Up and Vanished - Case Evidence 07.24.17

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

Take a deeper look at the evidence as experts discuss new developments in the case.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone else close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Ever since the end of episode 22, when we heard the call between Nelson Polk from the Irwin County Sheriff's Department and his grandson, I've been flooded with emails from listeners.

If there was a cover-up, who would come investigate it? And what constitutes corruption versus plain incompetence? These are some of the many questions people ask me. And today we'll attempt to answer them with the help of Bobby Chacon, a 27-year veteran special agent with the FBI. This is Case Evidence. To refresh your memory, here's the call I'm referring to at the end of episode 22. Are you related to Ryan at all? Yeah, I'm just a kid to him. I don't even know him, Dave.

As far as I know, I've never met him. I mean, they've got all in that podcast about how you and some guy, Alan Morgan, went and did like an original search on Tara at the Buchanan Orchard or something like that. That's exactly right. We did. There was a guy that went to another man and woman or his friends and told them that Ryan was at a party and was drunk. And he said he did all of this.

They called me and Allen Morgan, and we met with them. We went to the P.K. endorsement. We searched it, got a statement from him, and turned it over to the GBI. But the GBI, you know, now, which is all new agent, says, well, it's not in the file. If it's not in the file, it didn't happen. So I went to his boss man and told him, and he came back.

And, of course, he got a statement from me and got a statement from that guy and all that. Yeah, we knew about this less than two months after she disappeared, but the GBI didn't do anything. So we, you know, they was working, and we couldn't basically interfere with their investigation. I know how it all came about, and I know all about the investigation and all this stuff on podcasts and all that.

He's just trying to make a name for himself. He's right on some of that, and he's wrong on some of that. I don't even watch it. I don't even watch it. I don't even pay it no attention. Okay. Well, Papa, I just want you to know that I love you, and I just, I mean, I care about you. I just wanted to call and, like, ask you, and if you didn't want to talk to me about it, then, you know, I wouldn't talk about that. But I just...

No, I'm not involved in any way, shape, or fashion. That's all I want to know, Papa. I mean, it literally could have made me cry, like, hearing your name thrown around and this and that. I know how good of a man you are. So they know what happened to her, though? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they know the whole story. And see, there's a gag on her, and they ain't going to release that information anyway.

But there is a gag on her, so they can a gag order, so they can't tell the public. Apparently there were rumors these whole 12 years. How did this slip by for 12 years? Well, I can't really go all in on that gag order. Bobby Chacon, a 27-year veteran special agent with the FBI, heard this call too. This is what he had to say. The most interesting thing about that telephone call is the confidence that Nelson Polk has in his voice when he says that GBI has the whole story. If you listen to that voice,

he's supremely confident that, oh yeah, they know the whole story, which also seems to mean to me that he has the whole story, that Nelson Polk himself seems to know the whole story. And he seems very confident. He seems very like, almost like this was a cut and dry case. Once the story gets out there, everybody's going to understand, everybody is going to know what happened, and it's going to make sense. Whether or not that's true, who knows? But the one thing I took away from that phone call was his confident manner in which he said, oh yeah, they know everything. be mistaken. But that's the one thing that there seems to be the feeling that there's no mystery anymore, at least inside the investigative team and the prosecution team. So the mystery that we're all sitting out here hungry for answers seems to be, seems to be not so mysterious anymore to the people inside. And I only say that based on, you know, the confidence they hear in his voice. And like I said, he could be completely wrong. He may not know everything that's happening in the GBI investigation, but we do know charges have been filed. We do know a

prosecutor is intending to take this case to trial, which you don't go to a grand jury unless you have evidence that you know can convict a guy, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt in front of a real jury, not a grand jury, but a real jury. So there's a lot more evidence in this case that we're not being told about yet. And the prosecution is right to hold its guards close to the vest in a case like this, even if they went out to that orchard and found nothing. Because he doesn't say in the call – he says we turned everything over to them, because he doesn't say in the call, he doesn't, he says, we turned everything over to them, but he doesn't say that they actually found anything. When he says we turned everything over, that could be, you know, a bag of dirt.

It could be the original statement from the guy who gave him the tip. It could have been photographs of the search site, you know, could have been a lot of things, but it doesn't mention what it is that, you know, they turned over. But that's, to me, as an investigator, would be beside the point. The more interesting thing would have been, I would think that GBI at that point would dispatch somebody out there to re-interview this guy who gave them the tip.

You know, where'd you hear it? Who else was present? How well do you know this guy, Dukes? Can you go back and talk to him about it? Can we wire you up? You know, you would do things like that as part of the investigation. Who knows, Osceola may have not have, you know, maybe he was a confidential informant and they didn't want to give up his identity. Although in a murder case, you usually put those things aside. It's all going

to come out, I think, what happened on that first search. Now, the fact that they went back out to the orchard also could be, it doesn't necessarily mean it's as nefarious as it might look. I was on a forensic team in the FBI for many years, and often we researched, you know, different places because, you know, sometimes, you know, farms, particularly farm searches are tough, landfill searches are tough because they're so big and there's so many places to look. They may have looked in the wrong place. They may have gotten information more recently that says, oh, yeah, you're right. It was that farm, but it wasn't over here. It was over there. Because sometimes if you go too quick to a place, it looks suspicious. Remember in Making a Murderer where I was civilian, a couple of civilian women

searchers, they kind of made a big deal about how they went right to the car and they found, you know, the woman's car, the victim's car. And they're like, well, you have this whole huge, you know, multi-acre yard with all these cars. And within the first two hours of the search, they go all the way in the back and they go right to where her car was found. You know, so now they're like, well, maybe they knew the car was there. Maybe the cops kind of directed them there. You know, so sometimes if you find it too quick, you're accused of something. Or, you know, it takes too long.

Then there's another, you know, accusation. So you never really know until all that comes out. So I've definitely been involved in searches where we've gone back and, you know, my dive team did an underwater search one time and we searched and searched and searched and we didn't find it. And it was a body in a 50 gallon drum. And we could not understand why we couldn't find it in this body of water. What was a big body of water, but we kind of thought we knew where it was. And another search team, a state police search team went and found it. And I was furious and I'm like, but they said, no, they had gotten new information and it wasn't in the area where we were searching. Two years later, they found it in a different area of that same body of water in an area we hadn't searched. You know, that does

happen sometimes. So the results of that search 10 years ago might have been fruitless. And it might be the case where they, you know, they went back now with more definitive information. They may have had more specific information on where to look. I don't know. Also, you know, like I said, what begs the question is, well, regardless of what they found or didn't find 10 years ago on that orchard, why didn't they go back to this person who gave them the tip? And they may have interviewed him or they may not have. I don't, you know, that's, you know, to me, that's more interesting than what they may have,

may not have found in the orchard because, you know, why didn't they, this is a guy with, you know, this is only what, a couple of months after the disappearance. And here's a guy telling you that he overhears this guy. Now, as an investigator, my mind goes, okay, we're going to try to get you close to him again, a bar, another party, wherever it is, a ball field. We're going to put you close to this guy again,

and we're going to try to get him to talk about it again. And so that's the investigative avenue I probably would have taken. Maybe there's reasons they didn't. I you know that I don't know about. Maybe the guy wasn't willing to do that. You can't force somebody to do that. They may be frightened. This guy's a murderer and he just, you know, burned somebody, you know, after he killed him. So, you know, it might be a lot of reasons why it's just a mystery right now that we just can't answer. why it's just a mystery right now that we just can't answer. Yeah. I mean, the big question to me is at the press conference, the GBI said that Ryan Duke was never on their radar, but here is a police officer saying that they went and searched the same orchard they searched just a few months ago, based on a tip that Ryan Duke said at a party that he killed Tara. And this guy said that he gave that information to the GBI.

Now he could also be lying, but you know, who is lying? Yeah, he could be lying. I mean, and, and, you know, somebody in Osceola probably did a report on talking to this guy. They better have, you know, I talked to such and so-and-so on such and such a date and he told me the following and you write that down in a report. Now, just because you turn that report over to GBI does not mean you don't retain a copy of that report. So a copy of that report somewhere should show up the Osceola Police Department's records. Now, it's obviously subject to the gag but they're not bound by anything they say at a press conference. So if they say he wasn't and he winds up having been, okay, they lied to the public. That's not – now, you'd want to know – I'd prefer to know that there was a reason why, a strategic reason why you would lie to the public about that.

It could be somebody just made a mistake or somebody didn't know, somebody misspoke. And so they didn't know. Because clearly with a case like this, a case that kind of goes cold, new people are assigned to the case, new prosecutors are assigned to the case. So

not everybody gets up to speed on 100% of the things. Now, you know, now that you have your prime suspect in custody, you would know, you would think that that's something you would know. Now, you know, it could be something as simple as trying to avoid embarrassment. That, you know, here's a guy that should have been on their radar. So they want to say he wasn't, you know, whatever the case, that hopefully will come out later on too. Once the trial is done, the care gore is lifted, you know, this is going to be a whole nother examination. And so there's going to be two examinations here, you know, what happened to Tara, how it happened, why it happened,

you know, that's going to be, you know, the first one, and obviously the most important one, you know, and how, if the person responsible gets convicted, you know, and how if the person responsible gets convicted, you know what I mean? So the second one is going to be, you know, how this all took place over the 10 years. So we're going to have to hopefully know, hopefully once the gag order is lifted, we'll know what, if anything was found, you know, what information was provided to Acilla, to GBI, what GBI then did with that information. There's just too many questions to speculate on a particular, you know, particular thing that might, I mean, there's probably, there's half a dozen things I could think of that could be possibilities, but none of them have any more credence than another because we just don't know.

of them have any more credence than another because we just don't know. It's surprising to me a little bit because gag orders are not common. Judges don't issue gag orders in every case. They certainly don't issue them in every murder case even. There has to be kind of an overriding reason on why you would issue a gag order. And that's going to be a whole other interesting thing to examine is why a gag order, because there's many high-profile cases even that don't have gag orders placed on them. And so it would be interesting to see. Now, once everything comes out, once the gag order is lifted, it might be obvious why there was a gag order, but it's just not obvious now. And it may not be obvious even after. It's kind of a discretionary decision by the judge. The prosecutor may have said it could damage our case if some of these things are released early because it will all come out eventually. going to be subject to being disclosed at a later date and later time. So that's going to be an interesting thing to examine on, you know, how this whole thing developed, whether he was on

their radar and he didn't have any previous criminal record. It looks like it's certainly not a history of violence as some of these guys do, because the biggest fear in cases like this is if somebody was on the police radar 10 years ago and wasn't properly investigated and then subsequently arrested, and then he goes on to hurt other people in the interim in those preceding 10 years, that's unacceptable, right? I don't know what Ryan Duke, what he's been up to the last 10 years. He doesn't seem to have a long, violent criminal history. So you hope that's not the case, because that's the worst thing that can happen when mistakes or incompetence or corruption in the police department hinders an investigation. The worst possible outcome is that additional victims get created. Additional victims suffer because of that lack of competence or corruption or whatever it is, you know, or flat out just honest mistakes, whatever. So, you know, hopefully that didn't

happen in this case. What qualifies as corruption versus just incompetence? Generally, the difference between corruption and incompetence is corruption is action that's taken to benefit someone for their own benefit or the benefit of someone else. Whereas incompetence is simply that, is simply you're just not good enough at your job. You're just making mistakes. You're just incompetent. But corruption is where you take action, sometimes that looks like a mistake or it looks like incompetence, but it's actually taken to benefit either yourself or someone else, to cover up someone, either yourself or someone else's family member, friend, their criminal activity or something. So that's the general difference between corruption and incompetence. Now, don't get

wrong. Incompetence does obviously help the person that doesn't get arrested because of the mistakes that are made. That's not the intent of the actor or the person who did or didn't do the thing that we're talking about, but it's the intent. covers up evidence, destroys evidence, whatever, to benefit themselves or someone else, that's generally viewed as corruption. Corruption has to have that, has to have two things. It has to have intent and it has to have benefit. It has to be intentional and it has to benefit. So those are the two things you generally look at in corruption cases. And the benefit could be monetary. It could be avoiding detection as a monetary. It could be avoiding, you know, detection as a criminal. It could be a lot of different things. The benefit is not always, you know, dollars and cents and benefit isn't always clear, you know, sometimes, but that's generally the difference. And the outcome could be the same. You can have somebody who's corrupt

and cover something up to help somebody avoid getting arrested for something. Or you can have someone who kind of just either makes an honest mistake or is just so bad at their job that that same person doesn't get arrested for the crime. So the end result sometimes is the same. But the difference is that, you know, corruption is illegal and it's a crime and you should go to jail for it. Whereas incompetence, you know, there's not really a statute for it. You should probably lose your job over it if the results are, if you can't be retrained or something like that. But it's not generally considered criminal in nature. Whereas corruption,

you know what you're doing. You're intending to do it. You have the intention of taking these actions to help yourself or someone else benefit, normally benefit in police corruption cases, usually benefit financially or benefit from someone not getting arrested for something. What do you think happened here? It doesn't seem – to me, it skews a little more towards incompetence than corruption because if we go on the premise that Ryan Duke was told to the GBI early on as a person of interest from Osceola PD, and now Ryan Duke is in custody for this murder, if any corruption took place to help him, it certainly didn't help him eventually. In the long run, it might have helped him maybe stay out for 10 years, but it obviously caught up with him. And so therefore, because the guy ends up in custody, it skews to me if it has to be one or the other. In this case, it skews towards the incompetence end of the scale. But that's not to say, I'm not even saying it was that. It's just not enough facts to draw those conclusions. But generally, overall, in what you've told me and what I've looked at and read on the case, there has to be, after the prosecution of this case and if they get a conviction, I think there has to be an open discussion and an examination by GBI and OSILA PD about how this investigation was carried out. And that's a good

thing because it's always good to examine your policies and your procedures and see if you can do a job better. You can say, hey, look, we dropped the ball. We ultimately got the guy that was responsible. He should have been in jail 10 years ago, but he's in jail now and for the rest of his life, maybe, whatever. And we've learned from this and whatever, we're going to train our people better, that kind of thing. And that's hopefully the best possible outcome that could come out of it. Because even in my investigations, you know, after a successful prosecution, I always look back and said, is there anything I could do better? Could I have got more of the bad guys in jail? Could I have done it quicker?

Could I have got whatever, you know, better evidence or whatever? But so you always kind of reexamine your methods. I mean, I never had a case, obviously, go 10 years. But I have investigated cold cases. I'm the guy who's come along and put a fresh set of eyes on it. And so, yeah, it's just like I said, it's just it's going to be very interesting to see how things play out during the course of this pretrial period that we're in now and then the trial phase. And then this story is not going to end with the jury's verdict. This story is going to obviously live on because there's going to be a

whole lot of questions whether or not the jury comes back with a conviction of Ryan Duke or not. There's going to be a whole lot of questions that need to be answered about this case, you know, long after the jury, you know, finishes deliberating whenever that happens. Do you think it's common that in small towns, it's a lot more difficult to solve a murder with how close everyone is and obviously lack of resources? Yeah, it could be. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's really easy because everybody knows each other, right? Yeah, I would say that it's sometimes more difficult. It could be less difficult, but more often than not, it's sometimes more difficult because everybody knows each other and everybody's, you know, people could be scared and people could be, you know, because they have to live there.

things like that. So I think in a small town, you sometimes narrow your suspect pool down quickly, but then you then kind of come to a dead end. You hit a brick wall because of the relationships that happen in that town. The GBI would have like almost every other large law enforcement organization, probably not your SILA PD or something like that, or some of your smaller sheriff's offices. They all have internal affairs bureaus or internal affairs divisions. Sometimes they're quite small. Sometimes they're quite large. Sometimes they're proactive, and sometimes they're less reactive. It really runs the gamut. So we would expect that if an allegation like this came to light, which if we're already talking about it,

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an agent, say, working in public corruption, which also, you know, public corruption is the broader term, right? But it also, it encompasses, you know, police corruption, things like that. If I was on the public corruption squad, I would probably know who was my counterpart working public corruption in the state police, in DEA, the other federal agencies, because things kind of cross over. So they would probably pick up the phone and call GBI and say, hey, you know, are you aware of this allegation? Or, hey you know are you aware of this allegation or you know are you aware that there's stuff floating around on the internet or somebody

called in because we're getting it and we want to know if you guys have something because if you know they get a response saying we're well aware of it we've got people working on it we're going to bring it down whatever then the fbi would kind of just keep tabs on it but not just on a parallel investigation because there's no it doesn't make sense to do that. They're in the best position to, I hate to say it, but catch their own guys, right? And so if it wasn't the case, if they were like, no, we didn't hear about this, well, then we would call their people in and we'd have a joint meeting and either work the case jointly or the FBI could open it up themselves. And again, one of the reasons you have those pre-existing relationships is that if you feel like, oh, this is something we may not want to bring to them, we may want to start looking to ourselves, you would know that from

your relationships with them, whether or not they were trustworthy on that level. That's why you have pre-existing relationships. Your job is to know the landscape as an FBI agent and know, yeah, they have a really good internal affairs with a lot of integrity. We can just go to them. Or you might know that, no, I'm not bringing it to their IAD because I don't trust those guys. We brought something to them two years ago and they tipped the cop off or whatever. So they would know that. So the case is either – I find it hard to believe that GBI would just sit on it, particularly since they have two guys in custody. So you have a prosecutor somewhere who's preparing for trial or preparing to some kind of court proceedings, and prosecutors, man, they want every darn piece of evidence that they can possibly throw. If you've got 110% of the information they need for a conviction, they want 150%. They always want more. They're never comfortable. So some prosecutor's butt is going to be on the line in front of a judge because

these guys are in custody. So you have a speedy trial of constitutional rights. So there's certain timelines that have to be met. So they're going to have to be moving along on these cases. They're going to be hearings, pre-trial hearings, they're going to be trial dates set and stuff. So they're going to want to know, the prosecutor's office who's handling it, be it the state's attorney or a local district attorney or something, they're going to want to get to the bottom of this allegation if there's any evidence in this case that could either be jeopardized or compromised or maybe there's something they don't even know about. They'll get word of it, and they'll want to know about it because when you have somebody in custody, when you make that arrest, the clock starts ticking, and you have to start meeting certain deadlines. And like I said, there are constitutional provisions that kick in, speedy trial rules and stuff. You can't just keep people in custody without moving along at a certain pace. And the judge is going to

be asking the prosecution, are you ready to go? Let's go to trial. And so it's going to be, there's going to be multiple pressures coming from different places. So it's not only going to be internal affairs or the FBI, it's going to be that prosecutor's office who has these responsibility for prosecuting these guys to go, Hey, was there a search done in the woods? What the hell was found? We need it. We get to the bottom of it. So when we would get involved is very, is very fact sensitive. Each case is a little different. How we would get involved again, would we go directly to that department of internal affairs? It depends if we know enough about them, would we go directly to that Department of General Affairs?

It depends if we know enough about them, if we've worked with them before and we think they're trustworthy. You know, if not, we may start kind of a, not an undercover investigation, but more of a covert investigation where we start doing things in a way that they hopefully won't detect until we get, you know, further down the line. So, you know, we can bring it to them at a point where they can't really do anything about it to derail it or something. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So

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Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Kraken's registration details at kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer. If the gig owner wasn't there, you could have Osceola come out and say, you know, have a press conference. Here's the three guys or four guys around that woods. Here's our paperwork. Here's what we turned over to GBI. Here's the dates we turned it over. Here's what we turned it over. And then GBI can respond and stuff. I mean, the only thing about that is that, you know, the prosecution is loathe to get all this stuff out in the public.

They don't want to try the case in the public because that's not what it's about for them. And not to be blunt about it, but they could care less if anybody else outside the courtroom has an interest in the case. Their only interest is getting the right person convicted. And anything that might jeopardize that is going to be put aside for now. Yeah, that makes sense. You know what I mean? So it sounds blunt, but it's like it could be that they know exactly what happened, that GBI and Osceola PD have been talking, and the prosecution knows about it. And they're just going to sit on it until such time that they have to turn it over to the defense in the discovery process because all of that will have to be turned over to the defense. Everything the prosecution has gets turned over well in advance of trial. The defense then has the right to test that evidence scientifically with their own people, with their own laboratory, you know, so everything gets done well in advance. Now, in this case, you might not even, that's when you usually find out about things.

You may not even find out about it then. You may only find out about it once they start having pretrial hearings, you know, because what will happen is the defense will move to suppress this evidence and say, well, you know, anything found in the woods is irrelevant. We want it. We don't want it put in front of the jury. And here's the reasons why or whatever. Well, those type of hearings have to happen in public. And so that's when you find out that maybe when you find out about it for the first time, when they, when they try to suppress some of the evidence that was found or whatever, or there might have to be a hearing. And then all the behind-the-scenes machinations start taking place and the negotiations and the deal offers and stuff, right? So I'd be shocked if they didn't already float a deal to Beau to try to get him to lock into cooperating.

He can plead to a lesser charge. They indicted both of them. Yeah, there's indictment. Because sometimes you can charge people in an information or in a complaint without an indictment. But they indicted them, which means that they had testimony before a grand jury. Now, that testimony is usually by law secret until the trial takes place. It would be interesting to know if Beau testified before the grand jury. They're not

obligated to make that known. And so if he testified in front of the grand jury, that would be the first indication that he's got a deal. but once he testifies, he's locked in because, I mean, it has happened. You can change your testimony to trial, but now whoever's, of course, examining you says, well, you're telling the jury this, but, you know, six months ago, you told the grand jury this. And so then you start looking like a liar and just destroys your credibility on the stand. So sometimes prosecutors don't even put guys in front of the grand jury, you know, for that reason, you know, because the grand jury is so – it's such a weird process. It's not like a trial at all, and the prosecutors have a lot of leeway. Defendants aren't – they don't have any rights in there.

There's no course examination. If you're a witness, you can't bring your lawyer in there. And it's just – it very much favors the prosecution. But at the same time, the prosecution doesn't want – and hearsay is allowed, whereas hearsay in trial is not allowed, right? about what somebody else told me, which is hearsay. I couldn't say that at trial. You'd have to bring in the actual person that said it. But in a grand jury, you're allowed to, and that would protect that ultimate witness because they could say, I made the mistake in the grand jury, not the person or something. So it's just a formality, but it's sometimes done that way. But yeah, it seems to me the only linchpin now is that they have Beau locked in. I would almost guess that he's got to deal with the prosecution, testify, and receive a reduced plea. He pleaded to a reduced charge, maybe even avoid prison time.

I don't know. It depends. It's hard. It's a one-witness case. You wonder if the girlfriend never came forward or if he never opened his mouth to the girlfriend, whether any of this would happen anyway at all. I mean, look, it's possible that they looked into him early on, even though they're saying he was never on their radar. Now, I don't know why they'd say that, but it's possible that they looked into him and they didn't think he was a viable suspect at the time. him and they didn't think he was a viable suspect at the time. But for years and years and years to go by and nothing happened on the case, it's unusual if you had a suspect, Ryan Duke, and then

you went out and either executed the search or someone did the search and gave you the results of the search. And if any of that implicated Ryan at the time, then, you know, why, why the hell didn't they file charges then? And now there are lots of prosecutors who will not file, you know, murder charges, you know, unless you have a witness in the case, it's really hard when you have just, I mean, forensic evidence is great and physical evidence is great and then testimony evidence is great. But prosecutors, like I said earlier, want everything. They want all. They want the whole – and so it all depends on what the results of that search were.

If it wasn't enough for a prosecutor and they say, I'm not just going to throw a bag of dirt on the witness stand and try to convict this guy. I need somebody to say he did it. I need someone to give me a motive. You know, it's always the means, motive, and opportunity on a homicide, right? So you have the means, you know, until you know the manner on cause of death, you don't know what the means are. Could be a hammer, could be a gun, you don't know. Motive and opportunity.

Well, opportunity, a lot of people have an opportunity, right? And then, you know, motive also becomes. Now, those are the things that general homicide investigators kind of get guided by, but motive is not necessarily an element of a crime. You don't have to prove someone was motivated to kill someone. You don't have to just prove they did it. But motive is something the jury really wants and really wants to understand why this person did it. And so the prosecutor, they almost always bring in motive as, you know, sometimes they bring it in to overcome some weak, other weakness in their case. If you have a strong motive, even though motive is not really part of

a criminal act, if you have a strong motive, at least people start going, oh yeah, he probably did it because he had a real strong motive, right? So motive is a funny thing. And so sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. If it's there, you know, prosecutors feel a lot more comfortable, even though it's not an element of crime. People, you know, they feel a lot more comfortable going in front of a jury because the juries always want to know the motive. It'll be interesting to see how the trial goes. And then it'll be interesting to see how the aftermath goes when the gag order is lifted and we can actually, you can actually see behind this big curtain of secrecy that's kind of hanging in front of us right now. Thanks for listening, guys.

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