Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
Speaker 1: those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
Speaker 1: represent those of iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees.
Speaker 1: This series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener
Speaker 1: discretion is advised. Previously an algorithm. I feel I should
Speaker 1: have got locked over them. Yeah, I'll beat her, I
Speaker 1: rape you, rape you. I standard y'all call it right,
Speaker 1: but we don't call it ran in streets like you
Speaker 1: pay here? So what is she complaining about? After Vaughan's
Speaker 1: release from prison in August, he moved back to Gary
Speaker 1: first time. He really didn't go over okay and true
Speaker 1: World War for for a couple of days, and in January,
Speaker 1: Vaughan appears to have committed the first of his confirmed murders,
Speaker 1: killing twenty eight year old Tierra Baby and Way call
Speaker 1: it never happened. Her fiance, Marvin Clinton, investigated her disappearance
Speaker 1: and discovered a man, likely Vaughan, had stolen her cell
Speaker 1: phone and was using it to call prostitutes, and Marvin
Speaker 1: says he took that information to the police. He didn't
Speaker 1: have me thank but from that point on it what
Speaker 1: he did would director. I have no idea. And around
Speaker 1: that same time, another woman had a run in with Vond.
Speaker 1: She was one of the very first person that ever
Speaker 1: weighing into HOW, but she happened to get away from HOW.
Speaker 1: From I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Algorithm
Speaker 1: and I'm ben Key Brick at eleven am. On February,
Speaker 1: just over a month after Tierra Batty disappeared, Darren Von
Speaker 1: contacted a woman who placed an ad as an escort
Speaker 1: on backpage dot com. That's the same site that Von
Speaker 1: would later use to contact Africa Hardy. The woman who
Speaker 1: will call Sarah, came forward with her story after Vaughn
Speaker 1: was arrested and she saw his picture on the news.
Speaker 1: Detective Ford looked into it. He found the report that
Speaker 1: Sarah had initially filed, and then went out to interview her.
Speaker 1: How did it make you feel when you saw him
Speaker 1: on the news? Ford recorded this interview. With the way
Speaker 1: it's recorded, you can hear him well and how do
Speaker 1: you spell your last name? But many of Sarah's responses
Speaker 1: aren't audible. Luckily I got access to Detective Ford's report
Speaker 1: about this interview, so try to fill in some of
Speaker 1: the gaps. When the audio isn't clear. I'd prefer to
Speaker 1: hear things firsthand from Sarah, and I reached out to
Speaker 1: her for comment, but I couldn't get in touch. You
Speaker 1: can tell from the get go that she doesn't trust police,
Speaker 1: which makes sense given her story. And I know it's
Speaker 1: hard for you to believe, but we're here to try
Speaker 1: to help himself. Okay, how did you wind up meeting
Speaker 1: this guy? You had a back page ad, so you
Speaker 1: were in Chicago, you drove the Gary. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: met him at one house and he asked you to
Speaker 1: drive to another one. Now, how did you find it?
Speaker 1: Did he give you directions to it? Or did you
Speaker 1: put it like in your phone for GPS? So he
Speaker 1: just told you kind of how to get there. Now,
Speaker 1: in the report, do you say that it's fourteen East Court?
Speaker 1: East fifty Court was the street that von lived on
Speaker 1: with his brother, and the address Sarah had given police
Speaker 1: was just across the street from where Vaughan was staying.
Speaker 1: What happened when you get to the house. When you
Speaker 1: when you meet him the first time, Sarah says that
Speaker 1: as she was getting out of the car, Vun ambushed her.
Speaker 1: He put a knife to her neck, and he told her,
Speaker 1: you're going to listen to me. Get in the fucking house.
Speaker 1: What did he look like the guys? Sarah says that
Speaker 1: because of Von's facial ticks, the way he ground his teeth,
Speaker 1: she thought that he used to be addicted to crack,
Speaker 1: used to be okay, So he put a knife to
Speaker 1: your next and he said, you're gonna listen to me.
Speaker 1: Sarah says Von took her to a back room in
Speaker 1: the house. He made her hand over her cell phone
Speaker 1: and car keys and told her that if she did
Speaker 1: what he said, then he'd let her go. But she
Speaker 1: didn't believe him because she saw duct tape and gloves
Speaker 1: in the corner of the room, and he started asking
Speaker 1: her questions. He was asking about your car, who knows
Speaker 1: you're there? And he took your cell phone right so
Speaker 1: you're saying that these are all science and NFL like
Speaker 1: you were probably wind up dead. Okay. I used to
Speaker 1: work in narcotics a lot, and I did undercover words.
Speaker 1: I have the same sign as you do. When things
Speaker 1: started going weird, I started going, okay, it's time to
Speaker 1: get out of here. Sad's about and half behind. Sarah
Speaker 1: says that Von then repeatedly raped her. He seemed to
Speaker 1: be toying with her. He would stop and tell her
Speaker 1: he was going to let her go, only to then
Speaker 1: begin again. At one point, she tried to escape, but
Speaker 1: he caught her and started beating her and tighter wrists
Speaker 1: behind her back with a small rope any other weapons
Speaker 1: against jubisides tie you off. After hours of holding Sarah
Speaker 1: at knife point, choking her and raping her, Sarah says
Speaker 1: that Von gagged her through a coat over her head
Speaker 1: and drug her outside to her own car, some of
Speaker 1: the staff and outside with him punching you and choking you.
Speaker 1: This part of the story reminded me of something. It
Speaker 1: reminded me of an incident that Vaughan's brother, Reginald, had
Speaker 1: described police. Reginald said Vaughan had once called him at
Speaker 1: work out of the blue. It was like like the
Speaker 1: only time he's ever calling me over. And when he said,
Speaker 1: you say, you know he brought a chap back to
Speaker 1: the house and they got your food anything doing it,
Speaker 1: I think it really told me is because of the
Speaker 1: neighbor across the street. So now to be clear, Vaughan
Speaker 1: just told his brother that he'd gotten into a fight
Speaker 1: with a woman. He didn't tell his brother about any crimes.
Speaker 1: And I don't know for certain that the incident Reginald
Speaker 1: was describing has anything to do with Sarah, but I
Speaker 1: wonder Regardless, Vaughan forced her into the car and started driving,
Speaker 1: and she felt certain that he was taking her somewhere
Speaker 1: to kill her. They got the t Brawway and he
Speaker 1: got stuck at a red light and it's a pool hall.
Speaker 1: We got on twenty Broadway and there was two old guys,
Speaker 1: two old gentlemen that was standing outside. Sarah managed to
Speaker 1: get the gag out of her mouth and she screamed
Speaker 1: for help. They say what they heard was somebody in distress,
Speaker 1: and they looked and they see a woman tied up
Speaker 1: in the back feet of the car. The men snapped
Speaker 1: into action. They were armed, so they pulled out their
Speaker 1: guns and stopped Vaughan at the intersection. They helped to
Speaker 1: call at the light, and they were trying to make
Speaker 1: him get out the car so they can get the
Speaker 1: young lady out, and one of the guys shot off
Speaker 1: his pistol. One of the men fired a warning shot
Speaker 1: and Vaughan ended up bailing out of the car and
Speaker 1: running away. So basically, these people intervening for you shoot
Speaker 1: a shot in the air. He takes off, run in
Speaker 1: and the police show up. Sarah told police what had happened.
Speaker 1: She gave them the address where she'd met Vaughan and
Speaker 1: the fact that he'd said that his name was Darren.
Speaker 1: And after she finished up with the police, she met
Speaker 1: up with her boyfriend and it was actually while she
Speaker 1: was talking to her boyfriend that she decided to go
Speaker 1: to the hospital and get a rape kit because victim
Speaker 1: went through several hours in an exam. They had someone
Speaker 1: swabbing intimate parts of their body and taking pictures and
Speaker 1: you know it's not done for fun. My name is
Speaker 1: Dr Rachel Lovell. My area of expertise is around gender
Speaker 1: based violence and I am a research assistant professor at
Speaker 1: Case Western Reserve University. So a centual assault kit is
Speaker 1: a set of items collected by healthcare professionals, primarily in
Speaker 1: a hospital setting. The items can be swabs, combs, hair, photographs,
Speaker 1: any number of things. Level says that about six of
Speaker 1: sexual assault kits will have enough DNA to be analyzed
Speaker 1: and submitted to a database. It has to meet a
Speaker 1: certain number of criteria to be uploaded into CODIS that's
Speaker 1: the us IS Federal DNA database. When a new sample
Speaker 1: is uploaded to CODIS, it's compared against all the other
Speaker 1: samples sun Vaughan's previous crimes. His DNA should have been
Speaker 1: in the federal database. So if Gary police had analyzed
Speaker 1: Sarah's rape kit and it had enough DNA, they should
Speaker 1: have been able to link the kit to Vaughan. They
Speaker 1: would have discovered he was a registered sex offender living
Speaker 1: just across the street from the address that she had provided,
Speaker 1: And they also would have found out that Vaughan had
Speaker 1: been convicted for an almost identical crime to the one
Speaker 1: Sarah described. Now, to be clear, we can't know for
Speaker 1: certain what would have happened if police had tested Sarah's
Speaker 1: sexual assault kit, but it seems quite plausible that they
Speaker 1: would have been able to arrest Vaughn before he committed
Speaker 1: any more murders. But that's not what happened. Did the
Speaker 1: police ever follow up with you or take any steps
Speaker 1: to to investigate this? Is there any reason you didn't
Speaker 1: want to prosecute him for it? Well, heage you, right.
Speaker 1: Sarah is saying there that she didn't press charges because
Speaker 1: police told her quote, if he had paid you then
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have been rape. Right. That's the exact same
Speaker 1: logic that Vaughan had used to justify his rape in Texas,
Speaker 1: And according to Sarah, that same logic was now coming
Speaker 1: from the Gary Police Department. You can hear Detective forward
Speaker 1: Si after he heard that, well, and like you said,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, is that happened. I'm going to continue to
Speaker 1: work on this, and i am going to check the
Speaker 1: rape kit. It's actually a Gary Police department. I'm going
Speaker 1: to get that. I'm gonna send it down to the
Speaker 1: state Lab. So if there is any you know, DNA
Speaker 1: evidence will be trying to put that together. Instead of
Speaker 1: analyzing Sarah's sexual assault kit, police let it sit on
Speaker 1: a shelf for over a year. Sarah's kit was part
Speaker 1: of a backlog that's frustratingly common across the US. They
Speaker 1: are thought to be hundreds of thousands of untested kits.
Speaker 1: The exact numbers are hard to come by. This victim,
Speaker 1: how a sexual assualt kit collected, and the idea that
Speaker 1: nothing would be done from that, that that would just
Speaker 1: be put on a shelf, I think is painful to
Speaker 1: think about. Dr Lovell says that many people are shocked
Speaker 1: when they find out how many sexual assault kits never
Speaker 1: get tested. How can you have so many rape kits
Speaker 1: that were not tested, Like, how could you not test those?
Speaker 1: And that's a, you know, a very understandable, legitimate question.
Speaker 1: But the problem is even worse than many realize. The
Speaker 1: kit is a symptom of a much larger problem. Doctor
Speaker 1: Level was part of a project called the Sexual Assault
Speaker 1: Kit Initiative. The initiative was to analyze all the backlogged
Speaker 1: rape kits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Cleveland is located,
Speaker 1: and Level and her team then look through all the
Speaker 1: police records from when these kits were submitted. What we
Speaker 1: really found through our research is that many things as
Speaker 1: part of those investigations were not completed. It that includes
Speaker 1: taking victims statements, offender statements, running someone's criminal history, you know,
Speaker 1: all the sort of traditional investigative practices. Kids weren't tested
Speaker 1: because lots of things weren't done on these cases. These
Speaker 1: cases were close pretty quickly. I think one of the
Speaker 1: most important things that people should understand is that the
Speaker 1: investigations are often not what you see in TV. People
Speaker 1: have a sense that law enforcement has the resources to
Speaker 1: thoroughly follow up on all of these leads and test
Speaker 1: whatever they want. And you know, do all these sorts
Speaker 1: of things. You sexual assaults in particular, the departments are
Speaker 1: under resource, they're not followed up on. And this is
Speaker 1: what happens when you don't follow up on them, sexual
Speaker 1: offenders continue to offend. I was curious what had led
Speaker 1: Cleveland to analyze all the rape kids in its backlog.
Speaker 1: Why did they decide to go test their untested kids,
Speaker 1: Like many things came out of something really bad. On
Speaker 1: Halloween in two thousand and nine, they found the bodies
Speaker 1: of eleven decomposing women in the house of this man
Speaker 1: named Anthony soul so Well was under investigation by Cleveland
Speaker 1: police for rape. In two thousand and nine, so Well
Speaker 1: killed eleven women and buried them in and around his
Speaker 1: Imperial Avenue home. Neighbors remembered that stench of rotting flesh
Speaker 1: so wrongly attributed to raise sausage store next door. When
Speaker 1: they were sort of following up on these women's bodies,
Speaker 1: they identified that several reports had been made from women
Speaker 1: who were able to escape from Anthony Sowell and said
Speaker 1: that he had raped them and that they had taken
Speaker 1: him back to this house, and one of these women,
Speaker 1: maybe more, had a sexual salt kit collected that wasn't
Speaker 1: tested at the time. Ohio saw a backlog of thousands
Speaker 1: of untested rape kits. The plain Dealer reported that one
Speaker 1: from two thousand nine was later linked to so well,
Speaker 1: but by then he had killed at least four or more.
Speaker 1: You never know sort of the counterfactual, So what had
Speaker 1: happened had they done that? However, if those cases had
Speaker 1: been followed up on, you know, there's a strong likelihood
Speaker 1: that he might not have been able to murder the
Speaker 1: subsequent victims. You know, the story I'm working on right
Speaker 1: now actually has a lot of eerie similarities. People reporting
Speaker 1: it to police, reporting the house, and you know it
Speaker 1: wasn't followed up on and led to more sexual assaults
Speaker 1: and murders. I don't know, it's really hard looking from
Speaker 1: the outside kind of understanding how this stuff can happen,
Speaker 1: or how someone can kind of throw so many obvious
Speaker 1: red flags that don't seem to get caught. You know,
Speaker 1: the departments are under resource, they're under reported, they're not
Speaker 1: followed up on, and when you don't solve those crimes,
Speaker 1: they continue to go on. And commit sexual assaults as
Speaker 1: well as other crimes. The Sexual Assault CAN initiative is
Speaker 1: sort of pulling off a band aid and showing actually,
Speaker 1: there's much worse under here than what we thought, and
Speaker 1: really trying to transform the way we think about sexual
Speaker 1: assault and how to investigate it. I asked Dr Lovell
Speaker 1: how we ended up with this rape kit backlog in
Speaker 1: the first place. You have to start with the fact
Speaker 1: that DNA testing wasn't really available until the late nineties,
Speaker 1: but earlier on police did collect biological samples, not for
Speaker 1: DNA testing but for blood typing. When DNA testing did
Speaker 1: become available, it was expensive, it was very cost prohibitive,
Speaker 1: so police departments only really tested kits where there was
Speaker 1: a very strong likelihood that it was going to go
Speaker 1: to prosecution and the testing could take sometimes years to
Speaker 1: get the DNA evidence back. So by and large, most
Speaker 1: jurisdictions may have started to test the kids going forward
Speaker 1: when it became cheaper, or primarily those where the victim
Speaker 1: wanted to prosecute and the offender was a stranger. That's
Speaker 1: the only kids that they were really testing. They never
Speaker 1: really thought about going back to the old ones. To
Speaker 1: be fair, they didn't know what was going to be
Speaker 1: in there. They didn't know how many would have hits.
Speaker 1: Would it be worth it to test these kids? And
Speaker 1: there was a lot of conversation about should we only
Speaker 1: test the stranger ones or the non stranger ones, because
Speaker 1: the idea is that DNA will help you identify someone,
Speaker 1: But if you already know who raped you, what's the
Speaker 1: point of testing. What they didn't foresee from that is
Speaker 1: that kids can hit to each other. So here's one
Speaker 1: person who might have sexually assaulted for acquaintances, and although
Speaker 1: each person had their own police report, the kids have
Speaker 1: now linked them together. We also have a strong research
Speaker 1: to show that because offenders often sexually assault strangers and
Speaker 1: non strangers, one person's known offender is somebody else's unknown offender.
Speaker 1: So when the kids hit to each other, you now
Speaker 1: have a name suspect. They didn't really have a larger
Speaker 1: sense either about how many of these kids would be
Speaker 1: hitting to each other. Here's these seasoned law enforcement officers
Speaker 1: and I would be sitting in meetings and they would be,
Speaker 1: you know, just shocked at the number of rapes that
Speaker 1: this person had been connected to and how different the
Speaker 1: rapes were in terms of victim preference and age and
Speaker 1: gender and raise and all these sorts of things. They're like,
Speaker 1: how did we never would have put these together had
Speaker 1: it not been for DNA because they're so different? Was
Speaker 1: this a shock to researchers as well? I think the
Speaker 1: number was a little shocking when you started to pull
Speaker 1: the ball together. I mean, in Kyoga County, a fourth
Speaker 1: of these cases are linked to known serial sex offenders,
Speaker 1: so they know that they're connected to some other sex
Speaker 1: crime or they're connected to another rape kit. Almost a
Speaker 1: quarter of the kids that were analyzed contained a DNA
Speaker 1: sample that matched the sample in another kit or a
Speaker 1: sample from a noon sex offender. Can we say then
Speaker 1: that of these offenses are serial offenses or does that
Speaker 1: work for some reason? I think you can extrapolate to that.
Speaker 1: There's also researchers from the Detroit Sacchi Project about a
Speaker 1: third of their's were connected to more than one sexual assault,
Speaker 1: so we estimated at being at and then in terms
Speaker 1: of absolute numbers, how many are we talking about with?
Speaker 1: So as of December, there was about eight hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty known serial sex offenders. And again that that's the
Speaker 1: ones you know. Don't forget though, that sexual assault is
Speaker 1: the most underreported violent crime and still eight hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty known people who are connected to some other rape. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's it's kind of like if you compared it to
Speaker 1: like murder something like that, right, if you thought about
Speaker 1: eight hundred serial killers active in this county, that that
Speaker 1: would sound completely insane. Uh, And it does sound completely
Speaker 1: insane with serial rape to right, right, you know, to
Speaker 1: what extent has this actually led to, you know, opening
Speaker 1: back up investigations or convictions? So u Kyoge County started
Speaker 1: completely new investigations for seven thousand rape kits from nineteen
Speaker 1: three through two thousand and eleven UM. They just finished
Speaker 1: testing and investigating all of those. Over eight hundred defendants
Speaker 1: have been indicted. It shows that you can get convictions
Speaker 1: from old sexual assault cases when there are sufficient resources
Speaker 1: for victims in terms of victim advocacy and victim support,
Speaker 1: and there's sufficient um political will to make sure that
Speaker 1: these cases are investigated and prosecuted. Cuyahoga Counties investigation into
Speaker 1: their rape kit backlog has been an enormous success, in
Speaker 1: part because they had buy in at the county, state,
Speaker 1: and national level after they'd begun addressing the problem at
Speaker 1: the county level. They got federal funding from the Sexual
Speaker 1: Assault Kit Initiative, a national initiative to end the rape
Speaker 1: kit backlog, which launched in tw Cayuga County has the
Speaker 1: most number of convictions relative to the number of kids,
Speaker 1: and there's several reasons for that. Most notably is that
Speaker 1: Calga County is one of the first ones to do this,
Speaker 1: so it's an early adopter jurisdiction is before the federal
Speaker 1: money was available to do this, so they kind of
Speaker 1: got a head start. And the other head start that
Speaker 1: they got was that the state Crime Lab paid for
Speaker 1: the testing of all the kids, so they didn't have
Speaker 1: to use resources to pay for the testing, but instead
Speaker 1: put those resources towards investigation and prosecution. So they really
Speaker 1: got a large number of staff and personnel. So they've
Speaker 1: seen a very large number. Over eight hundred defendants have
Speaker 1: now been indicted. Do you know how many of those
Speaker 1: eight hundred were kind of already in prison for something else?
Speaker 1: For sure, some of them were in prison for long
Speaker 1: periods of time, But for all indicted defendants, we looked
Speaker 1: at their criminal histories and the median amount of time
Speaker 1: that they had been in cars rated that could be
Speaker 1: jail or prison was around six months. Some of them,
Speaker 1: you know, were convicted of murder and had life sentences,
Speaker 1: but overall they weren't incarcerated for long periods of time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was speaking to another researcher about how you assess
Speaker 1: the threat of recidivism given that so many of these
Speaker 1: crimes go unreported, so that kind of makes it hard
Speaker 1: to figure out how much people are reoffending. Do you
Speaker 1: have a sense of how the data from rape kits
Speaker 1: is changing, or or should change the way we think
Speaker 1: about reoffending. Yeah. I think that's a great question, and
Speaker 1: in fact, sachy data the connection is made when the
Speaker 1: victim reports and there's DNA collected, not at the time
Speaker 1: of conviction, so you have a much more representative sample
Speaker 1: of sexual assaults. I think the Sexual Thought Kit initiative
Speaker 1: is telling us that serial offending is much more common
Speaker 1: than previously assumed, because now we're getting a less biased
Speaker 1: view of what that actually looks like, and that in fact,
Speaker 1: law enforcement should start with the assumption that that they've
Speaker 1: done this before. I guess I was just shocked at
Speaker 1: kind of what people can do and how light that
Speaker 1: punishment seemed to me as someone not familiar with this stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think one of the sort of larger existential problems
Speaker 1: with this is that individuals have to come back to
Speaker 1: the community, right most of them. The problem is, oftentimes
Speaker 1: the offenders will come out of prison worse than what
Speaker 1: they went in, and there's no good treatment for sexual
Speaker 1: offenders adult ones. There is some stuff around juveniles, but
Speaker 1: for adult male sex offenders, the research is pretty consistent
Speaker 1: that treatment is not very effective. What are we supposed
Speaker 1: to do when these individuals are out? I don't have
Speaker 1: the answer to that, but I think it's an important
Speaker 1: conversation to have. I know that. For example, in Washington State,
Speaker 1: there's this place called sex Offender Island. The first time
Speaker 1: I heard someone talked about, I was like, sex Offender Island.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a place I certainly don't want to go,
Speaker 1: you know, like that sounds terrible, and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a place where they have civilly committed individuals who are
Speaker 1: the worst of the worst sexual offenders, and so this
Speaker 1: is kind of like they've served their sentence. You can't
Speaker 1: legally keep them in prison, but you can involuntarily commit
Speaker 1: them kind of like a psychiatric condition. But it's essentially
Speaker 1: an extra judicial prison or something. Yes, And sometimes some
Speaker 1: offenders say, you know, put me in this because I
Speaker 1: will continue to offend. And sometimes they're just civilly committed
Speaker 1: by saying, you know, we've deemed you as being too dangerous.
Speaker 1: I'm not suggesting that's the right answer, but you know,
Speaker 1: I think these are conversations that should also be had
Speaker 1: as well, like what do we do with individuals who
Speaker 1: may have a hard time being reformed and they are
Speaker 1: still a danger to society. I don't want myself for
Speaker 1: my children to live next to that person. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, that person has served their debt to society,
Speaker 1: at least according to the core. Yeah, it seems to
Speaker 1: me that like our kind of intuitions about these crimes
Speaker 1: don't match up with the laws and the sentences. But
Speaker 1: then it seems to me from your research that also
Speaker 1: the reality of the crimes doesn't match up with our
Speaker 1: intuition either, you know. So I don't know, just everything
Speaker 1: is kind of messed up right now, I know, I know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have no read you know, some of the other
Speaker 1: things I could provide recommendations, I don't know what to do.
Speaker 1: I think it's those are sort of philosophical questions, But
Speaker 1: I think there is a larger story about, now what
Speaker 1: how do we as a society handle violent sexual predators.
Speaker 1: Dr Lovell's research shows that Sarah's story with a rape
Speaker 1: kit that went unanalyzed, in a rap ape that went uninvestigated,
Speaker 1: that story is far from unique to Gary. It's part
Speaker 1: of a bigger problem occurring all across the country. But
Speaker 1: when Marvin Clinton says that he heard about Sarah's story
Speaker 1: and how the police hadn't followed up on the information
Speaker 1: she'd given them were analyzed her rape kit, it didn't
Speaker 1: shock him. I was surprised at all. They may have
Speaker 1: feel like she was the words this person, so she
Speaker 1: just stopped and the bell with them. It seems like, again,
Speaker 1: if they had just taken her seriously, she could have
Speaker 1: taken them to the house. They would have seen that
Speaker 1: this guy was a registered sex offender who had almost
Speaker 1: killed a woman in Texas, and they could have stopped
Speaker 1: all of this from happening. Exactly. Yeah, that's so fu exactly,
Speaker 1: But they would have took up seriously instead of making
Speaker 1: her feel that her life was worth nothing, like we're
Speaker 1: not noting what you're doing. We might travel had judging
Speaker 1: on you, but we just want to know what's happened
Speaker 1: and let her know that her life missed something. Clinton
Speaker 1: said that Sarah's story reminded him of his own experience.
Speaker 1: It kind of go inside with each other. After Von's arrest,
Speaker 1: Marvin says he learned police had lost the phone records
Speaker 1: he provided them. They looked through the foul they didn't
Speaker 1: have it, So we don't know what the other detective
Speaker 1: deal with it, if you just threw it away or
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be. But you told them this
Speaker 1: whole story about how you had gotten the records and
Speaker 1: called and spoken to this woman, and that a man
Speaker 1: had called exactly that I had told him all the
Speaker 1: novels did I called. I mean, it feels like at
Speaker 1: least once you had told them that he had her
Speaker 1: cell phone, you know that they should have been able
Speaker 1: to track down where he was or something exactly. It
Speaker 1: seems from both Marvin and Sariah's stories the police ignored
Speaker 1: crucial leads early in and these errors may have left
Speaker 1: Vaughn free to commit more murders. Personally, I think if
Speaker 1: police had investigated either of these leads thoroughly, they could
Speaker 1: have caught and arrested Vaughn and Africa Hardy and many
Speaker 1: of the later victims would be alive today. But could
Speaker 1: Vaughan have been stopped even earlier? He inclaimed he had
Speaker 1: been doing this for twenty some years. If that's a
Speaker 1: true analysis, death should have been more than seven victims.
Speaker 1: Do you wonder if there are other victims out there?
Speaker 1: We have a lot of missing females out here, some
Speaker 1: of them uh center cold cases, but I mean they've
Speaker 1: been missing for years. To think back when he said
Speaker 1: he'd been doing it for twenty years, we got some
Speaker 1: people that have been missing almost that long now, and
Speaker 1: then just a coincidence that he said he'd been doing
Speaker 1: it all this time and we got all these people
Speaker 1: still missing. Possible or could actually be something to it
Speaker 1: that we don't know. We can only go about what
Speaker 1: he said now. They dismissed some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: he had that they found not to be true, but
Speaker 1: we don't know what else and what ain't see. There
Speaker 1: were some stuff that he said that they looked into
Speaker 1: and they weren't sure if it was true. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they had their doubts about it. I mean even detective
Speaker 1: Board say he had been looking at couple of cases
Speaker 1: that he was trying to link to their van, but
Speaker 1: he just had been able to link him. I know
Speaker 1: of three cases man him was talking about, but he
Speaker 1: found victims that were angle. His probably as was to
Speaker 1: try to link the cases to damn man right now,
Speaker 1: he just ain't been able to do that. But if
Speaker 1: they do link some of all cases to him, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be surprised. Could Vaughan have been stopped even earlier
Speaker 1: before any of these crimes? Was Von responsible for the
Speaker 1: murders the algorithm had detected? And could police have caught
Speaker 1: Vaughan if they had heated hard Groves warnings? How many
Speaker 1: change gears here and switch the focus away from von
Speaker 1: crimes and back towards hard Groves algorithm. I reached back
Speaker 1: out to Hargrove to let him know what I found
Speaker 1: out about Von and Von's confessions. Were you able to
Speaker 1: get any audio out of the Gary police farm? You did?
Speaker 1: Next time? On algorithm? You know I have tried over cases, um,
Speaker 1: there are some cases that stick in your mind, and
Speaker 1: this was a case that stuck in my mind because
Speaker 1: number one, we had a we had a good defense
Speaker 1: to the forensic evidence. If you can call it friends
Speaker 1: of evidence, and his defense was that he had been
Speaker 1: dealing drugs and that he owed the person he was
Speaker 1: dealing with a lot of money. That's one of the
Speaker 1: critical needs for law enforcement. There needs to be a national,
Speaker 1: updated data set for homicide. All right is seven three pm.
Speaker 1: I just checked my mail. I was looking for wedding
Speaker 1: invitation and instead I found a piece of mail from
Speaker 1: Darren Fond. I had written to him a couple of
Speaker 1: months ago seeing if he had any interest in talking.
Speaker 1: Open this up. Never gotten a piece of mail from
Speaker 1: a serial killer before. This episode was written and produced
Speaker 1: by me ben Key. Brick Algorithm is executive produced by
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, Donald Albright and Matt Frederick. Production assistants in
Speaker 1: mixing by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and
Speaker 1: Vanity Set and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana,
Speaker 1: Miranda Hawkins, Jamie Albright, Rema l k Ali, Trevor Young,
Speaker 1: and Josh Thane for their help and notes. Next week
Speaker 1: we're gonna have a bonus episode where we address some
Speaker 1: listener questions. If you have any questions, if you have
Speaker 1: any tips about the investigation, really anything at all, please
Speaker 1: call and leave a voicemail at a D eight five
Speaker 1: zero one three zero nine. That's a D eight five
Speaker 1: zero one three zero nine, or reach out to me
Speaker 1: on Twitter. I'm at Ben Underscore keybrick kue b R
Speaker 1: I c H. Would really love to hear from any
Speaker 1: of you, even if it's just general thoughts about the show.
Speaker 1: We're doing that to both address your questions and also
Speaker 1: we've gotten some interesting tips already that we want to
Speaker 1: look into, so we just need a little extra time
Speaker 1: to research and then work on the next episode. Thanks.