Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 5. Then Who is David?
Episode Date: September 30, 2025Ogden passes off the baton to a new investigator, David, because for him, it’s personal. After a major break in the case, host Larrison Campbell and David set out to answer the question of how Janis... pulled off decades of lies and deceit. Binge all episodes of The Vanishing of Janis Rose ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment and Wildnight Media production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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David, if you could sum up your mom with one word, what would it be?
No, I can't use that one word.
Loving.
That seems like a departure from the word that first came to you.
Yeah, well, crazy, I don't know it'll be an accurate word, but yeah.
But loving, she was a loving mom.
I mean, it sounds.
complicated, you know?
Very.
Recently has been very complicated.
I asked David this question in 2025.
Three years after an investigator had shown up at his house
and told him that his mom, who he knew as Willie Joe Streetie,
was actually a woman named Janice Rose Bullock.
And that essentially, his life was
built on a foundation of lies.
My emotion's been all over a place since the day happened.
Sad, anger, being lied to and doing that to our daughters.
And then lying the whole time around me, or was our bond a lie, or is it true?
Was my childhood a lie?
I still love her because she raised me my whole life.
for most of David's life
he's had his mom on this pedestal
but now he's finding himself
having to interrogate his mom
in a way he'd never had before
not long after this all came out
Janice's daughters reached out to him
they had questions
we just started talking about
how my life was with her growing up
And was that happy?
Didn't she treat me right?
He was happy.
She was a good mom, he thought.
But now he's having to interrogate that too.
Was she?
How could she be a loving mother to him
and an absent mother to another set of kids?
But this seemed like they just just came for your wife.
She left them.
It's a question David wants.
to answer too, because he's on a mission to figure out just who he actually is, how he became
Janice's son, how she pulled off this con, and how tangled up in it he is, especially because
he's realizing that her lies about him go all the way back to the day he was born.
I might have a forged birth certificate.
After all, how does he?
a woman on the run from her past with a fake identity, who supposedly had a hysterectomy,
suddenly manifest a newborn baby. But it's more than that. Long before anyone found out about
Janice's lies, people had whispered that something seemed off about her new baby. Those
whispers had made their way to the investigator looking for Janice.
The detective said I was probably bought for $1,000.
David may have been bought for $1,000?
Her and dad went there and dad gave a nurse or doctor $1,000, and that's how they got me.
Like purchased on the black market?
This is not the story Janice had told David growing up.
But of course, so many things she told him turned out to be lies.
Who am I?
Is maybe the most fundamental thing, who David is?
Another lie?
What's the truth about how Janus got David?
And how did she get away with all she did?
Turns out, some of those answers were sitting right there in front of David the whole time.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Wild Night Media, you're listening to The Vanishing of Janice Rose.
This is episode five. Then Who is David? I'm Larison Campbell.
David doesn't know where he came from.
Any plans Janice made, documents she signed, real or fake.
That all happened long before David could hold up his own head, much less remember.
But figuring this out would help us understand the mystery that is Janice.
It's a big piece of her puzzle.
So David starts with what he does know,
that his mom claimed he was adopted.
He learned this when he was about 13.
David was getting picked on by some kids at school.
One of my friends was teaching my dad
didn't look nothing like my parents.
Saying he doesn't look related to his mom and dad,
this isn't the first time David's heard it.
Normally these comments roll right off his back, but this time it sticks.
So when David gets a chance to talk to Janice about it, he just asks,
Mom, am I adopted?
And to a surprise, she tells him, yeah, actually you are.
And she doesn't get too into the weeds.
She just said they, she came to the hospital and they handed me over.
She told me I was 24 hours old when,
She brought me home.
He's got the baby pictures to prove it.
Ones where he's tiny and wrinkled in his mom's arms,
like he could have just left the hospital hours ago.
She tells him she adopted him from Charity Hospital in New Orleans as a newborn.
Over the years through high school, David would be curious.
If I turn 18, will it be okay if I find my biological family?
And she goes, well, back then they had...
thing called closed adoption so they have no records of me.
No records of David?
Like anywhere?
Nope, she says.
No records.
Maybe I want to know where I came from.
But he doesn't push.
It's okay.
There's no records of my family.
I guess I just want to give me up that bad.
And it'll just drop ever since.
David puts these questions out of his.
mind. Never even asks his dad about the adoption. He cements himself in the one family he knows.
He's happy here anyway. One thing I've come to know about Janice is that she was a force field.
Witty and charming, she convinced dozens of people who knew better to trust her. And David was one.
Because now, as David looks back, he can clearly see that this Willie John's,
Joe identity she was using, was an illusion, long before any detective contacted him.
As David recalls, this is what happened.
One day, David's mom tells him she needs his help with something.
She got a letter in saying something about her food stamp, that she needs to go to Social Security Office.
He decides to take his mom down to the Social Security office himself.
At the office, she had to have a little bit of her.
hands her social security card to an agent.
They take it from her and disappear.
And they came back, so we can't give this back to you because it's stolen.
Her social security number is stolen, they say.
Janice having problems with her social would soon become a regular thing.
Remember, she'd even asked his wife Carolyn to borrow hers once.
But his mom was the victim, David thought.
Always thought that somebody stole her identity.
At the office that day, David sticks up for his mom.
I told him, no, it's not. It's hers.
So this has been a social security card for years.
But they're not listening to him.
And they argued and kicked us out of a social security office.
Logically, the one holding the stolen social security card is likely the one who stole it.
The staff have to wonder this, right?
And even David.
But according to David's recollection, they just let her walk right out.
No outright accusations, no one ever shows up to arrest her or even question her,
which might have solved the whole mystery years earlier.
I try to figure out what was going on, but nobody gave me a straight answer.
David's wife Carolyn says she contacted a lawyer who took their case.
only to turn around and say, actually, there's nothing I can do.
I asked her to talk to this person.
I could not even tell you the name of this lawyer.
That was 12 years ago.
So how would she get, like, credit?
Like, how would she open a credit card?
How did she, did she have a bank?
Yeah, we never understood that.
One bizarre scenario after another with her.
I don't think it's likely that Janice created this,
Willie Joe identity out of thin air. If she totally made up the identity, wouldn't she have made it
more like herself? For instance, Janice is white, while the Willie Joe identity is a black woman,
who was also a decade older than Janice. And this Willie Joe identity seems to correspond with an actual
person. When you search the social security number Janice was using for her alter ego,
it links to a different woman, also named Willie. This woman seems to have been born in Louisiana.
She's black, and her birthday is listed as the same fake birthday Janice had been using.
Records show this person even voted within the last few years in Louisiana. I reached out to her,
because I suspected she was yet another person whose life Janice had upended.
Were there loans she couldn't get or government services?
But the woman I reached said she didn't know what I was talking about.
So I kept sifting through databases and documents.
And that's when I landed on something that kind of shocked me,
even in the context of Janice's shocking life.
What I found opened a door
I didn't even know was there.
One that could help solve this even bigger mystery
about David's origin.
I immediately called David.
Okay, so the reason I am calling you
at 8.30 on a Monday night with COVID
is that I found a marriage record.
Actually, it was a few of them.
While Janice had been using this fake Willie
Joe identity, she'd also married three different men in the 1980s and 1990s. First up was, of course,
David's dad. Turns out she divorced him when David was four. Then she actually married that guy Cliff
from Poplarville. He's the real handsome one she tried to pass off as David's biological dad,
who she lived with in that big old house behind the Sonic Drive-in. And if,
this information surprised me, well, it really surprises David. He tells me he doesn't even know
who this supposed stepdad Cliff is. By the way, even after all this, Cliff still wouldn't return
my calls. But then I found Janice married another man while she was legally married to Cliff.
Yeah, bigamy. This next husband.
His husband's name was Wes.
David did remember his mom dating Wes,
but didn't know they'd actually been married.
So, yeah.
I feel kind of weird breaking all this to you over the phone.
How do you feel about this?
I'm just weird because my whole life's been a lot.
I've been alive.
So I don't know what's going on.
There was an upside to this discovery, though.
A husband would have seen a very different side to Janus than her son would,
and maybe know more about who Janice really was.
Hey, is this Wes?
Hello?
Oh, it is great.
Hey, this is Larison Campbell.
And this husband was more than happy to talk.
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I finally tracked down one of Janice's husbands.
As I dial his number,
I look down at a list of several dozen questions in front of me.
There are so many things I'm hoping he can tell me about Janice,
what she told him about her past,
and what he knew about David.
It's Saturday afternoon when we jump on the phone.
And right out of the gate, I realize the version of Janus that Wes knew was very different from the one that her son and I are unraveling.
He tells me he can't imagine why someone would want to report on Janus, a woman he'd only ever known as Willie Joe.
When you told me you were doing a story on it, I was like, it's got to be something good because she was a good person.
Turns out Wes knew nothing of the betrayal and lies she left behind in Mississippi and Louisiana.
He'd lost track of her after they split up.
Wes tells me he was about 22 years old when he met Janice, and she was about 50.
Or so she said.
They met at a bar.
Wes was about to get into a fight, and Janice hustled him out before things got bad.
They spent a night together, and a few days later, she invited him out to her family
Ranch. She told him she worked as a child psychologist. They were married for over two years,
even bought a house together. And he thought that was their story, until 30 years later,
when some reporter shows up in his inbox. And then to hit me with that, I'm like, whoa,
what the hell? Where do I even start? There's the fact that she was already married when they wed.
Wow. So she didn't get divorced from that dude until after we,
divorced. Right. Yeah, I mean, we got marriage certificate, marriage license, everything. Yeah.
And there's the fact that for a time, Wes lived with Janice at the ranch, where David's dad was also
living. And Janice didn't tell Wes who he was. I didn't even know what relationship she was to him.
I don't know if he was an uncle, dad, you know, I never, he was just the old man that stayed at the ranch.
had no idea that he'd been married to Janice.
And then there's how she, again, erased her past.
Let me ask you this before you start.
She never had twins.
She did?
She did?
So that was true.
Okay.
Wait.
Did she tell you about this?
Yes.
She told me that she had had twins before.
It was either they die,
And in a fire, the twins and the father died in a fire.
I told him about her four daughters, her first husband, all very much alive.
And then I asked him about the one kid he did know, David.
When I met him, David was 14, and my dad gave him a car for his birthday.
What was Willie Joe's relationship like with David?
Oh, man, she loved him.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, he was the greatest thing since flashbread.
What did she tell you about David's adoption?
That they adopted him.
That was, this is it.
I mean, she took in kids.
Took in kids.
Yeah, West tells me.
Aside from Janus supposedly adopting David,
she took in others while.
they were married.
How old were they?
The youngest was probably six.
The oldest was probably nine, maybe ten.
I mean, it was just for a few weeks.
Supposedly, we were watching them for the state.
I guess as part of her child psychologist thing.
Though now that he thinks about it,
he never actually saw her work as a child psychologist.
I've never seen a child case worker.
I never seen anything.
I mean, I never signed papers to be a foster parent.
But then all of a sudden, I think we're never gone.
She might have kidnapped those kids now.
I don't know what to think.
By the way, Janice was never charged with kidnapping.
But I can see why Wes would be suspicious
because Janice had apparently obtained other children
under mysterious circumstances.
I mean, actual foster parents,
undergo interviews, a background check.
To Wes's knowledge, that didn't happen.
It feels like both a clue and another layer of mystery.
No one seems to know for sure where David came from.
But if Janice were bringing in other kids
and passing them off as foster children,
could David have been one of those kids?
And if so, why did she keep doing this?
Wes never gets those answers.
He trusted this force of nature he's married to
and didn't stop to question her decisions.
Remember, when he and Janice started dating,
he was in his early 20s.
It was to be a young kid and her and older woman
and we just had a little fling, you know?
Until he says their little fling turned into a lot more.
A couple weeks later, she knocks on the door and she was pregnant.
And I'm like, oh, shit, here we go.
Which is how he ended up married to a woman decades older than him.
And Janice doesn't just tell him she's pregnant.
She tells him she's pregnant with triplets.
It's a family heritage thing, I guess, that they're known for twins and triplets.
Wes and Janice buy a house together in another town under her alias Willie Joe,
which, again, is the only name Wes.
knows for her, and they move, along with teenage David, as they prepare to welcome
triplets, which she'll later claim to miscarry.
I tell Wes she wasn't actually pregnant, that that was a lie, too.
Why do you say you didn't think she was pregnant?
Oh, she had a hysterectomy.
Oh, that she wasn't pregnant.
Yeah.
But she had a huge belly.
I mean, just weight in the stomach.
just the pregnant belly.
She had ultrasounds.
I never went to the doctor with her because I worked.
But she had ultrasounds.
She had ultrasounds.
Pictures of the babies, you know, pictures of the fetus, you know, all this.
He reiterates.
He saw her bare stomach.
It looked pregnant.
We were married.
I seen her naked.
What the hell was it then?
A basketball, she sold in her stomach.
This is freaking my life off.
The investigator searching for Janice told me that she had had a hysterectomy,
that he'd seen paperwork and proof.
And in the police file, one of Janice's sisters says that she had endometriosis,
and their mother had signed for a full hysterectomy.
That's pretty detailed.
But as I talked to Wes and hear those details about her stomach and the ultrasounds,
I actually start wondering if I were wrong.
Was Janice actually pregnant?
I mean, I got to be honest with you.
Your details are so clear that it's making me want to go back
and just confirm that she really did, in fact,
have this hysterectomy because that is...
I'm telling you, I would back down out.
Or was Janice finally doing to me
what she had done to so many others?
I'm not saying she was three months pregnant
when we supposedly lost the babies.
It was like right to turn.
So I don't know how she did it.
He remembers the day she lost their babies.
I was at work one day, and I got a phone call.
It's Wes's dad on the phone.
Saying, hey, we got to go to the hospital.
And we took off for the hospital.
And I said, what's going on?
He said, I'm not going to tell you nothing.
We'll tell you when you get there.
We'll tell you when you get there.
And we got there.
and she's standing outside.
And I'm like, what the hell is she doing here, you know?
And then I looked and I noticed, hey, she's not pregnant.
Well, supposedly she had lost the babies.
So we're going home, and my brain was just screwed up
because I just lost a set of triplets, you know.
Like I say, there was no, I don't know how she pulled it off.
Wes is devastated.
Too devastated to notice something that now, well,
seems like a glaring inconsistency.
He says she was seven months pregnant
when she lost the babies.
That's third trimester.
At that stage,
losing a pregnancy is considered a stillbirth,
three times over.
She's an hour later waiting on me outside the hospital.
It's so crazy because I had that thought,
and then I guess I just let that thought go
that nobody's that hurtful
to say, oh, I'm pregnant with your kids
and then, you know, trick you in this catfish and shit
and then you have a miscarriage
and you lose them at seven months.
Yeah, this is freaking me out now.
Impossible as it might seem
that Janice could just fake a pregnancy.
She didn't just do it this one time.
She's done it before.
The elastic pants Janice sported.
Her changing stories about if David were adopted or if she birthed him.
I wonder if she had a medical condition that might make someone look pregnant, that might help her sell this story.
That's total speculation, but it's just so hard to understand how she could have pulled this off.
What is clear is that at least some of the time,
these imaginary babies seem to help secure her to a man.
Wes, of course, and it seems Cliff.
It even makes me wonder about her high school pregnancy scare.
Her best friend remembers Janice rushing to get married
because she thought she was pregnant.
But her first child wasn't actually born
until more than a year after she had married her high school sweetheart.
It's like an extreme version of Tradwife,
believing a woman needs a man to be safe and secure,
and that a child is the only way to make him commit.
I'd called Wes hoping for a window into who Janice really was,
but it seems like Janice kept much of her real self,
locked away in this relationship, too.
So I was the one cluing Wes in,
not the other way around.
Were there any clues he could conjure
to help me better understand her?
Like, was the woman he was married to
the kind of person who would create a new identity
and leave four kids?
Did she ever seem like...
The type to do that?
Like, yeah, or like, haunted?
No.
If she had been 24 or I'd have been 53, we'd probably still be together.
Janice's and Wes's marriage ended the way most of her relationships did.
A firm cutoff.
She told me that they were going back to the ranch.
And I said, okay, if y'all go up there, I'll come up there this weekend.
And she goes, no, don't bother, I'm not coming back.
The breakup is abrupt and confusing for him in the moment.
what the hell are you talking about, he says to her.
Though now he looks back and remembers,
shortly before Janice broke it off,
David's dad, who again, West didn't know was David's dad,
had moved into the house,
and Janice had started sleeping on the couch.
The night of their split,
she and Wes got into a bad fight.
So Wes says he left and stayed at his parents' house.
I went back over there one time,
after that to get my stuff. And that was it.
Over the years, he's remembered mostly the good things about his ex-wife. He'd chewed a hog,
and she'd have it cleaned immediately. The way she cooked, her beauty. He says she reminded him
of an older Sophia Loren. But that period of his life now has a less glossy finish.
He's admitting to himself he did wonder if something were wrong.
right. I mean, there was times that I thought, man, this girl ain't who she says she is.
I think if I was older, I would have figured this out on my own back then. I would have put pieces
together. I was the 23-year-old naive kid, dude. It's crazy. You've straightened three or four
years of my life out now that were kind of a weird, kind of a weird vibe.
Straightened out some of Wes's questions, but added to mine.
When I found Wes, I'd hoped he'd be able to answer where David came from and who Janice, his ex-wife, was deep down.
But the version of Janus that Wes got wasn't the same one that she showed to David, or probably David's dad, even when all four of them were living in the same house.
One thing that seems clear, though,
is that Janice had this way of making children who weren't hers into hers.
The alleged foster children, yes, but also her friend's kids,
like Teenage Peggy from Poplarville,
or Cliff's niece, Little Karen,
who called Janice her Aunt Willie Joe.
They idolized Janice, and she seemed to love them back.
David recently found this picture of Little Karen from the early 80s
who was tucked into the bins of family photos.
Janice had kept it all these years.
There's a bitter irony to this
that it seems like the only children she didn't mother during those years
were the four she gave birth to,
who had to grow up with a Janus-shaped hole in their lives.
So these other children, was Janus trying to fill a hole herself
and the shape of her daughters?
Which brings me back to David,
and all the rumors that seem to attach themselves to his adoption.
Was this need to be a mom again so powerful
that Janice was willing to do something illegal?
Or was she just helping kids who needed her?
Or could it be both?
I bring all this new information back to David.
He tells me he remembered having other kids around,
but he figured it was above board.
Learning that Janice may have been involved
in a sort of off-the-book's foster care practice
did raise more questions about whether
he could have been brought into her life
in an off-the-book's way.
I thought that all is actually adopted the right way
not the legal way.
It's time to look into this rumor the investigator just dropped in David's lap
that he might have been purchased for $1,000.
I decided to try to go back and find the source.
I start with someone who'd known David when he was really young,
Karen Sullivan from Poplarville,
the little girl Janice had kept the photo of,
who thought David was her new cousin.
Remember, at the time everyone called David Trey.
Something was out with tray.
I knew something was out of a tray.
Karen was seven or so when Janice had started dating her uncle Cliff.
David was just a toddler when he and Janice entered Karen's life.
And Cliff had treated David like his biological son.
But Karen can remember her parents trying to convince Cliff that David wasn't his child.
Did you ever hear anything your parents talk about where they think?
David came from.
They thought she kidnapped him.
Kidnapped?
Yeah, she says.
When Janice left town, they became suspicious.
Was Trey even hers?
Like, did she steal him?
Did she buy him?
Like, what is the story there?
It's a wild rumor and eerily similar to one that had circulated in Louisiana.
Came out from somewhere.
that they thought he was stolen.
Yeah, even Merlene, my sister-in-law said she remembers that.
Where did that come from?
This is not a thing people usually say when a new baby appears on the scene.
But groups of people who didn't even know each other seem to believe it.
And there were other stories, even within the same town.
Like Peggy Perkins, the teenager who knew Janice from the diner,
and also lived in Poplarville.
Remember, Peggy's mom was close with Janice for a while.
One of the times Janice left David's dad,
he'd called Peggy's house.
He told my mama that he bought that baby
from a charity hospital in New Orleans
from a lady for $1,000.
This is the source of the black market adoption rumor
that the investigator had told David.
And there's something else David's dad had said
about his reasons for doing it.
Jan told him that she miscarried the baby,
and she was having such a hard time mentally about it,
he went and bought the baby.
Did she fake a pregnancy and then grief as a way to get a baby?
If so, that's hard to relate to.
Hearing this made me wonder if some element of the grief were real,
even if the pregnancy weren't.
I've had both a miscarriage and later a hysterectomy.
There was, at least for me, something similar in the grief that came with each.
What you're letting go of is a huge part of your life and who you might want to be.
Was Janice so desperate to keep being a mother that she'd do anything to make it happen?
and did any of the people who suspected she had broken the law call the police, child protective services?
It seems not.
Karen told me something that stuck with me about Poplarville that little town Janice kept returning to.
She says, you can hide stuff there.
It's part of the culture of not inserting yourself.
In public, they keep their mouth shut.
Behind closed doors, they tell it all.
So behind closed doors, Karen may have been hearing these theories, but that's where they stayed.
As you can imagine, learning all of this has David thinking the worst about his birth family.
What if they don't even know what happened to him?
Back then, you pay a nurse off, you get a kid, and nobody knew about it.
doctor and nurse, I tell the parents,
sorry, your son or daughter passed away or something like that.
See, I get too much in the TV.
A seemingly outlandish theory that now doesn't sound so much like fiction.
As we've reported this,
several people have asked me about David's birth mother.
Could she be the real Willie Joe?
Had Janice possibly stolen not just Willie Joe's identity,
but her child?
But this does not appear to be the case.
According to Janice's marriage records,
she took on Willie Joe's identity
two full years before David was born.
And according to records,
Willie Joe is a different race,
not just from Janice,
but also from David.
I just wanted to know
if it was actually a legit adoption
or not did my parents really,
give me a, didn't my mom kidnapped or did my mom really buy me? Or is just all true?
The timing is lucky. David learns about his mom's lives in February of 2022. That same year,
the state of Louisiana passes a law that allows all adoptees to request their original
birth certificates with their birth parents' names. Even if the adoption is clearly,
closed. David logs on, fills out the form, and mails it. An envelope arrives from the state.
That's what I'm looking at, because they sent me a... There it is. Oh, whoa.
And what he finds in that envelope sends him to Janice herself.
Tell us where we are, David.
what we're doing today.
We're in Dallas, and I'm going to go visit my mom.
How are you feeling leading up to this?
A nurse.
You know, company.
Hello.
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The Vanishing of Janice Rose is produced by Wild Night Media for Sony Music Entertainment's The Benge.
The show was written, hosted and executive produced by me.
Larison Campbell.
The executive producers for The Benj are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis.
The show's senior producer and story editor is Lindsay Kilbride.
Sheba Joseph provided production support, and Aaliyah Pape's fact checker.
Mixing and sound design for this series by Scott Somerville, with music from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions.
The show's theme song is Shake,
me by Lydia Ramsey. Legal review by Davis Wright-Tremaine.