Speaker 1: School of Humans. As I go through the case file
Speaker 1: one last time, three moments stand out to me. It's
Speaker 1: September eleventh, nineteen eighty nine, two days after Janie Ward died.
Speaker 1: It's around noon at the Junction Liquor store in Big Flat, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: A pickup truck pulls into the parking lot. Gary Don
Speaker 1: is the driver, and he's hauling two kegs off the
Speaker 1: back of the truck. He comes inside says that one
Speaker 1: of the kegs is untapped and he wants a refund.
Speaker 1: His request is denied. The keg is several days old
Speaker 1: and it hadn't been on ice. Gary Don asks again,
Speaker 1: more aggressively. This time he is refused again. He hadn't
Speaker 1: even brought one of the keg taps back. Gary Don
Speaker 1: gives up. He slams the door of his truck, annoyed
Speaker 1: that he couldn't get the money back. It's April two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven and investigators are asking Sherry, who was
Speaker 1: one of the passengers in Ron Roses truck, about the
Speaker 1: night Janie died and what she thinks happened. There's no
Speaker 1: one down there fighting, There is no one doing anything here.
Speaker 1: She had no one who did find her there was
Speaker 1: no boy that she was dating someone else's life, and
Speaker 1: you know all those unders that have always gone around.
Speaker 1: So that's why I just don't believe that anything happened
Speaker 1: there in all these hears in school, even saying they're
Speaker 1: rum and rumors among the kids. No, the only ones
Speaker 1: who've ever made allegations and who brought up rumor had
Speaker 1: been her parents and adults, not the kids. There's no
Speaker 1: way that if something bad had happened, it would have
Speaker 1: not somehow gotten through the kids in school. Even teachers
Speaker 1: here things. The teacher's never heard anything because we see
Speaker 1: these outside. So I mean, I don't know. I'm times
Speaker 1: that anything happened to her. That same day, Investigators interview Kim.
Speaker 1: She says that September ninth, nineteen eighty nine, was the
Speaker 1: worst day of her life. Fourth day in my life.
Speaker 1: I I can understand. It's been thirty years and we
Speaker 1: still don't know how Janie Ward died. I'm Catherine Townsend
Speaker 1: and this is Helen Gone. Janie's third autopsy was filled
Speaker 1: with observers. There was a representative for the Ward family,
Speaker 1: a forensic anthropology, and ABC had their FBI consultant, Brad
Speaker 1: Garrett in the room. Brad worked at the FBI for years.
Speaker 1: He worked on tons of high profile cases. Because of this,
Speaker 1: he got the nickname doctor Death. When he first started
Speaker 1: looking into Janey's case, even before the third autopsy, he
Speaker 1: didn't think anything pointed to a homicide. Well, it was
Speaker 1: really unclear to me based on the initial evidence that
Speaker 1: looked at you. And I will say that it struck
Speaker 1: me that the Arkansas State Police really did a great
Speaker 1: job of trying to figure out what really happened at
Speaker 1: this cabin. And I started get in the flavor of
Speaker 1: and I totally ABC this early on was I'm not
Speaker 1: sure this is a homicide. It could be, but it's
Speaker 1: not in my mind, not at least at that point
Speaker 1: going together as sort of a clearcutter of an homicide
Speaker 1: that it really could be something else. Is there anything
Speaker 1: specific that you remember about this case in terms of that.
Speaker 1: Is it more challenging than cases like it? Is it
Speaker 1: similar to what makes it different? The important thing for
Speaker 1: the public to understand is that people form opinions about
Speaker 1: what happens in cases. Obviously, families God bless them, form
Speaker 1: their own opinions because it's very difficult. And let me
Speaker 1: tell you I've worked a number of child deaths. It's
Speaker 1: very difficult for parents to accept that, you know, their
Speaker 1: child in effect either died by accident or by their
Speaker 1: own hand. In this case, I'm not suggesting at all
Speaker 1: this was by our own hand, but the point being,
Speaker 1: there's like this opinion form. Then then the parents in
Speaker 1: a very rural county now are promoting that this was
Speaker 1: a homicide. They're not really going to be interested in
Speaker 1: anything but an outcome that says that. And you made it.
Speaker 1: You said something in the program about talking to the kids,
Speaker 1: and you said it'd be hard to have a conspiracy
Speaker 1: if there were something like twenty people with a similar story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I find most conspiracies laughable because you know,
Speaker 1: I used to hear these constantly that you know, the
Speaker 1: FBI colluded to cover up. You can't get two agents
Speaker 1: to collude on something, so let alone to get an
Speaker 1: entire system too, and what would be the motive of
Speaker 1: doing that? But I realized that there was, you know,
Speaker 1: controversy if that's the right word, with a local judge
Speaker 1: and a local judge's daughter, and you know, allegations made
Speaker 1: with really nothing factually just supported. Of course, many of
Speaker 1: the suspicions that get brought up in the news articles
Speaker 1: about Jane and on the Justice for Jennie forums have answers,
Speaker 1: but these are still questions that get brought up constantly,
Speaker 1: and rumors continue in Marshall across Arkansas and as Janie's
Speaker 1: case continued to get traction across the nation. You know,
Speaker 1: anytime you have I suppose public exposure of a case
Speaker 1: that draws particular conclusions, or you know, for example, when
Speaker 1: you look at the second autopsy, which you know, sort
Speaker 1: of reinforce the Wards belief that Godter was murdered, you know,
Speaker 1: you then you know, sort of get an emotional reaction
Speaker 1: from the community as to you know, well maybe that's
Speaker 1: what happened, you know, whether it's really true or not.
Speaker 1: But you know, we're all i think suspect or vulnerable
Speaker 1: to the stories of others in driving our own narrative.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the problem today and trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what's actually true, and certain people speaks to just
Speaker 1: accept it or question it as to well, that doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense, it's probably not true. And so you know, people,
Speaker 1: particularly folks like average everyday citizens, they don't really know,
Speaker 1: I mean from the standpoint of what is it? What
Speaker 1: does it take to actually prove these cases? Is there
Speaker 1: really any evidence to support one's or the other other
Speaker 1: than this sort of idle chat about it or what
Speaker 1: some media outlet might say about it. I will tell
Speaker 1: you because I've worked so many high profile cases that
Speaker 1: I just sort of ignore all that because you know,
Speaker 1: the facts are the facts, and wherever they drive you to.
Speaker 1: Now you know, sadly the facts don't always because maybe
Speaker 1: even the lack of facts or evidence, you know, they
Speaker 1: draw you to not a really solid conclusion. When I
Speaker 1: talked to the ward's lawyer, Jerry Sallings, he didn't think
Speaker 1: the first investigation was done very well. But Brad Garrett
Speaker 1: said he thought the Arkansas State Police did a pretty
Speaker 1: thorough job investigating what happened, particularly because it was all
Speaker 1: happening in such a small town. I know, I was
Speaker 1: a little surprised the witness statement seemed really short, and
Speaker 1: also they didn't I was surprised that weren't They weren't
Speaker 1: separated in question that night and in a more fair away, right,
Speaker 1: because I thought that made it difficult later. Right, So,
Speaker 1: investigative protocol is supposed to sort of be the template
Speaker 1: of how you investigate a case, separate the witnesses, sort
Speaker 1: of locked down the scene, and basically you don't let
Speaker 1: anybody leave, or you make sure you've got the names
Speaker 1: of all the people that were there, which in a
Speaker 1: place like Marshall, Arkansas, shouldn't be that difficult. But you
Speaker 1: still have to understand that I doubt if they were
Speaker 1: thinking that way. Let's face it, a deputy sheriff in
Speaker 1: that county, I'm sure doesn't make much money. That obviously
Speaker 1: affects the quality of person you're going to get. And again,
Speaker 1: it's nothing against the people who were there who did this,
Speaker 1: It's just that it's going to be hard to get
Speaker 1: somebody that really has a lot of experience or super
Speaker 1: qualified to work in a super rural county unless they've
Speaker 1: got some passion about living there. On Janie's death certificate,
Speaker 1: both the and the cause of death are still undetermined.
Speaker 1: But because it's not definitive, can we say that the
Speaker 1: Wards are completely wrong in their perception of what happened,
Speaker 1: that their daughter was murdered, and can anything we find
Speaker 1: support what the family believes. You're not going to make
Speaker 1: any family feel better unless it fits the fact patterns
Speaker 1: as to how they want it to be, and so
Speaker 1: could anything else be done in this case to support
Speaker 1: the family's fact pattern And I don't think there is,
Speaker 1: because I don't think there's evidence to support that. You know,
Speaker 1: like that one totally unreliable witness claimed that she was
Speaker 1: struck with a board or a bat or a club
Speaker 1: and that she went down. First of all, there was
Speaker 1: no evidence, there was no forensic evidence on her body
Speaker 1: to support that. But again, there's nothing to suitue that
Speaker 1: any of that occurred. So you know, I've walked away
Speaker 1: from a number of families basically telling them literally everything
Speaker 1: I could tell them about a case that was appropriate
Speaker 1: to tell them, and you know, they're just not happy
Speaker 1: with what I'm saying, and I fully accept that and
Speaker 1: say I totally understand, so that I can only be
Speaker 1: driven by the facts, my own experience, what the forensics
Speaker 1: tell me, and I have to go with that. So
Speaker 1: you know, I'm open to if you or somebody else
Speaker 1: could tell me that contradicts what this sort of general
Speaker 1: conclusion is about this particular case. Great, but nobody has
Speaker 1: ever come up with that because I just don't think
Speaker 1: it exists. Now, I will say one thing about that
Speaker 1: you know, every case is like a pie. Investigators have
Speaker 1: part of it, The prosecutor obviously has a huge part
Speaker 1: of it. The medical exam there and the medical professionals
Speaker 1: for instant anthropologies, et cetera have a part of it.
Speaker 1: But you have to take each one of them in perspective,
Speaker 1: you know, And what if you put them all together,
Speaker 1: then what do you have, you know, with all the
Speaker 1: failings and biases and pinions and so forth. But what
Speaker 1: do you have at the at the end of all that,
Speaker 1: of that pie going together? And you know, and so
Speaker 1: I say that in that when you take the first
Speaker 1: or second autopsy, Okay, they found X or Y, fine,
Speaker 1: is there anything beyond with the medical examiner, Let's face it,
Speaker 1: that's a political examination of a body that's not with
Speaker 1: all the facts and circumstances that cops, detectives, prosecutors are
Speaker 1: finding through evidence collected through interviews with people at the sea,
Speaker 1: people who saw her fall, people who thought she was choking,
Speaker 1: people who poured beer on her. If that was the case,
Speaker 1: all of these things, you know, the medical him were
Speaker 1: supposed to stick to his or her lane. This is
Speaker 1: what I found in the autopsy, and it great. And
Speaker 1: then you go from there. So what you have in
Speaker 1: this case is a third autopsy by a sort of
Speaker 1: a seasoned professional and a forensic anthropologist to tell you
Speaker 1: the fact pattern that she was beaten to death with
Speaker 1: something is not there. We'll be right back. We've been
Speaker 1: able to answer some questions about the circumstances surrounding Janie's death.
Speaker 1: Our producer, Gaby and I sorted through what we know,
Speaker 1: what we don't know, and at this point what we
Speaker 1: can't know. One of the things that the family thought
Speaker 1: was suspicious was the fact that Jannie's dad, Ron Ward,
Speaker 1: said that he had seen Jane in a different shirt
Speaker 1: when he saw at the morgue the night that she died,
Speaker 1: versus what he saw in some photos that the investigator,
Speaker 1: Bill Beach had showed him a couple of weeks later.
Speaker 1: We did look into the shirt and we did figure
Speaker 1: out some things about the shirt. So what were some
Speaker 1: of those things. Well, we figured out first of all,
Speaker 1: that Jane stayed the night before the party with her
Speaker 1: friend Leslie, and according to Leslie, Janny borrowed that shirt
Speaker 1: from her, and so she was wearing both. Multiple witnesses
Speaker 1: said that they saw her wearing the black t shirt
Speaker 1: over the white pin striped shirt, because, including ambulance attendants
Speaker 1: who were trying to revive her at the scene, they
Speaker 1: specifically remembered rolling the sleeves up and pulling up the
Speaker 1: bottom of the shirt to expose her stomach, and rolling
Speaker 1: up the sleeves to expose her arms. At some point,
Speaker 1: someone must have removed the white pin striped shirt and
Speaker 1: what happened to that item of clothing is a mystery
Speaker 1: because we know that it was lost by law enforcement
Speaker 1: at some point. And that's just another one of the
Speaker 1: tragedies of this case because one of the biggest questions
Speaker 1: that the family had was why how she got all
Speaker 1: that debris under her clothes and what exactly that was.
Speaker 1: And of course you know, now with forensic testing, who
Speaker 1: knows what could be accomplished, But they lost the evidence. Okay.
Speaker 1: So one of the other big questions that the journalist
Speaker 1: Mike Master said brings up and his column is this
Speaker 1: idea of the ninety missing minutes, And he brings it
Speaker 1: up because there's a police dispatcher named Harold Young who
Speaker 1: said that the truck in the route from the party
Speaker 1: to the bank parking lot did stop at the police station.
Speaker 1: So what have we been able to figure out about this?
Speaker 1: It's very confusing. Well, I think the ninety missing minutes
Speaker 1: is like a classic example of something that was it
Speaker 1: was put out there and it's not necessarily correct because,
Speaker 1: first of all, in a lot of the early reports,
Speaker 1: I saw that the time of the sunset was wrong.
Speaker 1: It was it was described as being around six thirty,
Speaker 1: when in fact it was around seven thirty. And everyone
Speaker 1: at the party basically said that they said when people
Speaker 1: when things started happening, when things started to go wrong,
Speaker 1: when all hell broke loose, it was around dusk, which
Speaker 1: would have been around seven thirty, not six thirty. And
Speaker 1: Harold Young made that statement, but he also said that
Speaker 1: he called the ambulance service, and the two people from
Speaker 1: the ambulance service who were interviewed by the police both
Speaker 1: say they never received that call. So their discrepancies in
Speaker 1: Harold Young's statement. And Ron Kim and Sherry, who were
Speaker 1: all in the truck, they all told police that they
Speaker 1: never stopped anywhere, so they are all their statements match. Now,
Speaker 1: could three people have concocted a story, possibly, I mean,
Speaker 1: but their statements do match. And Harold Young GE's an outlier.
Speaker 1: He really is the outlier in that. And I think
Speaker 1: another thing that we found that was really important is
Speaker 1: that there may have been missing time, but I don't
Speaker 1: believe it was ninety minutes. It wasn't hours. You know,
Speaker 1: it may have been half an hour or longer, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't you know, it doesn't seem that it was
Speaker 1: an hour and a half. I think I do think
Speaker 1: that's six thirty times probably could not have been right,
Speaker 1: just based on what everyone at the party. Everyone else
Speaker 1: at the party said they saw. Okay, So another one
Speaker 1: of the big rumors is that she was hit in
Speaker 1: the face with a baseball bat and killed at the
Speaker 1: party by another Marshall High School student. People would often
Speaker 1: say it was Sarah, who was a popular cheerleader who
Speaker 1: came from prominent family in the town. Her dad was
Speaker 1: the judge. But it seems in our investigation that there's
Speaker 1: very little evidence that supports that theory at all. We've
Speaker 1: really looked into this theory and the possibility this could
Speaker 1: have happened, but we just can't find any evidence to
Speaker 1: point to it. I mean, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: rumors about, you know, something that happened to the party,
Speaker 1: but again, when you go back and look at them,
Speaker 1: You look at the statements, you find the people. It
Speaker 1: turns out that, oh it's just something I heard. And
Speaker 1: usually they didn't even hear it secondhand. Usually it's third
Speaker 1: hand or fourth hand. And you know, were there was
Speaker 1: there some truth to it, Yes, I mean Sarah, I
Speaker 1: think because she was a she was a judge's daughter,
Speaker 1: because she did have a temper. She'd admittedly like assaulted
Speaker 1: a couple of other girls, and she got in a
Speaker 1: fight with a boyfriend slapped him in the face. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's there's she had a temper. And also she told
Speaker 1: the police, she lied to the police about who she'd
Speaker 1: come to the party with, and they were inconsist since
Speaker 1: he's in her story. So I can see where that
Speaker 1: all taken together could lead people to conclude she had
Speaker 1: something to do with it. And also a lot of people,
Speaker 1: you know, they just didn't like her. They didn't like her,
Speaker 1: they didn't like her attitude, and that led them to
Speaker 1: believe that she could have had some role in this.
Speaker 1: But again, like none of the forensic evidence points to that,
Speaker 1: not one person that the party said they saw anything
Speaker 1: like that. The one witness that we did find who
Speaker 1: said she saw Jane's struck with a baseball bat. We've
Speaker 1: talked to her, you know about how problematic her testimony is.
Speaker 1: She's had a couple of different stories, and again, if
Speaker 1: she was struck with a baseball bat, you would see
Speaker 1: much more catastrophic injuries to her face. When I talked
Speaker 1: to the neurosurgeon the first autopsy, one of the biggest
Speaker 1: tragedy was such a simple mistake and something that should
Speaker 1: have been corrected really early. Fami Malick referred to the
Speaker 1: injury as a hyper extension injury rather than a hyperflection injury,
Speaker 1: which you know, they're two completely different things. Then you
Speaker 1: have all this confusion about whether her head snapped forward
Speaker 1: or backward, and that led to, you know, the rumors
Speaker 1: that she was hit in the face with something which
Speaker 1: would have snapped her head backward, and that led to
Speaker 1: you know, who could it have been? And the doctor
Speaker 1: branella autopsy. So I just think you can just really
Speaker 1: see how one little simple thing can just have this
Speaker 1: catastrophic effect on an investigation if it's not caught early
Speaker 1: and not dealt with. So throughout this case, a lot
Speaker 1: of what we've seen is that the wards will say
Speaker 1: one thing and then other people will say something else,
Speaker 1: like you know, they said they saw a clear fracture
Speaker 1: in the X ray when they visited the crime lab,
Speaker 1: but then in the X rays that they got sent
Speaker 1: to them a few weeks later showed the spine blocked out. Also,
Speaker 1: they said that they received death threats, And there's just
Speaker 1: sort of some of these these sorts of things that
Speaker 1: it doesn't see. There's doesn't seem to be any way
Speaker 1: to prove one way or another because it is what
Speaker 1: they saw versus what other people heard and saw. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that there are some things that we it's
Speaker 1: very difficult to prove one way the other. Like, for example,
Speaker 1: we can never know what Ron actually saw when he
Speaker 1: saw Janie's body. He described it, but obviously we can't
Speaker 1: know that we weren't there, and we also can't know,
Speaker 1: you know, when Ron Amona saw the X rays and
Speaker 1: they say that the X rays they saw later were different,
Speaker 1: We really have no way of knowing that either. But
Speaker 1: what we can say is that they definitely felt that
Speaker 1: the system was not working, and they felt people weren't
Speaker 1: helping them, and they felt that people in power were
Speaker 1: being treated differently, and they also were afraid and they
Speaker 1: were so afraid that they moved and they put their
Speaker 1: other daughter in a different school and said they were
Speaker 1: getting death threats. So there was definitely they seemed to
Speaker 1: feel that there was an atmosphere of fear in the town.
Speaker 1: When we talked to Richard Walter from the Vedok Society,
Speaker 1: he described a similar environment in Marshall, and a lot
Speaker 1: of other people did too. Several reporters said that people
Speaker 1: weren't cooperative or weren't helping. And then there was another
Speaker 1: journalist we talked to who said they received threats too.
Speaker 1: So it's only it's a few people's word, but we
Speaker 1: can't get inside their head and know their experience. We
Speaker 1: can only report what they said to us. One of
Speaker 1: the most frustrating things we can't know is Janey's full
Speaker 1: toxicology report. Some listeners brought up this theory from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Could Janey have been poisoned by accident? At the party,
Speaker 1: the host Jay made PGA that's pure grain alcohol punch,
Speaker 1: and in it he put orange slices that had been
Speaker 1: soaked overnight in rubbing alcohol. Here's his interview with Bill
Speaker 1: Beach again describing the punch. There's been some discussion about
Speaker 1: the fruit that would put in time. Was there any
Speaker 1: special preparations taken of soaked the fruit for to over
Speaker 1: twenty fires reven alcohol? What was the purpose for that?
Speaker 1: He seemed like a higher content. Danny koorol rode alcohol out,
Speaker 1: pray pulses or over the Very little alcohol and no
Speaker 1: drugs were found in Janie's system. Her blood alcohol level
Speaker 1: was point zero five. That's about one drink, but that's
Speaker 1: ethyl alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is isopropyl alcohol, and in the
Speaker 1: first autopsy, doctor Malick didn't test for it. One of
Speaker 1: the pathologists who reviewed doctor Malik's work in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two pointed out that the toxicology screens were limited to cannabis,
Speaker 1: ethyl alcohol, drugs, and lead. Rubbing alcohol poisoning is rare,
Speaker 1: but it can be fatal. According to the National Library
Speaker 1: of Medicines Hazardous Substances Databank, it's acute potency as a
Speaker 1: central nervous depressant is about twice that of ethanol eight
Speaker 1: ounces as a lethal dose, but as little as one
Speaker 1: hundred millilters or just over three ounces can be fatal.
Speaker 1: So I had her producers Gabby and tay or do
Speaker 1: an experiment. We wanted to see how much fruit Janey
Speaker 1: would have had to consume to ingest eight ounces of
Speaker 1: rubbing alcohol. So they follow Jay's recipe and soak the
Speaker 1: fruit for twenty four hours. Okay, so basically what we've
Speaker 1: done is we have three different oranges. We have an
Speaker 1: orange that's cut into pieces of four, we have eight
Speaker 1: pieces smaller pieces, and then we also have one that's peeled.
Speaker 1: With these three oranges cut into different quantities, we're trying
Speaker 1: to see if it's possible for one orange to absorb
Speaker 1: enough rubbing alcohol to be fatal. Basically, can the oranges
Speaker 1: absorb a lethal dosage of rubbing alcohol? That's a lot
Speaker 1: about rubbing alcohol and not very much orange. It's been
Speaker 1: twenty four hours and we take a look at what happened.
Speaker 1: Doesn't look like that much of the rubbing alcohol was
Speaker 1: actually absorbed in them, and that was in our different
Speaker 1: control environments, and it looks like only about three yeah,
Speaker 1: about three ounces was probably absorbed by the fruit pieces.
Speaker 1: We determined that to get to the lethal amount of
Speaker 1: eight ounces, Janie would have had to eat around three oranges.
Speaker 1: That's not impossible to imagine, but that's a lot of oranges,
Speaker 1: especially considering the fact that they smelled so strongly of
Speaker 1: rubby alcohol. But with one hundred millilters, she would only
Speaker 1: have to consume about one orange. In several witness statements,
Speaker 1: partygoers mentioned that Jane was chewing on the pieces of fruit.
Speaker 1: In fact, Ron Rose specifically said she ate a cup
Speaker 1: of the fruit. He said she may have thought that
Speaker 1: this would be weaker than just drinking the punch, and
Speaker 1: in a police report, investigator Bill Beach said that when
Speaker 1: he went up to the cabin that night, he found
Speaker 1: orange piels on either side of where Jane had fallen,
Speaker 1: and though the orange PILs were bagged and logged into evidence,
Speaker 1: they were never tested. In that first autopsy, doctor Malick
Speaker 1: said that Jane had ten ounces of digested food matter
Speaker 1: in her stomach, so Jane was drinking and consuming the
Speaker 1: fruit on a relatively empty stomach. He wrote, though that
Speaker 1: in the stomach tomato particles are encountered, no oranges are noted.
Speaker 1: We reached back out to doctor Grace Duke's, the pathologists
Speaker 1: who had reviewed the three autopsies for us in the
Speaker 1: last episode. First off, we wanted to know if doctor
Speaker 1: Malick could tell the difference between tomatoes and orange particles.
Speaker 1: No one else mentioned tomatoes or a food of any
Speaker 1: kind at the party, And since doctor Malick only did
Speaker 1: a visual inspection of the food particles, could he actually
Speaker 1: tell the difference between tomatoes and oranges that had been
Speaker 1: soaked in the red PGA punch. Sometimes you can tell
Speaker 1: exactly what it is, sometimes you can't tell it all.
Speaker 1: But if she were not chewing well, it'd be fairly
Speaker 1: obvious what was in there, especially if it were a
Speaker 1: mix with just liquid where it could separate out easily.
Speaker 1: If he says that he saw pieces of tomato, I
Speaker 1: would imagine that that would mean something fairly specific to
Speaker 1: a tomato, like either the seeds or a large piece
Speaker 1: of food. In terms of the oranges, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like if you were to again people choose their food
Speaker 1: to varying degrees. It's kind of like if you were
Speaker 1: to put food in a blender and blend it up
Speaker 1: a little bit. If you only blended up a little
Speaker 1: you could definitely still tell that there were orange pieces,
Speaker 1: you know how it has that kind of fibrous look.
Speaker 1: But if it were, you know, if it were chewed
Speaker 1: beyond recognition, or it spent a lot of time in
Speaker 1: her stomach. You would potentially not be able to tell that.
Speaker 1: So the answer is maybe, maybe not. But people frequently
Speaker 1: will report which type of food items they've seen in
Speaker 1: the stomach contents. Doctor Duke's described some of the effects
Speaker 1: of ingesting rubbing alcohol. The thing with rubbing alcohol being
Speaker 1: isoid propyle alcohol rather than ethanol, which is what we
Speaker 1: think of as you know, drinking alcoholic beverages would be
Speaker 1: ethanol isodprople alcohol. The effects of that would essentially be
Speaker 1: the same as ethyl alcohol. There would be the same
Speaker 1: sort of in an inebriated person, you know, impaired balance,
Speaker 1: slurred speech, things like that. The difference is that with
Speaker 1: isopropenol you're going to have more of an intoxicating effect
Speaker 1: than with ethanol. So really the effects you see would
Speaker 1: not be different, they just might be more pronounced in
Speaker 1: someone who's ingested isopropenol. The level of alcohol that is
Speaker 1: fatal in a person varies quite a bit. There are
Speaker 1: some limits that have been set previously as sort of
Speaker 1: the norm, as in, you know, this is a lethal
Speaker 1: level when this is not, but that can vary according
Speaker 1: to tolerance. Most teenagers haven't had enough, you know time
Speaker 1: to build up their tolerance, but it can certainly vary,
Speaker 1: so really the answer is that there's no specific limit.
Speaker 1: With this in mind, Janie could have had even less
Speaker 1: than eight ounces and had enough in her system to
Speaker 1: make her sick. Her mom, Mona, and people who knew
Speaker 1: her so that Jannie wasn't much of a drinker, so
Speaker 1: she most likely had a low tolerance. Isopropyle alcohol has
Speaker 1: a lot of the same symptoms as being drunk, drowsiness,
Speaker 1: slurred speech, stumbling, headache, and vomiting. If someone is over intoxicated,
Speaker 1: their heart beat slows down, their breathing becomes more rapid,
Speaker 1: blood pressure drops. They may have seizures or collapse. They
Speaker 1: may experience pulmonary swelling or inflammation of an excess fluid
Speaker 1: in the lungs. This can make breathing difficult and cause
Speaker 1: oxygen deprivation. If not treated in time, it can cause
Speaker 1: cardiovascular collapse and death. The body rapidly absorbs isopropyle alcohol.
Speaker 1: Symptoms are at their height from thirty minutes to two
Speaker 1: hours after consumption. The bottom line is isoproble alcohol hits
Speaker 1: fast and hard. Doctor Mallet noted in his autopsy that
Speaker 1: there was intense congestion in Jennie's lungs and in her liver.
Speaker 1: I wondered if this could be a symptom of alcohol poisoning.
Speaker 1: So those those autopsy findings are not specific to an
Speaker 1: alcohol poisoning. And when you say alcohol poisoning, that just
Speaker 1: that just means over over intoxication, right to the point
Speaker 1: that it's toxic to your body. But there aren't going
Speaker 1: to be necessarily specific findings associated with it. It's essentially
Speaker 1: a It has a CNS depressant effect, and then if
Speaker 1: one were to keep consuming and consuming and consuming, then
Speaker 1: it would potentially cause general, generalized sort of organ failure.
Speaker 1: But it's primarily based in the CNS depressant effect, meaning
Speaker 1: you know, depressed sensorium, which would eventually contribute to decreased breathing,
Speaker 1: which would potentially progress to death based on what doctor
Speaker 1: Dukes is saying. Just like we've seen before, so many
Speaker 1: of Jane's symptoms are not specific to her particular cause
Speaker 1: of death. But rubbing alcohol poisoning is possible, yes, So
Speaker 1: if it were president at a high enough level, it
Speaker 1: would certainly be a potential cause of death. The issue
Speaker 1: is just that we don't have a level reported if
Speaker 1: it were present at all, Doctor Duke said that if
Speaker 1: it were to the point of being lethal, Janie would
Speaker 1: have been visibly intoxicated. In the witness statements, only a
Speaker 1: few people mentioned that Jane seemed drunk. One was Sarah.
Speaker 1: Sarah said that when Janie called her a snob, Jannie
Speaker 1: was stumbling up to her and warned her not to
Speaker 1: eat the fruit. Ron Rose said that Jane appeared to
Speaker 1: be intoxicated shortly before her death. Jay said the same
Speaker 1: thing in his reenactment video. We may never know for
Speaker 1: sure what killed Janie, but we have to look probability,
Speaker 1: and we found some other pieces of evidence in the
Speaker 1: investigation that do suggest rubbing alcohol poisoning. Lividity or darkening
Speaker 1: of the skin due to blood pooling sets in at
Speaker 1: around two hours after death, but more than one person
Speaker 1: noticed that Janey started turning blue almost immediately. One partygoer
Speaker 1: said she started turning a darker color all over. Then
Speaker 1: one of the ambulance attendants who treated Jane at the
Speaker 1: scene in the bank parking lot made the comment, she
Speaker 1: was not as blue as my genes, but she was
Speaker 1: getting blue, turning blue, especially blue coloring of the lips.
Speaker 1: Or cyanosis is an indicator of oxygen deprivation, which is
Speaker 1: one of the symptoms of rubbing alcohol poisoning. Ron Ward
Speaker 1: said that when he saw Jane in the morgue, she
Speaker 1: had blood around her mouth. Blood in the mouth can
Speaker 1: come from gastric distress, which is yet another symptom of
Speaker 1: isoprobe alcohol poisoning. Another thing was that one of the
Speaker 1: ambulance attendants had smelled a faint perfume on Janie. A
Speaker 1: fruity smell can indicate keytnes in the urine, which is
Speaker 1: again another symptom of alcohol poisoning. As we said, alcohol
Speaker 1: poisoning can also lead to cardiovascular collapse, and in the
Speaker 1: third autopsy, doctor Plus did suggest that Janie could have
Speaker 1: died from a heartarrhythmia. If Janie collapsed from alcohol poisoning,
Speaker 1: her condition might have been exacerbated at the party. She
Speaker 1: was lying on the ground gasping for breath when at
Speaker 1: least one person, in an attempt to revive her, threw
Speaker 1: a cup of beer on her. Another person had mentioned
Speaker 1: a cup of water also being thrown on her. This
Speaker 1: could explain the fluid in her lungs that doctor Malick
Speaker 1: had noted in the first autopsy. So if Jannie was
Speaker 1: already suffering from over intoxication and central nervous depression, she
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been able to expel this fluid from her lungs,
Speaker 1: an she might have experienced some symptoms of drowning. One
Speaker 1: is that your throat closes up to prevent any more
Speaker 1: fluid entering the lungs, and when your throat closes up,
Speaker 1: that can cause hemorrhaging, which was noted in the third autopsy.
Speaker 1: It's possible that at that point she blacked out. I
Speaker 1: hope so, because the alternative is that she was on
Speaker 1: the ground, helpless, paralyzed, and unable to ask for help
Speaker 1: while everyone continued to party around her and pour beer
Speaker 1: down her throat she lay dying. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: The reason I'm an investigator is because I want to
Speaker 1: answer family's questions. But in Janie's case, I can't definitively
Speaker 1: answer the big question of how she died. Remember Parents
Speaker 1: of Murdered Children. That's the organization where the Wards found
Speaker 1: doctor Burnell and the v doc's Richard Walter. When we
Speaker 1: talked with their executive director, Bev Warnock. We also spoke
Speaker 1: with their volunteer coordinator Sherry Nolan. She became involved with
Speaker 1: the organization when her daughter, who was pregnant, was killed.
Speaker 1: I was talking about and one of my goals as
Speaker 1: an investigator is to help families. But when I mentioned closure,
Speaker 1: she told us that isn't something we or anyone can
Speaker 1: provide for a family. Well, we make sure we don't
Speaker 1: use the word closure. No one likes to hear the
Speaker 1: word closure. We hit someone here that used to say,
Speaker 1: the only thing that closes is the list of the coffin.
Speaker 1: The grief is so devastating to them. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not just have the funeral and then you try to recover.
Speaker 1: They have to go into the justice system, and then
Speaker 1: years later the pearl block system. So it never ends
Speaker 1: for them. It never you know, and it's not something
Speaker 1: you can you know, after a couple Montiers, you know,
Speaker 1: you can kind of feel like you're moving on because
Speaker 1: you can't. You know, your mind is just consumed with
Speaker 1: guilt that you didn't say they loved them before they least,
Speaker 1: or you know, any other kind of guilt. There might
Speaker 1: be a lot of survivors. The healing process is to
Speaker 1: talk about it and to be with other families is
Speaker 1: to be able to talk to them because they understand
Speaker 1: no one else would understand. But we also make it
Speaker 1: very clear that we understand the grief and the pain,
Speaker 1: but we don't understand individually their grief and their pain,
Speaker 1: because no one knows exactly how I feel. It was
Speaker 1: my daughter, my granddaughter, But I understand the pain and
Speaker 1: grief that we all go through, and I never you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of questions that survivors ask is when does
Speaker 1: it get better when you get over it. I think
Speaker 1: that they answer that because other people say it, and
Speaker 1: so I always say, it's not that it gets better,
Speaker 1: it's just that it's different. Never say that they'll be healed.
Speaker 1: It's a healing process that will never ask never tell
Speaker 1: them that they'll be over it at any point in time,
Speaker 1: because that grief's journey is a journey that you'll always
Speaker 1: be on. At the beginning of this investigation, I thought
Speaker 1: that people might be more forthcoming because so much time
Speaker 1: is passed. I also thought more people would come forward
Speaker 1: with renewed pressure on the case. But the thing is
Speaker 1: they might have already come forward with everything they know,
Speaker 1: and over the years there has been a lot of
Speaker 1: pressure on the case. It was reopened in two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, reinvestigated, and was a high profile case in
Speaker 1: the state of Arkansas. I wondered if anything could have
Speaker 1: been done for her at the party, could she have survived?
Speaker 1: I asked ABC's FBI consultant Brad Garrett about this in
Speaker 1: all the stories, I mean, do you think that there's
Speaker 1: anything that they could have done more to help her? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, when you talk about people helping other people,
Speaker 1: you have to get to look at it in context.
Speaker 1: Where are you. You're sort of in the middle of
Speaker 1: nowhere in Arkansas, which means, you know, the luxury of
Speaker 1: where you all are, Like I'm in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: If you started to choke on something, you could probably
Speaker 1: get an ambulance and or the fire department to your
Speaker 1: house in five or six minutes. Probably not realistic. In
Speaker 1: martiall arc and they did in my view, and you
Speaker 1: know other could they have done something at the scene?
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe not. I mean, if you believe that in
Speaker 1: affect Janie choked to death. If you believe that that,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what they could have done unless there
Speaker 1: happened to be a paramedic or an EMT. But you're
Speaker 1: talking a bunch of high school kids. So the odds
Speaker 1: of that weren't great. And so they did really what
Speaker 1: I would think is the next best thing. They didn't
Speaker 1: wait for emergency services to come to them, if in
Speaker 1: fact they even exist. They put them in the back
Speaker 1: of a pickup truck. Now, it was sort of unclear
Speaker 1: about how much of a lag there was between when
Speaker 1: she went down off the porch of this cabin and
Speaker 1: when she was actually taken. You know, I got different
Speaker 1: time periods. But at some point they said, we've got
Speaker 1: to get her to a doctor or to somebody that
Speaker 1: can take a look at her. So what ultimately is
Speaker 1: Jane's story. Janey's story is a tragedy. It's a story
Speaker 1: about a town where there was enough distrust between some
Speaker 1: of its citizens and the authorities that wild rumors could
Speaker 1: be believed. It's also a tragedy that a lot of
Speaker 1: the people in Marshall, Arkansas are tired of hearing about.
Speaker 1: And it's a story about a family who never got answers.
Speaker 1: Jane died in nineteen eighty nine at the age of sixteen,
Speaker 1: and her father, Ron Ward, spent thirty years investigating his
Speaker 1: daughter's death, which was almost twice as long as she
Speaker 1: was alive. Ron is gone now as well, and I
Speaker 1: can't help but admire him. He wanted the truth, He
Speaker 1: wanted to live in a world that had answers and justice.
Speaker 1: He wanted his daughter back. Throughout this season, people have
Speaker 1: continued to reach out to us about unsolved cases. Parents, siblings, friends, spouses.
Speaker 1: They are all desperately trying to find out what happened
Speaker 1: to their loved ones. I think about season one and
Speaker 1: Rebecca Gould's father and sister, Larry and Danielle, who were
Speaker 1: still trying to get justice for her. I've learned a
Speaker 1: lot from ren Ward. He shows us that you can
Speaker 1: go a long way if you don't give up. You
Speaker 1: can get a case reinvestigated, a special prosecutor appointed, and
Speaker 1: even another autopsy conducted. You can also get the information
Speaker 1: made public so that other people can come in and
Speaker 1: try to get answers. I've learned the importance of never
Speaker 1: losing faith in the fact that one person can make
Speaker 1: a difference. With enough pressure and time, anything can happen.
Speaker 1: It's a lesson that I'm taking to heart as I
Speaker 1: continue to investigate Rebecca Gould's murder. At the beginning of
Speaker 1: the season we talked about time travel. On that fateful
Speaker 1: night in nineteen eight eighty nine, many of the partygoers
Speaker 1: were teens themselves. Thirty years later, a lot of those
Speaker 1: kids are adults with kids of their own. A lot
Speaker 1: of them have teens who are the same age as
Speaker 1: they were when Jane died, and right now those teens
Speaker 1: might be heading out to parties and cabins in the woods.
Speaker 1: I'm Katherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone
Speaker 1: is a joint production between School of Humans and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It is written and recorded by me. Catherine Townsend. Taylor
Speaker 1: Church and Gabby Watts are our producers and story editors.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, and el C.
Speaker 1: Crowley for School of Humans and Connell Byrne and Chuck
Speaker 1: Bryant for iHeart. Our Field producer is Miranda Hawkins. Theme
Speaker 1: and original school are by Ben Sale, available wherever you
Speaker 1: get your music. Please visit us at Helegoon podcast dot
Speaker 1: com or follow us on social media. School of Humans