#465 - Chainsaws, Torsos & Murder Tacos - Davenport, Iowa
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No.

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This week in Davenport, Iowa, an unhappy woman disappears from her marriage and family. But did she run away to start a new, better life? Or does the torso found in the river belong to her? Welcome to Small Town Murder. ♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yeah!

Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, a tremendous amount for joining us today. And you picked a good day because, wow, do we have a weird story for you. A murder weapon we've never had before. Oh, great. This is the 465th episode. So to come up with a new murder weapon...

is something. This is a creative deal here. Yeah, we're going to start a big push toward 500 soon. It's going to be fun. That'll be a big one. Oh, we're getting so close. We're so close. I'm telling you, we're getting there this year, this calendar year. So definitely head over to shut up and give me murder.com. Why tickets to live shows? Oh,

Oh, yeah. And merchandise. There's all sorts of shirts, new stuff up all the time. Everything from skateboards to coffee cups, it's all there. Any kind of logo or saying on there that you want. But tickets to live shows, they're going fast. A couple shows are already sold out. It's crazy. Thank you. One of the shows we had to open up another tier. So thank you for doing that. If you want to come to shows, definitely get your tickets early. Even Boston and New York in December are selling very fast. And Phoenix is sold out in November. Right.

Get your tickets. First up, we have... First up is Sacramento on April 5th. San Francisco, April 6th. Get those tickets now. If you've never been to a live show of ours...

It is not like a lecture. It's not anything like that. We're comedians. We're stand-up comics. It's a comedy show. There's a murder, and you get to see the pictures, and I'm telling you. It's a real party atmosphere. Yes, it is. And even if people come alone and they make a million friends, it's a good time. Definitely come out to a show. Shut up and give me murder.com. And if you can't make it to a show, let's say you're overseas or something like that, we got you covered there. Virtual live show, 420 again. We're doing it April 20th.

They're like, what is that? What month is 20? How does that work? Yeah, how does that go on? So definitely come out to that virtual live show, just like a regular live show, but in your living room. Right. We had a blast last year. We're going to dress up. We have crazy smoking implements to make it successful.

Make Jimmy's head explode. It's going to be fun. Let's do it again. We're going to do all that. One other thing, patreon.com slash crimeinsports is where you get all of your bonus material. There's a ton. Anybody $5 a month or above, you put down $5, you get a couple hundred bonus episodes to binge on. New episodes every other week. One crime and sports, one small town murder, and you, my friends, get it all. This week we're going to talk about, for crime and sports, we're going to talk about a...

Well, no other way to put it. A gangster football team owner. Was it Sasso? Paul Sasso from the 70s. He owned a World Football League team and was just a straight gangster that tried to muscle his way into the league. It's wild stuff, and his story is just tremendous. It's wild. Can't wait. And then for small-town murder, speaking of a wild story. May as well. Let's get it all out in the open here. We're going to talk about Natalia Grace, the Ukrainian...

Disabled Ukrainian girl who was adopted and it's a mess of a thing. And the parents say she was trying to kill them and she says she wasn't. They said she was 23. It's nuts. We'll sort it all out. Who's a liar? How does that father make tears pop from his eyes with that kind of distance? It's amazing. We'll talk all about it. That's patreon.com slash crime and sports. And you'll get a shout out at the end of the show where Jimmy will absolutely mess your name up for you, even though he wants to get it correct.

So quickly, disclaimer, it's a comedy show. We're comedians. This is a comedy show. We're going to make jokes. Also, terrible things are going to happen to people. There's no avoiding it. That's called small town murder. It's going to happen. We didn't do it. That's the thing. What we do is we go out of our way to not make

make fun of the victims or the victim's family. Why, James? Because we're assholes. Yeah, but... But we're not scumbags. That's how that goes there. Yeah, there's plenty of other stuff to make fun of. We get to make fun of a murderer. That's awesome. We have no other recourse.

As people, unless you're on a jury, you can't do anything to anybody who's a murderer, really, except we can make fun of them, and that's what we do here, and all the other stuff that goes around with it. So if that sounds good to you, oh my God, are we going to have a good time. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, maybe you won't like the show. Maybe you will. All I know is, don't be offended because you've been warned.

There you go. No bitching later. That said, I think it's time, Jimmy and everybody else out there, wherever you are, I don't care if you're in traffic, get out of your car, stand on your hood, arms to the sky, take a deep breath, and let's all shout, Shut up and give me.

murder. Let's do this, Jimmy. What do you say? Let's do this, everybody. Let's go on a trip. Let's go. We're heading somewhere very exciting. Yeah. Iowa. That's...

If everybody out there, maybe if you take a family vacation, you go, well, we're going to plan the family vacation this year. And the kids go, Iowa, right? Like they all gather around and it's not Disney World or it's not this or that or Six Flags. It's Iowa. That's where we want to go. I have a beer koozie from when we went to Des Moines.

Yeah, that's exciting. It doesn't matter. They gave me a beer koozie that says, Iowa, let us impress you with our mediocrity. And that's exactly. They own it. And the people there are very nice.

Yeah. They are in competition with Minnesota. Minnesota has Minnesota nice and they call theirs Iowa nice. So they're in straight there. And the biggest rivalry in the whole area is Minnesota and Iowa. These states hate each other for some reason because it's like you think you're nice. Fuck you, buddy.

I'll show you nice. Yeah. See these people stranded on the side of the road? I'm going to fix their tire, and if it doesn't work, give them a ride to a service station. What are you going to do? I'm going to fucking kill you. Literally kill you with this kindness. That's how I'm going to do it. Now, Davenport, people will say, that's too big of a town. It's bigger than our normal town that we do, but it still definitely feels like a small town. The people that live there say that in our reviews. They're like, it's a small town, even though it exceeds our...

population limit. But the case is so crazy that we had to do it. It didn't matter. It was one of the... Yeah, there are rules. We can break them. It's not like these are imposed by anybody. We put stupid rules on ourselves. We made them. Yeah. Dumb rules on ourselves that only hinder us. That's fun. Let's do... What the hell's wrong with us? All they do is...

Handcuff us. Yeah. This is what comedians are. It's self-sabotage over and over again. We don't know what we're doing. This is in eastern Iowa, over in the Quad City area here. The Quad City, which is a real stretch. It's a lot of confidence to say the Quad Cities with those places. It's not Philips.

Philly, New York, Newark, and fucking what else would be right there? I don't know. Boston over there. Hartford, maybe. Throw that in the mix. I don't know. That's cities. How dare you? Was your East Moline and Moline? You're putting one city twice. That's not four cities. You're all Moline, okay?

Pick your corn and deal with it. It's try it best. That is it. And I know people from Iowa, and they are very nice. They are. It's about two hours and 35 minutes to Des Moines, which is where we were there. Right. About an hour 20 to Cedar Rapids and about an hour and a half to Earlville, which was our last Iowa episode, episode 420, Cheating Lies and Corn Rakes, which was an express episode. We talked about a town called Earlville? Earlville. Everyone there was named Earl.

Wow. This is in Scott County. Everyone here is named Scott, obviously. Area code 563. Mono of this town. The first one is Iowa's Front Porch.

Is that right? Which is, yeah. That's very welcoming. People sitting out there whittling. That's all it is. Come on over and talk about HOA issues. That's it. Or working together to serve you is the other one. I don't like that. That sounds like a motto for a government agency. That doesn't sound like a town. A little dirty. We will all suck it. The motto of the best strip club in town. That's what that is. Working together to serve you. Yeah.

Two for one price. Her tits, my ass. Come on in. So a little bit of history of this town here. In 1803 was the Louisiana Purchase, which Iowa is part of. Is that right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it went up everything west of the river at that point. Fuck shit, that's way up, huh? Yeah, it was everything west of the Mississippi they got at that point. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike was the first U.S. representative to officially visit Iowa.

This upper Mississippi area. That's a name. With a Z? Oh, yeah. Zebulon. That's a fucking alien name. Are we sure he had an asshole and a belly button? Did we check him? Zebulon Pike. Sounds like a made up. I don't know if they checked him for an asshole, but possibly. I'm Zebulon Pike. Show me your gills, motherfucker. I don't think so. Let's strip him down and find his asshole, everybody.

Make sure he's got a belly button. I don't believe it. So in 1832, groups of native people here was the Sauk, the Meskwaki, and the Kickapoo people were defeated by the U.S. in the Black Hawk War. Kickapoo. Yes, that's real. I'm sure it was a fair fight.

Well, yeah, I'm sure the weaponry was totally even. So the United States government then concluded the Black Hawk purchase, which is they beat them and then purchased the land. They beat the Black Hawks? Yeah, it's kind of like Mexico, kind of how that worked. The purchase was made for $640,000 in September of 1832. So imagine what that's now for inflation. I don't even know.

This is for $7 in comparison. For six million acres of land you got for that back then. Smoking deal. The biggest fire sale on the planet. Yep. 11 cents an acre is what that was. Yeah. Ridiculous. Man. It was named after Chief Blackhawk, and he was being held prisoner.

at that point by the U.S. South Chief Keokuk who had not been involved in this battle and he's the guy who Blackhawk said fine you can do it and that is the present day Davenport area

Wow. That's how that works. That is like the best land as a native to have. I mean, granted, the winters are pretty harsh, I imagine, but you've got water flowing all the time and fertile land. It floods like a bitch, but yeah, fertile land is the thing there. They've completed a bridge across the river in 1856.

All the steamboat companies were pissed because they were like, well, it's going to cut into our business here. We're you know, we were the only way to get across. So on May 6th, 1856, a couple of weeks after it was finished, a steamboat captain deliberately crashed his boat into the bridge to try to fuck it up. Which is hilarious. He filed suit against the Rock Island Railroad Company for building the bridge. Abraham Lincoln was the lead defense lawyer for the railroad company.

Wow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it was a hung jury, meaning nobody was awarded damages. So Abe came out on top because he was the defendant there. Sure. Famous people here. Laura Flynn Boyle or Laura Flynn Boyle is from here. Also Otto Frederick Rowetter. He's the inventor of sliced bread.

Is that right? Best thing since sliced bread. Otto made it. He made the machine that sliced bread. You are telling me that the first sliced bread was from America? Fuck yeah. Wow. It's a machine. They figured out how to slice the bread. Yeah. Otherwise, it would be by hand. Yeah, that's interesting.

Figured it was French. Yeah, yeah. They'd be more Italian. They'd be more interested in bread. Yeah. They didn't even figure it out until fucking 1800s. But we like sandwiches a lot here, I think, maybe. Great point. You know what? How can I make a sandwich easier to make? I need a machine that'll cut my hamburger bun. I need that. That's important to me. Reviews of this town. Okay. Here we go. Five stars.

Because we've never been there. What the hell do we know? So let's see. I was at first worried about buying a house in Davenport, but my experience has been great so far. I was worried about it.

You know what? That's so funny. It ain't bad. We have great neighbors as well, which helps. So, yeah. Here's another one. Five stars. I like how natural disasters usually miss Davenport. Usually. I like how they just know better than to come around here. It's a tough town. They say, no tornadoes here, buddy. Pretty nice over there. We'll go over this way. And it's a pretty safe place to live. We'll be the judge of that. We have statistics. I've lived here since birth, and I don't plan on moving away.

Is that right? Oh, man. Here we go. I guess so. Four stars. Davenport is a perfect place to start a family. Iowa nice. Truly is a real thing. However, Davenport is a small town in Iowa, so expect the smell of fresh farm every once in a while. Ugh.

You know what that is. A.K.A. shit. Expect to smell shit here and there. So then they talk about how... Expect to smell livestock. You're definitely going to do it. Davenport has recently built several new fast food chains, which is nice if you're not trying to be healthy. There you go. Okay. Two stars. I can never find jobs that fit me or that are legally okay to work for. Okay.

What? All it is is either a collection for the gambling racket or, you know, I'm just not good at it. I don't know what it is. Prostitution.

Or accounting, which I have no training in. Those are the only two jobs there are. You rethinking those face tattoos you got in 1996? Is that what it is? Legally okay to work for. I don't know what that means. Or I'm a good fit. That is hilarious. And finally, one star. This person really hates this place. This sounds like it's like a teenager who can't wait to leave.

Wow. This is hands down one of the trashiest and depressing places I've ever lived in, and I've been all over the country. Honestly, worse than living in a third world country. Calm down now. Stop it. You can still get Froot Loops, so relax. You flush a toilet and it goes bye-bye. Stop it. Poop goes away. That's a big deal. You kick that poo. You're a kickapoo now. Genuine certified poop.

Yeah. Your baseline is flush it away? Come on, man. I'll take it. I'm in. You have air conditioning. Extremely poor, illiterate, and depressed people trying to get out of there and don't have the money for it. Junkies, alcoholics, and aggressive drivers.

Oh, like a city? Everything from junkies to bad drivers they were covering there. It's a big range. Young kids leave right after high school and never look back. And then to top it off, everything's more expensive than major cities in the U.S. No, it's not. Probably not. What a jungle! Keep driving. Not sure why you need all those huge gas stations far on every corner.

Because truckers go through there. Right. Because you're in the center of the fucking country. Crossroads of the country. People going in all directions. Is the 40 through there? Is that what it is? 80. No, yeah. The 40 is down south through Arkansas. Yeah. Arkansas, Oklahoma. People in this town, 101,725. Now, in our story, takes place a while back. So the population is a little bit different. But that's what there is now. So a lot of people, but it's spread out. Yeah.

an urban environment at all. And does Davenport encompass all four of those little cities? I don't think so. I think it's, I don't know. Each one's different. I think they're all different. It might be all the same. Who knows? That's the thing. It's Iowa. We don't know how they're counting it. We don't know if they're counting corn husks as people. I don't know.

Or the cattle. 50.4% female, so about the national average. A few more females than males. Median age is like exactly the national average, 37 and change. Family here, 44.8% married, which is beneath the national average. Almost twice as many people that are single with children here as well. So, you know, people are moving around. It's not too staid, we'll say. You know what I mean? People seem to be in mobilization.

motion. Race of this town, 74.7% white, 11.6% black. You got 2.5% Asian, 8.5% Hispanic. So you would think of Iowa, but there's a mixture. You know what I mean? Religion in this town, 49% are religious, which is just about the national average. And they're spread around pretty good. Oddly, the highest

of anybody is Catholic here. Is that right? I wouldn't have known. There's a lot of also a lot of Lutherans and Methodists and things like that. But Catholic, 18.8 percent, 0.3 percent Jewish. So no singing today, but almost in Scott County last election politically here, 50.7 percent of the people voted Democratic, 47.2 percent voted Republican, 2.1 percent independent.

And the unemployment rate here is about the national average. Not bad. The median household income here is slightly lower, though. Median national in the country, $69,000. Here it's about $56,000. So a little less, but cost of living is a little bit lower as well. They're saying it's as expensive as a city. Yeah, it's fucking not. The median home cost here is $165,200. So...

Get fucked. Are you kidding me? You haven't been to a major city is what that says to me because... Say that number one more time. $165,200, which literally... Wow. I saw an article about a year ago in Phoenix and it was the cheapest house in Phoenix that was inhabitable and it was...

A terrible house in a terrible neighborhood. And it was $215,000. Unbelievable. That's what that tells you right there. The average in Phoenix is $450,000 right now. Yeah, it's ridiculous out there now. So if you are planning to move here, we've convinced you, then damn it, we're going to help you out with the Davenport, Iowa Real Estate Report. ♪ music playing ♪

Your average two-bedroom rental here goes for $900 a month, which is much lower than the national average. Your first home here, three-bedroom, one bath, 1,042 square feet. And it's pretty goddamn interesting because it's sitting, there's a hill and it sits atop a hill like a little house in a horror movie. Looks like a little miniature horror movie house. Allison referred to it as the dump on a lump. Yeah.

Because our research person, Allison, because her high school, she said, was located on a hill and that's what they used to call it. So this is appropriate for that. The dump on the lump. It has chunks falling off the hill. It doesn't look great. Oh, boy. $39,900, though. So...

What? Yeah. The inside needs work and shit like that. But I mean, come on. What's a little black mold going to do? Yeah, that's $30 a square foot, right? That's not bad. That's not bad at all. I can't do the math on the fly. But yeah, I think it is about that. Yeah. So four bedroom, two bath, next house, 2,821 square feet. It's a nice little house. It's old. It's 100 years old. You know, they redid it in a...

more updated fashion probably got rid of some of the charm of the house which is kind of shitty but it's a bland decent house to live in uh 2821 square feet if you got a bunch of kids 205 000 dollars

Holy shit. That's cheap as shit. For a whole 3,000 square feet. Man. Then there's a four-bedroom, five-bath T-Ball for each and every B-Hall. 6,080 square feet. It's a big goddamn house. And it's fancy stonework above the doorway. Very nice. It's a beautiful-looking house. It looks old, and it looks like an old Tudor house. It's really, really cool. $610,000 for that, though. How...

It's beautiful. That's what it should be, right? Anywhere else, that house would be $2 million if you were in it. It's a beautiful home. I mean, honestly, it looks gorgeous. So things to do here. Number one, Ice Travaganza. Okay. The Ice Travaganza, which, by the way, was canceled this year due to extreme icy weather.

Which is one of the funniest fucking things I've ever heard in my life. Doesn't that make it better? I mean, it would give you the mood of it and the whole thing. That's like canceling the Christmas parade due to snow. It's like, no, that's going to only help.

A little snow on top of Santa's red hat. Motherfucker, I'm in the mood for Christmas. Makes the best pictures you've ever seen. I'll punch somebody for cookies, man. Hand them over. I'm in the spirit. I'll punch the old man's wife. Let's go. Yep. So they said when the weather clears, a few sculptures were already completed. So they, quote, encourage folks to come downtown and support the small businesses, even though they're not going to have a festival.

Unbelievable. And also there's the German Fest, which is in partnership with the German American Heritage Center. And they team up to put on the German Fest. It's a free event to celebrate the rich German culture in the area. And the Die Musikmeisters Band will be playing there.

Die Musikmeisters. Die Musikmeisters for four hours from 12 to 4. Holy. A German polka band. Four hours of German polka.

Wow. Imagine beer and the sun and four hours of German Polka. You'd be like, oh, Christ, I'm going to stab myself. There's never been a culture that's good at torturing people. That's the one, man. Holy shit. In every way possible. They have 4 to 8 p.m. Then the Dern dolls come on, and they're an Alpine folk band. Oh. You're going to pick up the pace a little bit with some Alpine folk. Yeah.

I don't know what the difference between Alpine and normal ass poke is. Seems like it's all there, right? The same. The games they have. Amazing. The one game is the Stein Holding Contest. Stein, like a big beer mug. A game in which participants try to hold up a full mug of beer for as long as they can. Two contestants will award each champion two contests. Each champion gets a $25 gift certificate to a bar.

That's what you win. The winner gets to drink it. The winner gets to drink it. Yeah, they both do. Also, the Hammerschlagen, which is a game in which participants compete against each other to drive nails into a wooden stump one hit at a time.

What is this? Then there's the inflatable axe throwing, which seems like it defeats the whole purpose because it's not. Those don't go very far. Nope. And food and drink, I just saw Rob Smokin' Jays is up here. That's a food place serving brats and burgers and sauerkraut with a, you know, a winky fucking weed smoking name. Yeah.

So beer, beer, beer, beer, definitely. You're going to have a lot of beer farts after this. The Hammerschlag in itself. That's what they call it. The Hammerschlag and your post festival post festival beer farts. I am a Hammerschlag. Honey, that was a Hammerschlag of a fart. Jesus, I got to leave the room. People are. Oh, my God.

Crime rate in this town, this little safe town, everybody said. Property crime almost double the national average here. Jesus Christ. They will steal your corn, my friend.

And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault the Mount Rushmore of crime about 50% above the national average. Is there a fucking college here? What is going on happening in this place? What is happening? So that sounds terrifying for a small town in Iowa. Not anything you would have thought it was that.

That said, let's talk about some murder here. And this is, wow. Like I said, we have a new murder weapon this week. Never happened before. Is this a mortgage paperwork because everybody can afford one? No, no, they're doing fine there.

They have a house they call the Castle House that people are going to talk about, which sounds really impressive, but it's not that impressive. But for the area at the time, I guess it was really, really nice. So let's talk about this. First of all, let's talk about a woman named Joyce. Her name is Joyce Amelia Monaghan.

She's born in 1949, and she is the only daughter of Virginia and Eugene Monaghan, which sounds like your parents. That sounds like parents right there. Ginny and Gene. Ginny and Gene. They're from Granite City, Illinois. Mm-hmm.

That's how they're salt of the earth from Granite City. You know what I mean? Her father is a teacher and her mother's a homemaker. I mean, this is like middle America, mid 20th century sitcom shit. Yeah, when that shit was possible. It's impossible today. Oh yeah, teacher. And they had two other kids too. So three kids...

Five mouths to feed. One teacher. A family of five owning their own home. And yeah, that's not going to happen. Hilarious. So her mother's a homemaker. Father's a teacher. She has two younger brothers. So she's the oldest of the group here. She graduates from Granite City High School and becomes a secretary with the Mississippi Glass Company in St. Louis.

Okay. Very exciting going off and doing that. So that's what she does. She is very conscious of her looks, everybody says. Her mother especially says this. Said she was never the type to go out to the store without makeup on and that kind of shit. If she's leaving the house, it's an appearance she's making. Really? So she's going to make her appearance correct. Yeah. That's how she is. She meets a young man in 1968. Okay.

Young man who had graduated from college and was currently at the time in chiropractic school in St. Louis. So that's why he was in St. Louis, was going to school to be a chiropractor just like his dad. So his name is James Clint, I guess. K-L-I-N-D-T. Clint. Yeah. So Clint with a D. So his parents are Dr. and Mrs. Clendon.

D.A. Clint, which sounds very fancy. Her dad, his dad's a chiropractor, has his own practice and his own building and all that kind of thing. So he attended Iowa State University and then went to the Logan College of Chiropractic in St. Louis. So that's how it's how she gets there. Now, they don't realize they're the type of family that.

has money and they remind me of the sopranos in a way that they remember how in the sopranos if you watched it they constantly would say did we give aj too much growing up maybe that's it and they go no we didn't give him too much meanwhile obviously he had too much like everything fucking drum sets and they're like here's a brand new car when you're it's crazy so they gave a freshman in high school a drum kit and let him play it while they were home while they while dinner was going on

Yeah, that's the thing. If I could have saved up my money and bought a drum set, my father would have been like, very nice. Now you're never allowed to play that. Thank you. If I hear a fucking beat. You can play that when no one's home. We're always here? Well, tough shit then, I guess. Best of luck learning anything on that, because no. Nope, not happening. Yeah, they were like, they gave him everything. Well...

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Geraldine, his mom, said she believes that her son received no more material things during his upbringing than any other kid in the neighborhood. She said it wasn't any better than anybody else, which is hilarious because he's an only child of a doctor, a chiropractor. But, you know, he makes good money. He's got his own practice. So he said they're from a working class area in West Davenport.

That's where the chiropractic office is and where they live. So she said that, you know, same things everybody else had. Like in 1966, his graduation present from high school, every parent gives their kid a graduation present from high school. We got him a brand new Corvette, you know, like every kid gets.

He got a car. Not a car. Not a car. He got a 66 Corvette. He got a fucking awesome, sweet vet. That's what he like. Oh, my God. Here you go, son. Right off into the sunset with fucking women hanging off of you like.

The 18-year-old girl's fucking just, you know it was a convertible. In a car that in 40 years will be fucking iconic. Yeah. You know that it was a convertible and it was red. Yeah. You know what I mean? It was a fucking white leather interior. White interior or white with red. But one way or another, it was red and white. Hot shit. That's a badass car. That's a bad, that's, she said, you didn't get anything more than any of the other kids. What'd you get for high school graduation, Jimmy? I don't know.

Newspaper clippings from the Denver Chronicle of the Broncos' victory in the Super Bowl four months earlier. My parents dodged that bullet when I didn't graduate high school. Ha ha ha!

Unfortunately, I didn't get a new Corvette for my GED certificate. That came in the mail. Nobody else. We didn't all gather around for that one. I got newspaper clippings of an event from four months ago. Awesome. There you go. Take that, kid. Enjoy the rest of your life. Jesus Christ.

Maybe this will help you go to college. Maybe. There you go. Sure, yeah. Perfect. College application. I know that John Elway has back-to-back Super Bowls. Let me quote you an article. You have them memorized by then? Ridiculous. Oh, man. So they end up dating for about a year, and then in 1969, Jim and Joyce get married.

So they're going to get married. Isn't that nice? They fell in love and got married. And in 1969, the summer after she graduated from high school, it's a very, you know, mid-century middle American story. Beautiful 60s life. Yep. She loved him. She said he was unlike any other guys that she met. He was like,

had ambition, and he wanted to be successful. He was just going to be, he wants to follow in his dad's footsteps. His dad did, yeah. We seem to be doing well, so why not? So that's what he was. But even her mother said that wasn't the only reason she married him, but that played a part in it. Sure. She was more ambitious than some of the other boys in the area, and they liked that. So in 1971, they have a son. This will be their only child. His name is Bartley Bartley.

Really? I did not know Bart had a fucking longer version, by the way. I didn't know Bart was short for anything. Bartholomew, yeah, but Bartley? B-A-R-T-L-E-Y. Bartley. I mean, that's just an ingredient for beer plus another letter. That's all that is. Yeah. Well, that's something you call your friend whose name is Bart when he comes up. Bartley, my friend. What's happening today? You know what I mean? If you're fucking around with nicknames. Bartley. What's up? Bartley.

Sounds like what you call a golden retriever. Yeah, Bartley's a great name for a dog. Everybody out there, next dog you get, first person we get who shows us a puppy named Bartley, we'll do something for you. I'm not sure, but it's- We'll send you something for sure. That's Small Town Murder on Instagram. Send your picture of your new puppy, Bartley, and we will send you something. I don't know what yet, but-

Bartley, that's not a half bad name at all. That's great. It's a great dog name. It's perfect for a dog. It's a real person. That's fucking. Yeah, we should have named Oscar Bartley. He seems like a Bartley. That's a yes.

That's a cowboy name. That's a cowboy dog. You bet. So they end up moving to Davenport once he graduates from chiropractic school and everything where he works as a chiropractor. So they're going to start their life there. Indiana, right? That's Davenport, Iowa. No, but they were from Rock Ridge. Where were they from? Granite City. Granite.

She's from Granite City, Illinois, but was living in St. Louis working for a glass company. And he was going to school in St. Louis. St. Louis, right. But he's from Davenport. So they go back to Davenport because his family name is good for chiropractic. Hell yeah. So that's where they're going to go. All of her friends said that she, meaning Joyce, quote, built her life around Bart, around the kid.

She was really into raising this kid and really all into that. They said that Joyce would play basketball with her son because he would work long hours at the office doing the chiropractic shit because they're open into the evening. They don't close at 4. So she would drive Bart to and from school, take him to swimming lessons. She would show up at school and

and do the PTA meetings and stuff. Whole mom thing. Whole mom thing. This is very middle America... Awesome. ...of the time. She... Like I said, they moved to Davenport, and she originally... Her ambition while she worked at the glass company was she wanted to be an airline stewardess at the time was the job, which back then...

Women strived for that job because – and the funny thing is I actually was – I read a book. There's a book called Fly Girl by this old flight attendant. That's a nice way to put it. Hey, this old broad who's fucking flying around –

But she did – she was a flight attendant in the 70s. So she was talking all about stories about that. I found that shit interesting as hell because it's a different time. And she said a lot of the girls got the job because back then they had like you couldn't weigh more than this. You couldn't be this – Really? More than this tall or less than this tall. You had to be attractive. Wow.

Yeah, they were trying to draw first-class customers in with, you know, good... Yeah, and a flight was an event back then, too, whereas now it's like you go to the airport and it's just every dickhead hates being there because this is like a taxi to them. Yeah, fuck, I got to do this again. Oh, I'm doing this again. And back then it was exciting. And they were looking for like... But anyway, in the book she said that a lot of the airline, the girls who got into this, got into it...

to find husbands and a good place to find husbands is in the people is in the first class cabin where hell yeah guys can afford to be in the first class cabin they said something like it was like 83 percent of the stewardesses uh were married and retired from stewardessing by the time they were 27 because they would fucking i can't remember the exact staff it was something like that like it was a ridiculous amount would marry most of the time it was guys on planes

Now they just go to the Phoenix Open. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, they're not going to fucking talk to you on a plane now. No. I'm going to blame them. Go to a golf outing and meet a man that has a shitload of money there. Imagine being hit on by some fucking fat dipshit with bad cologne and then having to sit in a tube with him for four hours after you don't want to go out with him.

That's terrible. So that sounds like a bad job. So in the 70s, though, she kind of gave up on that because she was comfortable and she was happy to raise her son. And if you're an airline stewardess, it's kind of...

It's a difficult job with a child, I would think, a young child that you like doing all the school stuff with because you're out of town a lot. Well, there's that. And then at that age, they're like they're not – sure, they're resilient, but they get hurt a lot and get hurt easy or they get sick. And you can't be in fucking Pittsburgh waiting on a layover and this kid's throwing up. You can't just hurry home. That's tough. Yeah, especially if he's got the –

a chiropractic practice and all that kind of thing. And he's got a nasty storm in Pittsburgh and she can't get off the ground. She's stuck there. Yeah. I don't know, kid. So they, they, they meet a couple near them and become best friends with them. So they have a couple that's best friends. Marianne and Donald Roth are their neighbors. Um, they, before they move into this house that everybody calls the castle house, um, the, uh, the, uh, Joyce and Jim live two doors down from Marianne and Don, uh,

Donald Roth and the Roths were having a garage sale one day when Joyce walked up and started talking, just introduced herself. And, uh, they became all four became instant friends, a cup, you know, couples, friends, uh, Jim and Don would make booze in the basement, uh,

Really? Yeah, they were making like they made beer and they made other shit too they were making. They were like doing that. And Joyce and Marianne would go out shopping and making cookies and taking the kids for walks and all that kind of shit. So everything was, you know, every couple has couple friends they hang out with and that was theirs.

So this continued after they moved into the castle house. They still would, even though they weren't two doors down anymore, they still hung out just as much. They'd come over and do everything together. Joyce, Marianne describes Joyce as a kind person who's very humble, very understanding, a very loving mother, very loving daughter. She liked to work out back in the day, and she said this was before like a

that was really a thing. Yeah. In the seventies, people didn't really work out as much as they did. It was a kind of a really on the cutting edge at that point. Yeah. The early eighties, like gyms and exercise and aerobics and jazz or something became huge. Yeah. Big industry. But she was still doing that before that became like a thing that everybody did. Suzanne Somers.

Yeah, so they lived in 1980-ish by that time. They're living in this castle house, which at the time was a $100,000 house. That's a monster. We're talking in 1980, it's $100,000. 1980 Davenport. Davenport, $100,000. Right now, the median home cost there is $150,000. And that was 40 fucking five years ago. So think about that. Holy fuck. And I have a picture of the house, Jimmy. Check it out.

Here it is. That is a two-story living room right there. Really? The brick, it's like a regular house with a brick circle on it there. Like a turret. Yeah.

It's a turret. It's a two-story living room that looks like a castle turret. I don't know if you can see the castle things on top there. And so on the other side of the house, is it the same as that side? So it has like two of those and the turret in the middle? No, it's just the turret on one side, the big turret on one side, and then a house next to it. It's a very unique looking house. It's a weird looking house. It's bizarre. It's a three-bedroom, three-bath, 1,989-square-foot house. So not necessarily a castle size, just a castle piece. No.

Attached to it. Through this whole story, it is described as lavish and like...

It's a normal ass two story house with a rook welded to the side of it. Under 2000 square feet. You know what I mean? Wow. But I mean, they describe, I guess it's very nice and they have nice things maybe is why they describe it that way. But it's, it's, everyone describes it as just, oh, this lavish thing in this. Oh my goodness. This amazing house they have. It's 1220 Royal Oaks Drive and it recently sold. Actually it sold. It's still there. Oh yeah. 2023 it sold for $345,000. Wow.

Wow. So still fucking exciting to people. Yeah. It's a it's different, I guess. So at that time, they're living in that house. They have two cars. They have a 1978 Cadillac Seville that they bought new and they still have. And then a 1981 Volkswagen Jetta as well.

So this is right when that's pretty new. We're talking like I didn't hear a fucking word about a 66 Corvette. Nope. He doesn't have that anymore. I'm sure he got rid of that. He's got a Jetta instead. Yep. Yep. Probably family thing. You know, once you heartbreaking probably sold the vet when the kid was born, I bet that shit doesn't even have a trunk. There's not even room for fucking groceries in that car. Never mind a child.

And they also have a 28-foot cabin cruiser that can accommodate 17 passengers. Fuck yes. If you don't know, that's a big-ass boat. That's a badass boat. He's got a big old, that's like the Stugatz, basically, right? Well, it's a 34, the Stugatz is probably 50 feet, but this is lake-going. It's a lake-going Stugatz. Yeah, it's a lake Stugatz. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

A lake dick. Perfect. So now she's described, too, as stylish and beautiful, Joyce, at this point, by her friends. A good friend who's devoted to her family and devoted to her husband and her son and her parents and everything like that. A close friend of Joyce's named Dixie Simmons, or Dixie Simons, I believe. She described Joyce as, quote, unquote, ultra femme.

Very girly. Yeah. She liked skirts. She didn't like pants. Lipstick is her favorite. She knows all the shades. She liked ruffles and bows and girly, you know, middle America girly shit. Looking like she's in a pageant type of shit. Pink gal. Sure. She usually wore heels all the time. Oh. Even like to the grocery store, she'd have heels and a skirt on and she loved to have, she'd have all her jewelry on and all that kind of shit. She was fancy. She was fancy.

How are you going to go to the lake like that? Go on. I don't know. I mean, you could pop yourself on a boat like that, I suppose. I've seen women on boats, and I'm just like, why are you dressed like that here? What are you doing? You're going to get the spray on you. Yeah, you're going to fuck those shoes up in this water. And that makeup, too, on top of that.

I got Louboutins at the lake. At the lake. So she was, especially a lake, that makes it worse. The ocean's nothing. Yeah, gross. It's a lake. There's water on that. It's not going anywhere. It's just a big non-moving tub of water. That's a catfish down there. You don't want your shoes near catfish. You got carp shoes now. That's not good.

She's described also as talkative and active, but sometimes has trouble with asthma. She's got some asthma problems. She might have allergies out there in the field. Yeah, probably. So James is described here, her husband Jim, is described as a, quote, man's man. Dixie's husband is a man's man. No, no, no. Joyce's husband. Dixie's Joyce's friend. Oh, got it. So Joyce and Jim are a man's man and an ultra femme, as described by their friends. Okay.

Seems like a good couple. He loves to hunt and fish and crack people's necks and shit, obviously. He loves the smell of fish guts. He's a gun enthusiast, too, with all of his hunting. And he owns two boats, the 28-foot cabin cruiser and an airboat as well.

Really? A fan boat? I guess so, yeah. One of those airboats. That's awesome. This guy... Fuck yes! Man, they're living some Iowa life here. This is some shit. Shallow water boat? That's awesome. Shit, yeah. Lake boat. So 1983 comes around and they're starting to talk about getting a divorce, these two. Really? And it's not one person saying, I'm going to leave you or the other person saying, I'm going to leave you. It's they're talking to each other and seem to be...

Over the course of about a year, working out kind of trying to work out an amicable type of divorce while they're living their lives. Isn't there anything more beautiful?

It's nice, I suppose. Yeah, it's good for the kids and everything, but it didn't quite work out in the way. That might be more beautiful than falling in love and living until you die together. Oh, yeah, because death is inevitable, and for the most part, I mean, honestly, how many relationships that start end? Most of them. Most, yeah. Because you figure half the marriages end, and that's marriage. How many...

relationships end before marriage right 95 percent of them so i mean i mean it's like a 90 it's like a 98 failure rate right so crazy it's much i would it's i think it's a seinfeld thing too george costanza was saying how it's a you know you don't judge people by how they are in a relationship you judge them by the breakup because that's always going to happen

Absolutely. How would I break up with this person? Because that's, yeah. So anything where it's an amicable, we discuss it over time. It's very mature. Right. We, we take as much preparation to end this as we did to build this. That's beautiful. I fucking love that. Yeah. She also, Joyce, uh,

It was kind of uneasy about it. She didn't really want to do it that much, but then she did at certain times. She was willing to deal with the problems and work shit out because they have, you know, like a 12-year-old son at this point in 1983. Young Bartley has to be considered here. So March 13th, 1983, Joyce is not aware that her husband has decided to proceed with the divorce.

Because they talked about it all, but he's actually got paperwork that he's filed and everything now. She finds out about it.

So she's like, oh, just you can't get it. No. And then talk about it. Then talk about it. No. And they had like gone and seen a lawyer together as well. Like the year before to talk about how to, you know, that they can distribute their property amicably and all that kind of shit. But she ends up finding papers in his office. So she decides to go get her own attorney because she's like, oh, my God, this guy is going to fucking leave me with nothing here. I didn't realize he was doing this. I thought we were doing this nice.

So she borrows money from Don and Marianne, the friends. Right. And hires a lawyer. The Roths. The Roths, yes. So they are – this was, by the way, they had been talking about the divorce and they were going to have an uncontested divorce. That's how it was working. And then all of a sudden this guy has papers and it's a totally different thing than they discussed. Right.

So her getting her own lawyer now delays the action of the divorce and cancels the proposed agreement as well that they had. They had like they had shit. They had like numbers worked out and everything drafted and drawn up and ready to sign. And then he changed the you can't do that. No, I'm goalpost. Joyce was going to get four thousand dollars of the couple's holdings.

I guess. I don't know if they had stocks or whatever. They also had five cars, apparently. So maybe he did have the Vette. Those are the cars they were driving. It's got to be. They have the boat and they have at that time about a 90 to 100 thousand dollar home.

So, but she's only going to get $4,000 out of the entire deal, which doesn't seem fair. I would say that's not very equitable. So I get five cars, two boats and a castle house and you get here's four grand. Enjoy. That doesn't seem right. Right. How long we've been married? Fucking 13, 14 years, 14 years. They have a kid.

She didn't like she wasn't like banging half the town or anything like that. This is you can't do that, man. No. So Jim tells his partner, Dennis, in the in their chiropractic business that he feared his wife would, quote, get everything if she contested the divorce. So he didn't want her to do that. So anyway, they were trying. Well, she's trying to get leverage now because she knows he's trying to fuck her. So now she's like, all right, I'll fuck him right back. So her and a friend.

go to a Davenport, Iowa parking lot. Okay. On the night of March 16th, 1983 here. And they, they stake out the parking lot and they're, they suspect that Jim is, he's got a van and he's, the van is there. And she says that she thinks this is her husband. She's, he's there using this van to buy drugs. So she's trying to stake this out.

So then she could say in the divorce proceedings, like, if you don't give me shit, I'll tell everybody about the drugs. Okay. For a doctor, that doesn't look great. No, it doesn't. So the friend of hers, Dixie Simmons, again, she's back in the mix. She said that she and her husband are...

had once smoked weed with them with the four of them had smoked weed together at Jim's suggestion Jim said you guys want to smoke a joint and they were all like yeah sure and now she's trying to talk like oh you know he was bringing it out if you say you want to smoke a joint everybody smokes a joint I don't want anybody talking any shit about it later on because you all are involved in this we all did it

It's just he had it at the ready, so he's a terrible pothead, a problem. Yeah, and I don't care. You could probably chiropract. Is that the verb of that? I don't know. You could probably crack bones better, Stone. You could feel and be like, yeah, right there. That's better. I don't want to besmirch the good name of chiropracticy. Oh, I will absolutely besmirch it. Don't touch me with that crazy shit.

Fuck out of here with that. And some people it works wonders for. Yeah, I had it done and I left worse off and I fucking hate it now.

I have a cousin and my father that did it on and off for years, and they always, it's a relief. It's great. They love it. They swear by it. My mother one time did it, and the guy totally fucked her neck up. She had to have surgery and all this type of shit. So it depends a lot on who you're going to probably. So it's not really. I went because I had a pinched nerve, and he'd pinched it worse, and I was fucked up. Yeah.

All I know about chiropractic-ness is this. Remember the Ultimate Warrior, the wrestler? Yeah, yeah. Who they'd come out and he'd be like... He'd be shaking the ropes when he talked. Before he was a wrestler, that guy was a chiropractor. So...

Imagine that guy coming in, grabbing your fucking neck and twisting it. You'd be like, oh my God, Jesus, help me. Veins popping out of everywhere. If you're young and don't know who that is, look up The Ultimate Warrior and you'll go, oh my God, that guy who's cracking necks. Are you kidding me? That guy used to give people traction. Holy shit, yeah, there's so many people. They come in and their heads backwards and shit when they leave. You just...

They're still in one of those foam collars today. Still, still. So, yeah. So Joyce goes to her friends, like we said. She also, the Roths, in addition to giving her money, also helped her stash some of her stuff there as well at their house. Okay. She hid her car in their garage. Oh, okay.

And she also the Roths gave her money to hire an attorney and all that kind of thing. And then she'll she'll also hide some like jewelry and credit cards and shit she has over there as well. I mean, she's hiding things that are very easily repoed or canceled. You know, like, yeah, you get it if you want. But like Oliver, I don't think it's I think they probably own it, though, I think. Right. I don't think he's going to take it back.

You know what I mean? And also like her jewelry because that's expensive. So all of the high value stuff that she owns, that belongs to her, is she's getting out of the house, which is an interesting thing. So on March 17th, 1983, Joyce secretly records a 45-minute conversation with Jim, with her husband. Yeah.

in which she'll end up giving this tape to Don and Marianne, the Roths, for safekeeping, along with a few other items, like we said, jewels and documents and things like that. So this tape is a wild fucking ride, and it's a lot of fighting. 45 minutes of contention? Of contention with people who are in the middle of a divorce. So that's fun. Wow.

I don't want anybody having those tapes. Yup. They, they, the, the Tate mentions drug dealing and she brings up his drug buying and dealing, uh, accusations of income skimming and income tax evasion type shit. She's saying, you're not claiming this talk of a girlfriend of his as well. And the, how the property and custody would be divided. She's trying to get everything on tape is what it is. Yeah. And,

And toward the end of the conversation, this exchange takes place here. Okay. Jim says, quote, why was I lying to you? Joyce says, and trying to kill me, stuffing my head down the bed. And Jim says, I was trying to kill you. Yeah. Joyce responds, pulled my head down. And Jim said, this is amazing.

This is like, it's so funny when people kill people, you go, what reason would you have? Well, Jim just sets it out really easily here on a plate for you, why you would attempt to murder someone. I was trying to show you how much I didn't want you to get a lawyer.

By suffocating you. I thought that would be the trick. Yeah. I thought you'd understand at that point that I really don't want you to. Yeah, that is. Wow. So Joyce says, oh, you hurt me. You had my head down in the covers and told me you were going to cut me up in little pieces and I was going to die.

I thought she was going to say he was farting like a bat. He went to German Fest earlier. You had so much crowd Dutch ovening the fuck out of me. So she said that, yeah, you said you were going to cut me up in little pieces and I was going to die while you held my head under the covers, which sounds terrifying and not great. Why would you say such a thing? Well, Jim has an answer. Okay. Because she said, that Jim says, yeah, that's dramatics.

He was just being dramatic is what he said. He said that in the heat of the moment or she's being dramatic that he didn't say that. Him. He's saying like, I run off at the mouth. You know how that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote, cut you into little pieces. Doesn't mean it's like you see, I could kill that guy. You don't actually want to kill him. You know what I mean? You don't actually want to take him, suffocate him, you know, drain his body of blood and cut it into little tiny pieces and hide it all over the county. You don't actually want to do that, you know?

Yeah, but I said that my high school girlfriend's pussy was the size of the Grand Canyon. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. You can't actually throw a hot dog down a hallway, you know what I mean, in her pants. Like, that's not actually possible. If I threw that, you'd get stuck. I was just hurt that she had sex with my friend and didn't like me anymore because I didn't know what I was doing in any capacity of life because I was 17. But you know how that goes. I also didn't understand vaginas, nor that they don't stretch like

Yeah, I didn't get it. I didn't get that she didn't have 14 children already, and maybe that's impossible. So you know how it goes. So that's dramatics. Then he goes, yeah, that's dramatics. Anyway, he anywayed that conversation. He anywayed a very specific threat. She said, you held my head down on the covers, told me you were going to cut me up in little pieces and I was going to die. He gave a three-word answer, which was, yeah, that's dramatics. And then, anyway...

I don't think the jury is going to. Wow. That is some balls right there. She said, anyway, I can hardly wait to see just to see the file for you what you get. You're going to get less than this. You're going to get less than what I give you. So he's saying that the 4000 I was you were going to get was a lot compared to what you're going to get now. Be thankful. Yeah. Be thankful. And at one point in the 45 minute conversation, he said, quote, I hate you. I have to get rid of you.

But that could mean from the house, from his life. I mean, that's what I mean. That could be out of context. That sounds terrible, obviously, but it's a bad read.

We don't really know what the context is. So she has this tape, which seems like a, you know, she says she gives this to her friends for safekeeping because she doesn't want him to find it and destroy it. And she thinks this will come in handy in the divorce proceedings, obviously. Yeah, clearly. Obviously. So they did. They, you know, Marianne says that her husband Donald suggested that Joyce leave the tape with them because, quote, if Jim gets that tape, he's going to be very angry that you recorded him. He didn't know he was being recorded. Yeah.

So that's March 17th. She gives them the tape and everything like that. March 18th.

No one can find her. Okay. No one can find her. She's gone. That was the day before? The day before. She gives the tape to her friends for safekeeping and moves some more of her stuff there, and she just disappears on the 18th. No one can find her. And she's not the type of person who, well, you know, she goes for a day sometimes. All of her time is accounted for. She's got the 12-year-old that she does all the care for. Right.

You know, he needs to be picked up at this time. She's going to make dinner for him and she's going to do all these things. So it's if she disappears, it's not normal. So her friends launch a frantic search for her all over town. It's not that big of a place. So they're looking all over. They actually find her car. Oh, they find her car. It is at the Moline Holiday Inn.

Yeah. The Halloween. Not East Moline. Not East Moline. Let's be specific here. South Davenport. So she's gone. They call the police. They contact her parents. They contact the police. They say, we found her car. She's not checked in at this hotel. No one's seen her around there. We can't find her. She didn't pick up her kids.

What's going on, Erkid? So the Roths say, I don't know if this will help, but here's this tape she gave us yesterday. Listen to this TDK. There's some shit here. There might be something on this Memorex for you. So...

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We get support from Dove. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery Podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Let me cut to the chase. Did you know that in many states across the U.S., it's still not illegal to discriminate against people based on the way their hair grows out of their head? To deny black folks from jobs and opportunities because they have braids, locks, twists, or bantu knots? That's messed up.

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Crown stands for creating a respectful and open world for natural hair. And the Crown Act is legislation which prohibits race-based hair discrimination in workplaces and schools in the U.S. Dove is driving awareness by advocating for petition signatures and supporting the Crown movement to create a society where black hair is not only accepted, but respected and celebrated in all of its beauty.

Join Dove in taking action to help end race-based hair discrimination by signing the Crown Act petition at dove.com slash crown. That's dove.com slash crown. At the same time... Max Elfman.

Maxell, Memorex, all those fucking tapes. Yeah. At the same time, unbeknownst to just about everybody else, Jim's got a side piece and has had one for a while. Of course he does. Yeah. Jim's got a 26-year-old beautician. Oh, Jim. 26-year-old beautician named Terry Kuhn is who he's going out with. Terry, Jim. Terry and Jim. That's him.

Have been going out for several months here. They've been fucking going out. Where are they going? Yeah. Yeah.

The day – so they try to figure out what happened on March 18th. She disappeared. So they're like, okay, let's figure it out. So they recreate her day. At 8.30 a.m., Joyce talked to a friend. She was supposed to meet that friend at 10 a.m., and she called the friend at 8.30 to say she'd be a minute or two late. And then she said, right as she hung up, she said, okay, I got to go. Jim is coming home. And she hung up the phone. That was the end of the conversation. Okay.

930 a.m. James Jim he calls the friend that she's supposed to meet at 10 to say that Joyce would not be there because the two of them were going to have a trial separation I don't know what that has to do with meeting her friend at 10 a.m. when you're separated you're not allowed to meet people and do things and talk to people you just gotta yeah it's gonna separate you go you sit in like a decompression chamber and think about it yeah whether you want to be together or not

So then at 11 a.m., James is seen in Princeton taking out his airboat, although the river was, quote, extremely high and rough that day. He was out on the airboat. So an airboat's a bad boat to be out on. It seems like on a choppy field it wouldn't be fun. You want kind of flat waters for that. Like a jet ski.

So later in the day is when relatives found Joyce's car, which is the Jetta at the Moline Holiday Inn. So they talk to Jim, the police do, and they go, you know, where's your wife? And he says, I have no fucking idea. Then later on, he stated that he found the car. He tells them, I found the car at the shopping mall and I moved it to the Holiday Inn. What? Yeah. Yeah.

So that's what I did. Why would you do that? He said that he moved the car to the Holiday Inn, moved the seat up so it looked like his wife drove it there, then disabled the engine, took like a cord, a thing out or something, a cord, a fucking plug out or coil or some shit out and went to, quote, went to the nearby airport for a ride home.

Which seems like very inconvenient. I'm done with this broad. I'm going to take her car. I'm going to move it from this shopping mall where I assume she could be inside at Macy's buying something. I'm going to take it to the Holiday Inn. Yeah. Make it so it won't work anymore. Yeah. And then make sure it's up where my wife sits. It's like a prank that you do to your co-worker and move the car around the corner. This is dumb. It's weird.

And far away. Far away. She would be so stranded. So fucked at this point. And then, in a matter of complete inconvenience for him, now he's at the Moline Holiday Inn with no ride home. Yeah. So he just goes to the airport to catch a cab. Like, what a weird thing to do. It's just a strange thing to do. And the seat positioning is way different for them. She's about 5'4", and he's over 6 feet tall. So...

Oh. Much different seat positioning. He's a big, tall, tall guy. I think he's like 6'3 or something. And then disabling the car so even if she does find it, she can't even go home now either. Can't even go home. No. Stupid. Stupid.

It's very weird. So she was that day. She was supposed to consult a minister about how to tell her son about the problems at home and the trial separation. And she didn't go there. She never showed up for that either. Never made it. Never made it there. She also they find out because the Roths tell the cops, you know, she had been.

Keeping a bunch of stuff at our house, she kept a bunch of jewelry and other personal items of higher monetary value. Later on, after Jim tells his friend that he wouldn't meet her that morning, you know, she's not going to make it to meet you, she missed two other appointments, including the minister, and she also missed a friend she was supposed to hang out with as well. So two different things, and she never told her son anything. Right.

Yeah, it's a little weird. So it's very strange. Time goes by here. Time goes by. Like almost two weeks go by. She doesn't turn up.

So on March 30th, police search his motor home. Jim's motor home. This is for any signs of something. Okay. Don't find anything there at all. Yeah. Except they do find something, but not to do with a missing person. The family and friends run an ad in the paper now at the, in the quad city times. It's a 10 day ad. They run it for offering a thousand dollar reward for information about her whereabouts. Her friend said, we just didn't think she'd take off and leave like that. She was a very devoted wife and mother.

They said she had marital problems, but they were all of her friends were under the understanding that her and her husband were not going to follow through with the divorce. In the last week, she'd been telling her friends they weren't going to get divorced.

And apparently she found this paper and everything went in the toilet here. They asked her friend, was she ever saying she was in danger or in fear of anything? And her friend said, quote, I don't really know. I think that possibly deep down inside she did. She wanted other people to know that he was making threats toward her. That must have been referring to the tape. Right.

Yeah. She said that she appeared to talk of the threats in a more or less joking manner when she discussed it with her. Wasn't anything she took seriously. She was like, I mean, Jesus, he's going to fucking kill me before he divorces me. He's got a he's got to feel like a like an asshole if he has nothing to do with this for moving the car. And now he's gone for two and a half weeks. Why would you move the car? What purpose would there be for that?

Other than I'll show her that that's not her car. I'm going to keep it because I bought it. Maybe that kind of controlling shit. Or if he's playfully moving it like a prank. I almost did that to a cop once and then I thought better of it. There was a cop that got out of the car and left it running. I was like, I should move this around the corner. And then I didn't. That's fucking funny. So they're asking Jim what he thinks and he goes, I think she fucking took off.

He said, quote, this is his quote, quote, she took, well, what I'd consider to be all the valuables I had left. It's a divorce, so I guess she's entitled to it. So he's telling people, I don't know, she took all the expensive shit in the house and now she's gone. So on April 16th at 9.15 a.m., two commercial fishermen. That's never a good sign. Nope.

One of the nets? No, they spot something floating in the Mississippi River off the Bettendorf shore. So they call the authorities here, and they end up, it's just inside the western limits of Bettendorf, and parts of the, they find this, they pull it out, what this item is, and they find it is a unclothed lower torso of a body, of a human body.

Lower torso. Like below the arms. Yeah. Section. Your fucking midsection. Yeah. Hips to navel above, I guess. Unclothed. Then about five hours later, because they're looking for shit now, a stomach and some intestines are discovered floating nearby, and they pick them up too. The guts. The intestines floating around. The internals, yeah. Yes. And a stomach. Just a stomach.

Jesus. Floating nearby. Not a belly. The stomach. No. The organ. The actual organ of the stomach inside. So the police, they go, well, who the fuck is it? There's two missing women in town at this point, by the way, in this area. So is it one of these missing women? Is it somebody else? Yeah.

Who could it be? Now, out of the two missing women, one is Joyce and one's another lady. The other lady's found alive like the next day. Wow. Definitely not her. She's good. Well, that narrowed it down. They said, you got your intestines? And she poked around and said, I think so. And they were like, never mind. What about your stomach? Is that good? Have you eaten today? Everything went fine? Never mind then. So she's found alive. And then there's Joyce, who still hasn't been found.

but they don't know. So the body part, they say right away, these has no, this part of the torso has no surgical marks or scars like that of any kind. Like there was never had like an appendix removed or, you know, whatever, anything like that. Uh,

There's a couple of very obvious surgical marks, but apart from that. Yes, apart from that. That might be identifiable with the surgery is what they're talking about here. Because there's no DNA in 1983, so they're just trying to figure this out by they hope there's a tattoo or a fucking surgery on it because that's a way they can figure it out. Otherwise, they're like white lady's torso. Don't know. Just a random white lady torso. So the portion was about from the navel to the mid-thighs.

Oh, that's quite a bit. Yeah, that portion, the pelvic portion is really more accurate here. It was apparently severed from the rest of the body by a quote. This is from the medical examiner's report. Quote, by a device with a blade five sixteenths of an inch wide, which moved in a circular motion like a chainsaw.

In other words, a fucking chainsaw. Like there isn't another tool. What else? Yeah. Unless you invent another chainsaw. Right. You've just described a chainsaw. Half inch wide blade that moves in a circle. That's a fucking chainsaw. That's a chainsaw. And that's what they said. She's been dismembered by a chainsaw, which is. Wow.

Nobody does that. In all of our shows, people, regular people, personal murders, no better. I've read countless mafia accounts of butchering people in bathtubs. Never.

ever with a chainsaw because it's the messiest thing you could possibly you ever seen Scarface it's the messiest fucking way to dismember a body is with a chainsaw I think the Iceman said he did it and didn't like it because it was too messy because it was everywhere it's a fucking nightmare no you gotta get apparently you gotta get a fucking from all of I've read this sounds like from experience but from all I've read is you gotta get a fucking knife and go in there and know the anatomy of the joints and know how to do it and do it that way so um

That's what they said. Wow. And then they found intestines, too. And they were like, we figure these go together. That is fucking crazy. Yeah. So they said the chainsaw was it was cut three and a half inches above the navel. So belly button and three and a half inches. Both legs were severed. One was severed seven inches from the pubic bone and one was three and a quarter inches down. Oh, they weren't even even they were uneven legs.

Oh, this is... That's worse, right? Somebody's haphazardly just chopping this fucking thing up like an onion and they have no skill, no knife skills. There's just like chunks of onion in the back. Yeah, yeah. But like that's two slices then down there because, you know what I mean? It's not like a run through on the legs. It's chop one leg then go to the other side. Yeah, chop one leg.

Oh, God, Jesus. It's so hideous. Not even line them up. No. That's a nightmare. That is wild. And so they said that is how the dismemberment happened. And a 19-inch cut along the back, four and a half inches deep cut through the backbone.

Wow. Through the spine. That's how it was. Oh. To split it, basically. Yeah. From the back. So finding this is horrific. Truly. And they said that it has been in the water for more than a couple hours, but is consistent with only being there about a day in the water.

And the awful realization is you want to imagine a monster did this, but nothing on the planet is capable of operating a chainsaw other than a human being. That means a person had to do this. You would hope a grizzly bear did this. Right. Something that you could just put it out of its misery and the whole town's grateful and nobody feels –

Anything either way. We sent some fellas out there with some rifles and we done put the offender down and then they dragged the corpse back in and everybody has like a barbecue. He was dragging a Husqvarna. We caught him. Yeah. We're eating bear tonight, everybody. And then that's what the town does. And that's German. Home Depot card. He bought the echo with that'll, that'll really spruce up the ice Travaganza this year. I'll tell you that much right now. A bear head on top of a giant sculpture.

So people freak out in town. Number one, there's a woman missing. They don't like that. Number two, this torso freaks people out. And they're like, that means there's a shitload of other body parts out there floating around. Right. That people do not want to find because it sounds gross. Right. Obviously.

So they said that her friend said, quote, with the developments of finding this torso, we've just taken a wait and see attitude to see if they can positively identify who they did find. It's like we're not going to mourn our loss of our friend just because there's a body part in the river. That could be just some guy, you know, killing –

prostitutes from des moines or something i have no idea this could be a prostitute from or anybody from that that's who cares but it's not my friend you know the most common one another discard it could be from fucking augusta some trucker rolling through throwing it out the window yeah that's what i mean especially back then because that's when you started hearing about serial killers and people killing women and shit like that so um they say that it might not be possible that the

they might not be able to identify who this is just from this body part, they said. So they did tests, conduct tests at the university hospitals and laboratories in Iowa City. And they said they're hoping to get the blood type. That's what they're hoping to get. So,

We're not even talking about DNA or anything at this point. We're hoping to know whether it's like A or B. That's what we're looking for at this point, which is so big. We're just going to narrow it down to this population, which is still a lot. It's a shitload. So they said even if it turns out to match the blood type of Joyce, it won't prove...

That the abdomen is part of her body. And so it's difficult. And if the blood types don't match and they know that they have another murdered person out there, keep looking for Joyce. So the police, the Davenport police captain, Charles Borgstat, who is also the chief of detectives, he said this. And this is not what you want to hear from the chief of detectives and police captain. Quote, kind of a baffling one.

That's not what you want to hear at all. I'm the best of all of these things. I got the highest job you can get and beats the shit out of me is what I'm saying there at this point. I got nothing. I don't have anything for you. Oh, man. So they said the only unusual characteristics, no scars, no tattoos, no anything like that. The only unusual characteristics on the abdomen and pelvis area are the

Quote, two real tiny birthmarks about the size of a freckle on the front of the waist about at the bikini line. Okay. They're not even big. So they said that's the guy said it's that's not that's difficult because this cop said, quote, you could go ask the average mother, say, does your daughter have a freckle? And they can't tell you for sure.

And especially right there. Yeah. Number one, they said it's kind of right where your underwear would be. So even if you saw them all the time in their underwear, you still probably wouldn't see that. So it's difficult. They said this amount of the Scott County attorney, William Davis, said with the amount of evidence so far, quote, I can't prove a murder occurred or that it happened in my jurisdiction. All it is is a piece of a torso. We have no proof of anything.

So they also, the police detective, I mean, you don't know. You know that a murder happened somewhere, but you don't know who it is or where it happened. It's just in the river. Well, I guess we don't know that a murder even happened. We just know that somebody died. We know that somebody did some bad shit after somebody died. We know somebody got to their amateur butcher class a little late and didn't do so well, didn't understand he weren't supposed to use a chainsaw. Right. So the captain of the detectives there and all the other cops are trying to tell the reporters that.

They're cautioning them against drawing any conclusions from what's been revealed so far, they said. The one cop said that he felt that some news reports were, quote, quote, quote, coming down on Jim Clint, maybe a little too hard with a lot of their in your endos.

Okay. So basically all these papers are like, the husband's obviously responsible here with the car thing and all that. And this guy's going, slow your roll. Not so fast. I think maybe we're taking this guy a little bit too much to task, which is,

That's interesting. That is Iowa nice. That's Iowa nice. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Yes, life's missing in the next day. And we find a torso and then we say, yeah, it's about, it's been in there. Oh, not, I'm sorry, not consistent with the day. It was consistent with it being there since March. So a month. That's what they were saying. It was a month. So, you know, it's consistent. Everything works out. But, you know, I mean, we can't, that's not.

He's playing musical chairs with the cars. If the man sitting next to you, still buy him a beer is what we're saying. I mean, let's not be mean here. Holy. He did make a point here. He said, if Joyce Clinton would walk in that door right now, we would cancel our investigation and that would be it. Well, that goes for any murder, really. Yeah. Where you can't find a body. Yeah, if they walk in, then it's probably not dead. Yeah.

That stopped John Walsh from calling everybody a scumbag. Yeah, a slow life scumbag.

He also said this at the same time. He said that, you know, we don't know anything. This is what he says. Calm down. Don't jump to conclusions, this detective captain. Now let's stir up some, like, internet-level conspiracy theory shit before the internet. Is that what he's going to do? Yes. He said that, you know, he ponders the possibility of even a more bizarre twist. You never know. He's just throwing out theories. He said, quote, she could be setting him up, too.

She disappeared, found a corpse, chainsawed it to pieces, and planted it in the river to set up her husband.

Yeah, she could have been abducted by aliens and they obliterated a corpse. By Zebulon Pike. That's who did this. You know who did it? Zebulon Pike, everybody. We know it. It was one of those no belly button motherfuckers. We knew it. I told you to check his asshole. Did no one check his asshole?

No one shacked his ass all in here. See, this is what happens. Incompetence. You got stomachs and intestines. It's all your fault. You're all fired. This is ridiculous. Captain Detective. Detective Captain. She could be setting him up, too. Oh, boy. She said because the day before she disappeared, she gives this tape to her friend. I mean, maybe this is all part of a big elaborate situation.

Rather than the obvious where it points to this guy might have killed his wife, this guy goes, that's what I would do to set somebody up too. I'm just saying. But no jumping to conclusions, paper people. Let's all just let it play out. Wow. She gave her friends a tape indicating he's up to no good, and then she disappears forever.

She's probably setting them. This guy does not trust women. He was 100% sitting at a counter in a diner just like eating a turkey sandwich while this was going on. Like, let me tell you what I think. I'm just spitballing here. Listen, my wife blew my fishing partner, so who knows? I don't trust women anymore. Anything's possible is what I'm getting at.

We want a skeeter boat together. She blew him. So, you know, women are shady. Could be setting him up. You never know.

Based on my experience. Jesus. Holy shit. So the police affidavit that the press gets a hold of written by a lieutenant, Ted Carroll, shows the main focus of the investigation is trying to determine whether this evidence could be part of the body of Joyce. That's what they're focusing on. So they search James's home. Sure. Searching the castle here. Now, all the cops know him. They all know Jim Clint.

Not just because it's a small town, because half the police force goes to him for their back problems. Yeah, of course. He's like the cop chiropractor. Yeah. So they all know him a lot. They sat there for an hour chit-chatting with him while he's cracking them up. So the word is that his work is real good and his prices are reasonable. Wow. So they're like, how can a guy who does honest work for reasonable prices, I think she's setting him up. That's what this guy's saying. Yeah.

I mean, not that no one else has been able to do anything with my neck. So I'm willing to let this slide is what I'm getting at. Yeah. I can feel my fingers again. So he's a good man. I'm going to let it slide. Yeah. Yeah. So they do that. His office is located at 1941 West 3rd Street in the same large home in which his father, also a chiropractor, practiced for about 30 years.

So it was just passed on down to him, which is pretty cool. He shares the building with another chiropractor. This April 17th, they search his home where they retrieve a chainsaw, which is – that's fine. Everybody's got one. Tons of – I have like six chainsaws. I have tons of woods behind my house. Trees fall on the trail all the time. We're constantly chainsawing. I don't got a tree in sight. I got two chainsaws. That's what I mean. It's just –

You just like that they go brrm brrm a lot. I like motors. God damn it. They're fun. Chainsaws are fucking fun. They're cool. So police searches home. They retrieve a chainsaw, and they also seize an Avon hairbrush. She bought shit from Avon. Yeah. She was the audience for that. Wait until you see her cabinet full of Tupperware. Oh, it's all Tupperware. If she was around in 2010, it would have been all dildos. You never know. Yeah.

So they seize this to get samples of her hair, actually. Oh, smart. So they have hair samples there so they can try to get something and compare something, basically. So they do all of that. They also go to a storage unit rented by Jim at the Northwest Storage Company at 3031 Hickory Grove in Davenport and took hair samples from inside of a wig that she had worn as well to make sure they got her hair samples. Okay.

So they said they wanted the hair. It could help in identification, obviously. So they searched the river. This whole time, by the way, they're searching the river for more body parts. They're constantly dragging the river. But that river, that shit could be in... Oh, God, that thing moves. It could be in Louisiana by now. Yeah, it could be in the fucking ocean. Yeah, some girl could be flashing her tits at a girl's gone wild back then and fucking... There's going to be an arm floating by behind her. Some girl taking off an Auburn t-shirt. Yeah.

So they searched that. Now, that week on the Sunday, police with a search warrant, that's when they seized the still chainsaw. So they got a decent chainsaw there. Some nice ones, yeah. Yeah, from their house. They say this, quote, seized a still chainsaw from the Clint's luxurious home at 1220 Royal Oaks Drive. Right, right.

They have emphasized that the saw was, you know, could be involved in the dismemberment of the woman. You never know. So but a chainsaw was. So they're taking it. Court papers show that the police plan to look for a heart shaped diamond ring, but did not find it at either the storage locker or the home. She had been wearing this ring at the time of her disappearance. Apparently, according to her friends, she wore it every day. So they want to find that. Yeah.

That Monday comes along and Jim tells the Des Moines Register reporter that talks to him because he's the subject of everything. He says that he's being unfairly implicated in this investigation. He said, quote, I feel like I'm in limbo caught here in a nightmare. It's not very pleasant. You wonder what the recourse is.

Can I sue them? Is what he's saying. Yeah. Recourse. Recourse. How about I really wish they'd find my wife somewhere, hopefully alive. That would be good. That's a better thing to say. Say that answer. Yeah. Say that one. That's better. Everybody out there, if someone's missing, you'd really like to find them. That's your only answer. I don't know. Chris Watts said the same shit, though. But that's the right answer. That's the right answer. He just is not a very convincing fucking liar. And there was a video of him. No.

And they believed him until that video. Yeah. They bought everything he said until they're standing there in the home while he's saying something happened in a video showing the opposite thing and the neighbor's making that face at the cop like, are you seeing this shit right here? He did everything but go fucking, holy shit, that's you, Scott. Fuck.

Or Chris, I'm thinking Scott Peterson. Chris Watts. And he's got, he had his hands behind his head, like how you, how you react. Surrender? Yeah, when you're about to be arrested. When you surrender? Interlock them behind your head. That's what he did. Yeah.

Down on your knees. There you go. I don't know if he realized he was doing that. It's the funniest fucking thing in the world. See his hands behind his head. He straight felony stopped himself. That's what he did. That's what he did. It's the funniest, funniest fucking part of that whole thing is him just

felony stopping in his neighbor's living. That's so weird. That was the whole case. His neighbor's face was the whole case. Yeah, his neighbor's like, you're not seeing this? He's a felony stopping guy. We did a Patreon on this and we talked about it thoroughly. You gotta go back and listen to that. It's very fucking funny. God, it's so good. So...

This is what he's saying, though. He's like, I don't know what they're talking about. Yeah. So the next day after that statement, cops and boats are searching all around the river looking for more body parts, but they find nothing. That afternoon, a police affidavit uses as basis for the search warrant. It became public. So then people are finding out more details. The sworn statement from a police detective alleged that before she disappeared, Joyce had tape recorded a conversation with her husband. Now the public is finding out about this. They didn't even know about that. Oh.

During which she asked him why he had told her in a previous conversation that he was going to cut her up in tiny pieces. His response was to admit the statement, but say he was just being dramatic. So that became public now.

That's a big deal. The affidavit also outlines some of Jim's alleged activities. Old Dr. Jim here on the day of his wife's disappearance, among them taking his airboat for a ride on the Mississippi River north of Princeton and driving his wife's car to a Moline, Illinois, hotels and moving the seat up so it would look like his wife drove it there, quote unquote.

Why would he say that? Rather than saying, I figured I'd move it up so when she got in the car, she wouldn't have to move it up. He said, so it would look like she drove there. Yeah. You know, because. This man's a doctor? Are you fucking kidding me? That's why I'm saying I don't trust chiropractors because. That's not very smart. I feel like a medical doctor would know better than to say this, right?

Even a doctor of like fucking 18th century French art would fucking know better than to say this. I mean, Scott Peterson went fishing and then they found the body where he went fishing. He didn't move a car. You know what I mean? And say he did it to intentionally make it look like she was driving. That would have looked really bad. That's the man that got the death penalty. I mean, still, he got it. It

Wow. So they contact him for comment after this. The paper doesn't. He said, well, I can't talk to anybody anymore. I'm sorry. Yeah. I've said too much. I've said too much. Wednesday, a woman reported spotting a human leg floating in the Mississippi near Buffalo, just down, not Buffalo, New York, Buffalo down there, just downstream from the Quad Cities. But a search by helicopter turned up nothing because by then it could have hit a current and gone under. Who knows?

Who the fuck would, if you saw it, I wouldn't take my eyes off it until somebody gets it. Well, it's floating. What are you going to chase it? I think so. I mean, the Mississippi, it, it moves so fast and areas that you can't go to. There goes a leg. Oh shit. Oh man. I better tell somebody it's floating. It's passing this. No, that no, here it's still going.

It's by the cattails. And I don't want to get it myself. Am I going to grab it? No. Fuck that. Wave it over my head? No, fuck that. Yeah, I'm not touching it. Nope. So after a week, the main question is, who the fuck killed her? Yeah. Or is it her? Or who is it? And if not...

Who the fuck else died? So friends and relatives of Joyce say it's been a difficult time. Her friend, her friends, Ron and Diana said it's devastating. Believe me, I'll tell you that right now. So there you go. One said also, quote, we're hoping it's her and we're hoping it's not her. The torso. Hmm.

If it is, then we have an answer at least to what happened to her. We hope it's not because of what obviously happened to that person, but it's not a very good thought. So, yeah, they have no fucking idea. But also they said in the days that have followed the recovery of the body, the case has become a sensation in the area ever since.

Everybody. Oh, they said it's repulsive and fascinating. They got a Davin. The paper went to a psychiatrist in town, Dr. Truce Ordana, who's a psychiatrist, and said, what's this all about? Why are we all so interested in this? And he said, there's a little bit of morbidity in all of us. Welcome to True Crime Podcast. Welcome to Small Town Murder.

So they said he's noticed intense interest in the case while he's been making rounds at local hospitals. He said, though, most of the comments he's heard are in the form of sick jokes. That's what everybody does immediately.

Welcome to small town murder. Welcome to small town murder. In every situation, too, that's what we come across in these small town murders. Whenever something happens, the first thing that happens are a bunch of fucking jokes. That's the first thing. They said it's the first, cops say it's the first dismemberment case they can even remember in the area. So it's hot shit for these people. You know, one of the psychiatrists, they asked him what kind of a person would be capable of sawing up another human being with a chainsaw. Dear God.

And the psychiatrist said, quote, they are controlled individuals who keep their emotions bottled up and are preoccupied with this violent act inside them. And then things just erupt. A lot of these people usually have stored up anger toward people in their past. When they do this, they usually do this to somebody they perceive as invulnerable or a threat to themselves. You know, like.

It's going to take all your money. The act of cutting somebody up in the fashion does two things. Number one, it eliminates the problem. And number two, it gives them the power to remove the identity of the person by reducing them into chopped up pieces, into particles and fragments. So the whole of the personality disappears. It's a very primitive, almost infantile response to anger.

It also helps you dispose of a body is what the other thing is. Logistically, it's much easier to dispose of parts than a whole person. Yeah. You make the car smaller and it disappears easier. That's why the mob cut guys up for years because it's easier to get rid of them at that point. That's why chop shops exist when people steal cars to make the car smaller and get rid of it.

It's so easy. Get rid of it and that's it. But they ask what kind of person does this. That's the most verbose. That's so many words to say. A fucking monster. A sick maniac fuck. That's it. Yeah. Be careful. Everybody watch out. Lock your doors. He's out there. Or she. They're out there. One eye open, everybody. That's all we're saying. There's a bad person on the loose. Nobody rest easy tonight. So there's rumors all over the place and amateur people come. I mean, everyone's got theories and...

I think it was a trucker coming through town. I think it was a serial killer that did this and dumped it from somewhere else and all that kind of shit. Captain detective saying, I don't know if she's setting him up. I don't know if she could be setting him up. That's even the detective captains involved in it. He's sitting around here.

So the police are they're working the cases like two cases, the disappearance of Joyce and the torso found in the river. They're not one investigation now. So they say here's right from a newspaper article.

It's the talk of the town. In taverns, people elbow to elbow at the bar discuss developments. In offices, on city buses, theories are made and argued and then agreed upon or dismissed. In a radio studio, a talk show host takes call after call from listeners who want to discuss publicity about the case. Wow.

That's all it is. Yeah. On a sunny afternoon in Davenport's East Village, a young couple walks along the seawall of the Mississippi. The guy looks into the water and shouts, there's a leg. The girl's eyes widen and the guy laughs. Just kidding. It's not. Minutes later, a car drives by and a man shouts to a woman sitting on the wall, are you looking for that body? And then he drives off laughing. That's all anybody's talking about. What? What?

Okay.

Does she have a bunch of dipshits and a chiropractor in her fucking novels? It's the Orient Express. Yeah, that's the only one I've read, and I don't remember all of the people being like, I don't know, shit could have been everybody, could have been none of them. Might have jumped off the train for all I know. My mom had every one of those books next to my toilet as a kid. I read so many. That's fucking hilarious. Those are the only books you've read, I think, at this point. It is. So if I want you to read something, I have to put it next to your toilet? Put it next to my shit or something.

Done. I'm going to go get books and that's what's going to happen. Done. Any book I want you to read, I'm just going to insert it. You'll go, oh, what's this? And read it. You won't even understand why you're reading it. I don't know why I know so much about Tesla. What's going on? Why do I know so much about... Yeah. Nikola Tesla. Interesting.

So the prosecutor in the case, they said, are you going to file any charges? And he says that they have no hard evidence that Jim had anything to do with his wife's disappearance or that she's even dead. No proof that the chainsaw seized from his home was involved in any way. In fact, they have no idea where she is. He says, this is the Scott County attorney, William Davis. I have no indictment. I try to put myself in his position with all the publicity. James Clint may be, may be being sacrificed to the judicial judicial system. Okay.

So he's saying with all this publicity, I mean, we might be rushing the judgment on this guy. I don't know shit. That's what everybody says. They took that steel chainsaw with them. Yeah. And they found nothing in it that indicates it was used as a – wow. But back then you'd have to find like a whole spot of blood or a chunk of flesh. There was no DNA to just go all over it for. Right.

But the drive gear is so tucked. You'd think it would be covered in something. You'd imagine so. So James, though, he's arrested for something else now. Oh, what'd he do? Two counts of possession of a controlled substance. Oh.

Oh, he is doing drugs. Yes. Small amounts of controlled substances seized by police during a search of his Winnebago on March 30th turned out to be MDA and hashish is what he had. So he's got weed and he's got like, yeah, fucking, you know. Date rape drug? Powdery shit. Yeah. MDA. I guess that's.

it's gotta be something like it. Something. Uh, he appears in court, uh, here to do that. And when he appears in court on his drug charge, he leaves and then is chased through the streets by packs of reporters and cameramen from all over the place. So they're trying to find out maybe she ran away. So Joyce's are, they're trying to find out maybe if this torso is Joyce. So they do tests. Forensic pathologists are trying to figure this out and all of that. Um,

It's been a couple of months now, and they're still thinking maybe she just ran away. But her mother doesn't think so. Her mother said Easter passed. She didn't call me. Nothing's going. This isn't happening. This is crazy. So this is Jim's story that they lock him into. He gives a story. He took Bart Lee to breakfast and then dropped him off at school driving the Jetta. So I took the Jetta to do that.

He got home. He said he, you know, just meandered up to his bedroom like any other time. And when he got to the upstairs bedroom, there was his wife pointing a .357 revolver at him as soon as he walked in. So he said that, you know, he's pointed it at me and holy shit, she's pointing it and I didn't know what to do. So he said that he...

Got close enough to her talking to her to be able to grab the gun away from her without her firing a shot. Perfect. Snatched it away. So he said at that point, rather than, you know, be like, you crazy motherfucker, we pointing guns at me for this is fucking nuts. He said they calmly sat on the bed and discussed their marital problems.

As you would. I think they've come to a head based on your gun toting. Yeah. He said they talked, they cried, you know, they just, they had a real come to come to Jesus moment here and decided on a trial separation. And Joyce would be the one leaving the house. He'd stay here with Bartley. She'd leave the house. James said he helped her load her things into the car. She said, I'll, I'll leave right now. You know, um,

No suitcases she didn't take with her because when you leave someplace, you just grab handfuls of clothes and throw them. He said personal items were put in paper bags, like shopping bags, and her clothes were just placed in the back seat. No suitcases needed. It's just easier to just put them in the back seat raw dog like that. So he said he gave her some cash, $4,000 he gave her. He said, here's some money to start over. Bye.

Four G's. I'm sure you don't want to say goodbye to your son or anything. See you later. I guess that makes sense why she's at the mall. She's got to get her necessities. She's got to get her shit together, yeah. She then left, gave him no indication of where she was going or when she would return. Later that day, though, he discovered that more than $30,000 in cash and a few other things of value from the house were also missing.

So he's like, she could be anywhere. She got 30 grand in cash from me. She could be in fucking Paris by now. Yeah. Her friend, though, Marianne, doesn't buy that shit. She said, number one, I think the gun pointing is out of character for her. That doesn't seem right. Yeah. Which we will say this. I will say I'm not saying that this happened, but people in our we've had cases where people are having marital problems. None of this shit's in character.

The things they do. None of it, yeah. People, most of the killings, we've talked about some serial killers, but most of them are the first and only time this person's probably going to kill anybody is because it's this specific situation that's put them in it, not...

The fact that they have a bloodlust, you know what I mean? Like when I, in the trailer park, when he, she, he or she moved across the street and then she walked out and he gunned her down. You knew that was coming. You know what I mean? Stuff like that. So, um, also Marianne said that when she talked to Joyce on the telephone that morning, she was not despondent. She was looking forward to her day.

bunch of errands and appointments that we know she never got to. Roth said that she later told Jim, quote, there was no way she would have gone out without telling us. And there's no way she would have been in the bedroom with a gun pointed to, uh, because there's certain people that he told that she had the gun to her head and certain people he told him certain people. She told, yeah, he said that he was, she was pointing the gun at him. So, uh,

Yeah, they're like, that doesn't seem right. So a police officer is sent to check Jim's house that night and said that she did find a 357 Magnum on the bed. On the bed? On the bed, like he said. This was back at the time. And although the covers weren't wrinkled as she would have expected having people sitting there. So it was a made bed just with some covers sitting on top.

Officer Gail Lighthoff said that Jim told her that Joyce said when she left, I'll be watching you and you'll never divorce me. And then he said, OK, here's $4,000 in your clothes. Have a good day. She said that Jim was cooperative and she found no evidence of foul play in the house.

She also noted that the housekeeping in the home was not especially good. And this is... Everybody said this. They said Joyce had her shit together and everything in life except the housekeeping. Really? She was not... They were not good housekeepers. The house was always a fucking disaster. That is hard to do, man. It's hard. And she's busy doing shit with the kid. I don't know. They said that except the bathrooms, which were exceptionally clean. That's good. They said exceptionally clean. Good, but also...

Was he cleaning up in there? That's a good thing. So May 10th, he gets his chainsaw back. They give it back? They give it back without the chain and blades. They said, we're going to keep that in case we can figure out how to test stuff. But he requested it be returned, and they return it. I got a downed tree. I don't know what you want from me, but I got to cut some stuff up. That's my song. Now, June 29th, they report that the blood type of the torso has been found. By the way, we're going to tell you exactly what happened, and it's fucked up. Don't worry. Hang in there.

It's blood type A. Okay. And that matches Joyce's blood type. No, it's very common. Oh, it's the most common? I don't know if it's the most, but it's common. I think AB is the most common. Yeah, it's not a rare one where you'd be like, oh, there's only four people in all of Iowa with that blood type. It's nothing like that.

So October 21st, Jim pleads guilty to two different drug charges that we told you about that were filed after the search of his motor home. They're going to hold him to the fire here. He is fined $300 and given a suspended sentence. So nothing much there. Yeah. So they also talked to Terry, his girlfriend, and she said she began having the affair months before Joyce disappeared. Right. Okay. Okay.

Cops are trying to keep the info in-house now because everybody's running wild. We have the prosecutor, William Davis, and there's a guy named Ned Weir who is going to be his lawyer, Jim's lawyer here. So the prosecutor said Davis said that he is concerned about the publicity surrounding the case and has tried and failed to plug what he sees as leaks in the police department.

This is a small town. Everybody knows each other. Yeah. And they want to talk and they sit around in the diner with a turkey sandwich hanging out of their mouth going, I don't know. He could have killed her. She could have killed herself. I don't fucking know. They don't stop investigating. So anytime they're sitting down to eat, if it's two guys, they're yammering about it and the waitress hears it. Yeah.

He said he's tried, but it's such a big deal. It's all everybody will talk about. So he said he doesn't know what to do. He says, though, that he's taking very big interest in the case and really trying to keep the evidence all together because he knows who Jim's lawyer is and if he's going to have to

You know, go after Jim. He knows this will be a tough battle because his lawyer used to be, I believe, a prosecutor. So we are not. He's not. He's just a good defense attorney. I'm sorry. There is one murder case, they said, in which the defendant was going to try to use the defense that they were watching television in a motel room.

So in a pretrial conference, he asked the police investigators why they hadn't felt the television to see if it was warm. If it hadn't been, then no one could have been watching it. But if it was, it could have proved their innocence. So why didn't you do that? And that became a big deal. And I think that person ended up being acquitted. So-

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Was there a crime committed?

As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of? You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

And he said, when you know Ned's on the other side of you, you take everything step by step and you do your homework. Weir was the Scott County attorney, but resigned in 1977 during an investigation into allegations that he used county employees and equipment to benefit his private practice. But a grand jury did not return indictments against him.

So two years later, Davis became county attorney, Ware's a defense attorney, and they actually were against each other in the Dwight Henninger murder trial, which was a big deal in Davenport and a huge deal. And the guy was found innocent by the jury. So this defense attorney –

He's a formidable foe here. Sure. So he said also at the same time, Davis said he's got a rape case, another sex case, and a murder retrial coming up. So he's got a lot of shit going on. Sure does. Yeah. So 1984, February 16th, this is the first official confirmation that they believe the torso found in the river is Joyce. They could never prove it because it's not DNA. Right.

But the tests come from a Dallas forensics lab all the way in Dallas, Texas, which used genetic markers, which is the precursor to DNA evidence, using blood samples from her son, husband, and parents. Fantastic. And the prosecutor said, I am certain that the torso is Joyce Clint, and I'm confident that we can prove it's Joyce. Which...

They really can't. So February 17th, the next day, Jim, since they say this is definitely her, Jim files a claim on his wife's insurance policy saying she's dead. Well, they said she's dead. So pay up, fuckers. Not bad. I mean, yeah. Yeah. They said, too, he can't get away from all this shit.

Nothing. His lawyer said that like he hired a lawyer, said his lawyer, that's all he can do. He said he goes to like, you know, get a sandwich real quick and everybody surrounds him and they're talking about the case. So it's fucking ridiculous. Anything new? Does anybody know anything? He said he stopped by the tavern just to get a drink and he said couldn't even do it. He stood at the bar and the bartender asked some questions. He walked away. Another waiter came over and was like, hey, let me ask you about this.

He said, I can't get away from this shit. Now, the cops here are worried the publicity is going to fuck this case up. They said that it's not because not fuck up the trial. They think it's going to it's they don't like that. It's pressure to solve the case. Yeah, well, kind of your job.

I mean, you should have, as soon as the body's found, the most pressure ever should be on you. You're in the homicide department, so you should be. That's all you do. It's all pressure, really, there. The one cop says, it's strange, but unlike other cases I've worked on, the publicity and interest surrounding this has meant that everybody wants to help me. But on the other hand, because of the publicity, if it goes unsolved, there will be pressure and time to get it solved. Yeah. Yeah. There should be pressure in any murder case. Forever. Forever.

He said, and then pretty soon, instead of everyone trying to help me, many will say, why haven't they found out what happened to Joyce Clint? Yeah, that's how that's the job. That's why you maybe don't want to do that job or maybe you do. This guy, by the way, is a 46 year old police veteran, as they call him in the paper. And they said that he works from 8 a.m. till midnight a lot of days. And he just loves his wife and his kids and his dogs and his motorcycle.

And his job, evidently. Yeah, he said it's not stressful. In a way, when your mind begins to work, you feed on it. He said he's a competitor and he likes to win. His friends call him the bulldog. Yeah. So he had a heart attack and his doctor told him, you know, stop working 16 hours a day and quit smoking. He was gone for three months and then came back and was working 24 hours straight again. And smoking.

He literally told that it says this in the paper, quote, Obviously, I did neither. He says as he now about his doctor's orders as he drags on a cigarette. And he said all he's been doing is taking calls from people with tips, taking calls from psychics, strangers, every fucking nut bag out there. He said some of the leads are ridiculous, but you got to check them all out. He said a few nights ago he got sick and tired of it and had to go dry. He just drove around for three and a half hours.

just to get away from the phones. Okay. So, now, the case here, the county attorney, William Davis, expects to decide in a week or so, they say, whether to file criminal charges in what has become known as the Davenport Chainsaw Murder Case. Good God.

It involves exotic laboratory techniques and a lot of work. And so they're worried that the jury won't even understand what they're talking about when they come to genetic markers. Because even in 96, the OJ jury was like, I don't know about that DNA shit. It was still new. So he's decided there's a 200-page report. And he said that if he doesn't decide to indict the guy or try to get an indictment, then they'll keep working on it.

basically. The investigation, they said, has focused on Jim, but who knows? They're still like, we don't really know. He said, as a case, a case may be built on many, many pebbles, not even rocks. We just have to keep putting them together. There you go. So,

They say that they're trying to do it through these genetic markers, and they say these are the things that we find in people's blood tissue and bones which indicate characteristics, and they're unique in certain persons. It's much more complex than determining a blood type. It's early DNA sequencing they were trying to do. So they said they sent them to the laboratory, and the experts there believe the torso came from the offspring of her parents. Oh. But it's not 99.999. It's none of that. They just believe that.

So they obtained blood samples from Jim, from Bart, and they said that it's consistent with the theory that Bart could have come from the offspring of James and the woman whose torso was found as well. So that's possible. So they shipped the torso then to a forensic anthropologist in Oklahoma, and he examined the torso to try to determine the age, weight, height, and build of the body.

Put a body back together here. And Davis, the prosecutor, said, I don't know that anybody in Iowa has called a forensic anthropologist in the past to substantiate the identity of a body.

And he said that he's not aware of anyone else in the nation who has used genetic markers to try to prove the identity of a body. So he's basically trying to invent DNA legal work here. Yeah. So they said the scientific evidence and the coincidence of the disappearance without a trace provide ample proof that Joyce is dead. And the odds of being someone else are just phenomenal. It can't be. So they arrest him. They arrest Jim in his office.

The officer showed up and he said, quote, hi there.

Very Iowa nice. We're here. Yep. And he is let out in his blue lab coat and everything. Wow. So April 15th, Jim and Joyce's parents, both sets of parents, all the grandparents are awarded joint custody of the couple's son while this is going on because he's being held on a million dollars bail that he doesn't have. So now they're questioning. They don't know whether the torso is going to have enough to hold

him because that's really all they have. Now, May 3rd

Jim writes a letter to his attorney saying Joyce is alive and three people I know have seen her. So fucking talk to them. August 7th, the trial is going to be moved to a different county due to all this publicity. I mean, that's all everybody talks about. You have to move it to the moon. There is not a juror in this county that doesn't know everything about this case. They have to move it across the state, so they do. The trial comes up August 3rd. It's in Keokuk, Iowa.

Okay. Now, prosecution witnesses here. Let's talk about this. Two prosecution witnesses testified that they recalled seeing Jim on his airboat in the Princeton, Iowa area on the day his wife disappeared, but neither were able to support a witness's testimony that Jim carried four or five black garbage bags onto his boat that day. Well, that's a lot. They said, I didn't see any garbage bags. That's a lot. That's a whole person worth. Yeah.

Uh, two witnesses Monday said they had not seen him when he was walking on or to the craft. Now the science people, this is very interesting how they do this because they bring us to a statistician in here too, which is very weird. It's a, that I don't, that to me is the thing I don't like the science stuff. Yeah, it's okay. So there was various experts who offered the testimony here, the Dallas lab people and everything like that. World famous forensic anthropologist, um,

He said that the height, weight, and age are similar to Joyce of the torso. And a statistician testified that using all the information gathered by police and other experts, he concluded that it's 98.82% probable that the torso belongs to Joyce. Based on what? All the factors. Everything. All the factors. That's a hard one for someone on a jury to go, well, I mean, yeah, 98. That's crazy. Yeah.

Roth, Marianne Roth testifies that when she talked to Joyce, she was in good spirits and she was talking about going back to school at that point. She said she didn't hear from Joyce later in the day, became concerned. She missed several appointments. She said she went to the house to confront Jim and accuse him of lying when he told her that he had found his wife sitting on the bed with a gun to her head when he came home that day. That's what he told her.

She all Marianne also testified that Joyce wouldn't and couldn't just leave both because of her love for Jim and their son Bart. And also because she was such a bad housekeeper that she wouldn't have had enough clean clothes around the house to just take off without preparation. Wouldn't have enough clean clothes. There has to be a laundry time. At some point, what if she did laundry the day before and had all of her clothes washed? She didn't wash one piece at a time, I doubt. Is she? Is she?

That's so weird. Was she washing tomorrow's clothes today? That's what I mean. I don't understand that. So that's what she said. She wouldn't have had enough clean clothes around the house to take off, which if I'm on the jury, I'm going, she's really trying to paint a picture of this lady. That's a wild claim. I'm not sure. Then her character becomes an issue.

Which is crazy because Joyce, because Joyce says she's just a mom and she's done nothing crazy for her character to come in. They said that she's described as ultra feminine and an eye catcher and a head turner and a devoted wife and mother but a messy housekeeper.

They said here, this is one person said she was determined and strong, not the kind of woman who breaks down in a crisis. And according to testimony of a close friend, she vowed she was never going to let another woman live in her house.

God damn it. So I'm not going to leave and leave him with the house and have some other broad move in. No way. Not going to happen. So she said that didn't seem like the statement of someone who, you know, was going to just fold and do all this type of shit here. So they said, was it the words of a cool headed lady who came up with a bizarre scheme to block the divorce and get revenge on her spouse?

OK, you know, the she set him up theory. She's out there laughing while he's on trial. That's that theory. So the defense contends that the torso is from a victim physically larger than Joyce. But a close friend of Joyce's, Marianne, said that Joyce had a continuing weight problem. She fluctuated a lot. So it could have been her.

Joyce had been described in some testimony as about 5'4", 130 pounds. But they said she fluctuated. And her one friend will say she knew how to buy clothes that made her look smaller. So you couldn't tell she was fluctuating, but she was. She'd tell her or she'd tell her friend. A defense lawyer here for Jim argued that Joyce is still alive. She ran off with $30,000 and some other things, and she's still out there. And my guy's on trial here.

The prosecutor says that, no, Joyce is a stable, upright person, and she didn't take off. She kept in close touch with family and friends. She wouldn't run away without contacting them. She wasn't also, he said, she was no shrinking violet. She found out he was divorcing her secretly, and she was ready to fight right back at it. She went and got a lawyer of her own. So he says, or this is Mary Ann, says, quote, Joyce had her stuff together. She didn't break under crisis.

Okay. And she's a mother of a 12-year-old. She's not going anywhere for long periods of time. And totally dedicated on an everyday basis to doing everything for and with him. She plays basketball with the boy. Yeah, she's not running away, unlikely anyway.

So the science they bring these people in, it's an expert witness, testified that laboratory tests for genetic characteristics show it's possible that a piece of the woman's torso found in the river was Joyce. This is Benita Harwood, a medical technician at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Medicine in Dallas, Texas. Okay.

gave testimony here. They said the tests were run on a piece of muscle tissue from the torso to look for certain types of enzyme patterns that are known to be passed along genetically from parents to children.

Similar tests for these, quote, genetic markers. They're acting like this is some crazy science and now we just take it for granted. Were run on blood samples from her and her parents. And we already discussed that. And they said that her son could have been the offspring of James Joyce and all of that. So but under questioning by the defense lawyer, this witness acknowledged that there were, quote, literally millions of people who could have produced offspring with the same genetic marker found in the torso.

Millions? Millions. Because it's so vague. It's like 40%. You know what I mean? And literally millions of people who theoretically could have been Bartley's mother if the markers were the only factor taken into account. So basically, she said this means nothing. It means that there's a – it's definitely – we found out it's certainly not not her. We don't know that. But we know that – we don't know it is her either. Okay.

Who knows? And also the witness agreed with the county attorney, the prosecutor, who said this was true because of other factors such as sex, age and other characteristics has not been taken into account to narrow the field further. But it still doesn't mean it's a white lady of that of a kind of an average. You know, it's like anyway. So they said that also they did tests on a piece of vertebrae from the torso and concluded the torso had type A blood, the same as Joyce's.

Joyce had taken jewelry, clothes, and some personal items to the Roth home. There's 140 things she took there they have. Yeah, Roth also said that Joyce was planning to go to school so she could get a job. The defense contends she dropped out of sight to block the divorce. Can't divorce a person who you can't find, basically, to make it take longer.

So she said that since Joyce disappeared, the dissolution of marriage has not become final. So see what happens. They also said that Joyce, quote, she knew she was never going to let another woman live in that house. She knew how to stop Jim. I'm not sure of the exact wording. That's what her friend Dixie Simmons said. Really? She said, I know how to stop him. And I'm not sure of the exact wording. So that means that.

The defense is planting. She was saying, I know how to stop him. It's just take all the money and run away. Then he can't do shit. So the next witness saying that she's alive. This is her friend, Jan Simmons, who said he saw Mrs. Clint alive in April of this year. The prosecutor said they learned of the sighting less than 24 hours before he testified to it. So this wasn't on like his initial interviews or anything like that.

They also say they used testimony of several witnesses to try to show the torso isn't Joyce. Most of that testimony focused on the hair color on the torso, the hip size, several moles and birthmarks, and all the things that the evidence, they say, makes it not her. They also said that Dixie Simmons said she remembered no moles or birthmarks on Joyce. And also her mother said she didn't remember either.

She's got a boat, so they would know. They'd see her in a bikini, right? Yeah, Virginia said, I don't remember any freckles or birthmarks in that area. So that's her mom and her best friend said that. But, you know, I've got a daughter, and I don't know what she looks like between shoulder and knee. I don't know any spots there. You're my best friend. You know where all my birthmarks are? Not a single one. You got one? You'll never know. Take your shirt off.

Let's go. Come on. You know what, Jimmy? Let's count them. When we're done with this, let's inventory each other's birthmarks just in case one of our torsos winds up in a river someday. Let's connect the dots and see if we can draw a picture. Yeah, that way that's something you could tell. You could draw a picture of Santa Claus on it. It's awesome. A little hat and everything. Let's see if Orion is on your back. Yeah, let's do it.

So the verdict comes in, and the jury began deliberating. It's a two-and-a-half-week trial. It's a seven-man, five-woman jury. They sat through 63 witnesses and 160 exhibits, and everybody said they seemed exhausted. They come in, and three-and-a-half days of deliberation. Oh, wow.

They finally, the judge declares a 29 hours of deliberation over four separate days, declares it a hung jury and therefore a mistrial. Oh my God.

They take Jim back to the courtroom and no decisions made. So he put his hand, he put like his hand up by his face, like, oh fuck, we got to do this more now. He talked to his, now it's his open, open air girlfriend, Terry. Now he just, she comes to court and kisses her and his mother's there and all that.

He said nothing. They all tried to get a quote from him. All the reporters, he didn't say anything. He's still being held under a $1 million bond. Really? Yeah. His attorney said they made an oral motion to reduce the bond after this mistrial was declared. And the prosecutor said he's going to ask for a hearing to try to stop it. And they had denied a similar one as well earlier. So the defense attorney said he's disappointed. We're disappointed. Nobody's happy with that kind of result.

Sure. No shit. The prosecutor said it was the biggest case of his career. And he said, oh, I'm disappointed. I didn't want to do it again. Yeah. He said, it's a shame we couldn't get this thing resolved, which is real casual way to discuss a murder trial aside. This thing couldn't get it resolved like it was a land like a border dispute in a fucking neighboring properties.

But apparently some of these people, the jurors, believed he did what we were accusing him of. So some of them did. They said, would you consider plea bargaining with him? And he said, that's the furthest thing from my mind right now.

Yeah. Problem is he doesn't have a lot of time to reload here because Iowa law requires that if he wants to try him again, he has to do it within 90 days unless the defendant waves that thing. So really, yeah. Unless the defendant needs more time for another trial. So the prosecutor has to start all over again. Yeah. So yeah, he said he's going to do it. Uh, the jurors though, the judge said it's not a mandate, but you know, try not to talk in detail about it cause there's going to be another case. Uh,

So the jury foreman, Wayne Nelson, a 51-year-old life insurance salesman, they all said no comment. And he said, quote, we tried. We just decided not to decide. Yeah.

They just decided, fuck it. Yeah. They said, well, what was the split among the jurors? And he said, we don't feel the need to discuss that. A man may have chainsawed his wife and you decided not to decide? I decided not to decide. We decided to take a pass on it. It wouldn't be the Iowa nice thing to do to really judge the man. So he said that the jurors took quite a few votes during their deliberation is all he would say. And then they said, any other comments? And he said, quote, it's kind of like kissing your sister.

What? Kind of like kissing your sister. Why do you know what it's like to kiss your sister? Okay. Allison also, she sent me a thing and she was like, they said this. What is that about? That's an old timey phrase. Yeah. That means you got, you wanted something and you didn't quite get what you want. You know, you wanted a girl and a kiss, but you kissed your sister. So you got shit. You got nothing. You know what I mean? You got a kiss, but it was from your sister. So how great is that? Well,

Which is a really weird fucking old-timey statement that I've always thought was strange since I was a child. I don't like that at all. It's the weirdest thing. You know, it's kind of like, I don't want to. There's more. Don't worry about that. And like I said, we're about to find out exactly what happened to...

So the jurors later declined to say anything about the vote or anything like that. One juror said, quote, I wish we could have come to a verdict, but we couldn't. Couldn't do it. The jurors, by the way, ranged in age from 24 to 71 and everything from factory workers to farmers.

And the judge said, too, it's safe to say that an inconclusive trial is always a highly undesirable situation. I now declare a mistrial. I declare the trial is missed. So the town here, they're pissed off, too. But they're all like, well, you know, that's what happens. They go to a North Park shopping center in Davenport just to talk to shoppers about what they think.

And many shoppers said they would find him innocent if they were the jury, although they said much of the testimony points to the contention that he did kill her. Okay? What the fuck? Several people said if they're going to do a retrial, they're going to need better evidence than that. One guy, an electrician, said, I think he's guilty, but to send someone to jail for life, you have to be positive. Just because he said he'd kill her on the tape recording, that's not the same thing as catching him doing it. But she's dead. Ugh.

We don't know that he was. We don't even know that some shoppers said they don't think the torso belongs to her. Wow. One person said there wasn't a positive identification of the body. I'd probably acquit him. Another one said, I think he did it, but I'd probably vote innocent because there wasn't enough to back up that it was her body in the river. So it's either maybe he didn't do it or it might not even she might not even be dead. So, I mean, they have both of these things.

They said one person here, Gloria Lash, Delash Mutt said, quote, the lying is hard to understand about his lying. If he was innocent, why would he lie? They said in a retrial, though, they think he'll probably be acquitted unless more evidence pops up. One woman said, I hope there'll be more evidence. People wanted to use their hearts to find him guilty, but they need concrete evidence.

And then one person went to school with Jim, said, unless there's more evidence, I think it'll be another hung jury or a not guilty verdict. I knew him and I don't know what to think. So the whole town is really everybody else. A lot of these cases, everyone has a hard opinion and they're all like, I don't know. Shit could be anything. So second trial, November 5th, it starts. This is quick. In Sioux City, they do it now.

His mom, Jim's mom, said that she's seen Joyce recently. Now, stop it. Since the last trial. No, now she says now that she believes she saw her alive last summer.

But she said she isn't certain it was really Joyce in a small silver car in Davenport. She said that's one reason she didn't mention the possible sighting during the first trial was because she wasn't sure. But it's possible. She's testifying as a witness called by the prosecution. Geraldine Clint said that she said that and she said, quote, I swear to God, I saw her driving through the alley.

It was in Davenport, June or July, behind a big white stone house that serves as her residence, which is the chiropractic office that the parents live in. She said she acknowledged she hadn't contacted police or the prosecutor about the sighting. She said she decided not to mention it after hearing a witness testify about a possible sighting. So she said, oh, man. She said then she realized she possibly saw Joyce in the same kind of car described by Jan Simmons as well.

So we had the two different people said, I think we saw her in a silver car. So Simmons, who is – because there's Dixie and then there's Jan, two different people. Jan's the guy or Jan or whatever. Yeah.

He says that he is Clint's best friend, James' best friend, and he said that he definitely saw Joyce driving a silver Camaro in Davenport last spring. She's got a Camaro. Yeah, and Jim's mom also testified that Joyce had told her twice that she wanted to run away because she didn't want to have to face the, quote, people she did business with after the divorce. It was an embarrassment to get a divorce. Okay.

In 1983 in Iowa. Yeah. When you're a prominent family. So the prosecutor said she's never run away in 13 years of marriage, but now she's going to run off because she can't face the clerk at Yonkers, which I guess is a grocery store. And the mom said, that's what she told me. I don't know.

That's what she said. I don't know nothing here. She also said that Jim's girlfriend, Terry, a Davenport hairdresser, may have moved into the home of James and Joyce about three days after Joyce vanished. Okay. That's early. If you think, yeah, you don't know where she is, you are not moving this. What if she came back in a week? Your son is still in the house. And this lady's sleeping in her bed. That's what I mean. Three days? You fucking nuts. That's early.

Other testimony, witnesses continue to disagree on her size. The defense maintains that the torso is from a woman who is larger than Joyce. Geraldine, who is Jim's mom, and Jan Simmons, his best friend, and his wife Dixie, who is her friend, all testified that Joyce was petite. But Joyce's cousin, Diana, testified that she often bought clothes that made her look smaller and she was good at hiding her

Her fluctuations. Now, the jury is now going to deliberate for 15 hours over two days. There's only two women on the jury, which is weird. Ten-man, two-women jury. When they came in with a verdict, they said the women looked like they were near tears and not one juror looked at Jim, which is a bad sign for a defendant. That's terrible. Yeah. Yeah.

The jury, if they're going to acquit you, they're trying to tell you with their eyes that they believe you and they got your back. If they walk in and won't look at you, that's because they feel it's a normal human thing to feel bad that you're about to send someone away forever. And it's a confrontational thing that even though you think they're a scumbag, you don't want to confront them about it. You don't want to be part of this. No. So the verdict comes in. He's being tried for first-degree murder.

It's first because if he did it, he definitely planned it and disposed of. And then there's also second degree murder and voluntary manslaughter that they can choose from as well. The jury finds him guilty this time of second degree murder.

Okay. So we're saying he didn't plan it? Yes. That's a compromise verdict is what that is. The difference between these two is that a first-degree murder is a premeditated or planning. Second-degree carries mandatory minimum or mandatory 50-year prison term. First-degree murder carries mandatory life without parole. Big difference. Holy cow.

So sentencing comes around. You, sir, may fuck off 50 years in prison, which for some unknown reason that I can't find or figure out in Iowa law at the time, the sentence is automatically cut in half. Really? So it's 25. It's so weird. So he gets 25. The prosecutor estimates he'll probably serve 12 or 13 years.

Jesus Christ. Which is not enough for dismembering the mother of the children. That's insane. Holy shit.

So you get half off right out of the gate and then maybe 40 percent of that off. So that's that's wild. You are getting that's a what is that 60 percent off. That's a pretty good deal. Yeah. So now shit gets weird, by the way. If you thought it was weird up to this point, they talk to these jurors as they're on their way out. One guy, the foreman, says we're not making any comment. We deliberated hard. That's all.

One said, we did the best job we know how. It was a difficult decision. One, they said, why won't you talk to us? And the jurors said, quote, because it's none of your business, and then left the courthouse. Because I don't want to. I don't want to. One member that would talk said the jury had taken several votes, and out of tons of the votes, a majority voted for acquittal each time. And then somehow they just said, all right, what about second degree? And they all said, fine, that'll get us out of here.

I would be livid if that was the truth about me. They just wanted to leave. Oh, my God. These motherfuckers just wanted to get back to their lives. That's fucking wild. The foreman of the first jury, though, he said he's happy they were able to reach a verdict. So that's nice. His lawyer said, when asked about this, they said, well, he didn't get convicted of first degree. Second degree, that's much better. And they...

He said, what do you think about that? His defense lawyer said, quote, sort of like kissing your sister. Oh, my God. Everybody is kissing their sister in this fucking episode. But it's better than verdict form number one, which is first degree murder. He said that we're disappointed and there's going to be an appeal. He said it's obvious to me it was a compromise verdict, which, yeah, obviously. So the family, though.

Her mom says, Joyce's mom said, I'm just extremely happy. Today, I'm just going to relax after two years. So she feels that. She said, we're happy with what we got. They said, are you disappointed it wasn't first degree? She said, we're just happy with what we got, which is very Iowa. We're just happy with we got something. We're not going to complain. It's kind of like his new system. Yep. She also attacked the defense's ridiculous closing argument. In the closing argument, she said,

They said that they said that they she just she just left and he was given she was given the whole bullshit. He also said that he thought the prosecution, this is the defense attorneys, did a much better job presenting his case this time.

And that affected the outcome. The prosecutor said definitely the right decision was made. He said, I'm very pleased and satisfied. It's the most difficult case I've ever presented. And he said he was not disappointed. The jury didn't convict him of first degree murder. And he said that, you know, be eligible for parole and 10 might serve 20, but probably not that much.

He assumes that he'll lose his chiropractor license over this. Probably, yeah. Okay. November 24th. Now that she's... This verdict means she's officially dead now. The insurance company has not ruled her dead until this now. So now her obituary comes out finally and everything. And they said Mrs. Clint was declared dead Tuesday. That was the day of the conviction. Okay.

So the insurance says she was dead, and they said that he was filing for it way back then, but now they're trying to figure out who's going to get the money. So they asked to go to court to get a judge to decide who gets the money. It's going to go to her kid probably, but then who's going to be the executor of this shit and all that. January 1985, the state takes his chiropractic license away. Okay. I mean, not like he uses chainsaws in there or anything, but still.

The chairman of the Iowa Board of Chiropractic Examiners said, I think you could say that the board has been watching the situation very closely. We can't have a murderer.

Yeah.

Joyce's parents buy the first item sold. They had to buy shit from their own estate. It was their daughter's pottery bear collection. I wouldn't probably let them just buy anything they wanted right out of the gate. I would hope so. Right.

I would fucking hope so. So September, the bank holding the mortgage buys back the house as well. So now they own it. They have two different permanent memorials dedicated to her. Kneeler in the chapel at the Zion Lutheran Church in Davenport and at her grave site at the Davenport Memorial Park. They have a thing up for her. 1986, Iowa Supreme Court appeals here. Yeah.

By the way, we're getting to it. Full description of the murder. So, um, he, the justices ruling on this thing here basically said that, um,

He's going on the scientific tests that are used to identify the victims. They're saying – the prosecutors are saying that they've long been recognized by physicians and the legal profession. The court will also rule on whether it was proper for the prosecutors to play the tape of their conversation between them when he admitted that he wanted to kill her.

Or he tried to kill her or talked about killing her. They argued the conversation was privileged interpersonal communication and should not have been introduced as evidence. But they said there the judge ruled there is no privileged communication in cases involving the prosecution of a crime committed against a spouse. Right. You couldn't use that if he killed somebody else and it was trying to get that. Maybe you can use it then, but you can use it. Yeah. That person's dead.

That person's dead. So they said also, quote, a witness testified she had seen Clint putting plastic bags on his boat, then transporting them out to the river. One of the bags was said to be so heavy that it required him to use both hands to carry. We merely conclude the evidence was sufficient. And they said that affirmed fuck off. 1992, he comes clean.

What? Comes clean and gel. He's in there. He's up for fucking, he's up for parole in like three years now. So you might as well admit it and get that going. So he tells the Fort Dodge messenger newspaper that he killed his wife in self-defense. Listen to his story, but you know, the murder weapon now, and you know what he did. He says, quote, I turned the corner into the bedroom and I said, hi to Joyce. And as I did, she brought the gun up and pointed it to my head.

I ran out of the bedroom and the pool room was right outside. I picked up the pool ball and threw it back toward her. I like just, you know, wild. I was an athlete and I could throw fairly, fairly hard. I wasn't trying to hit her, just trying to buy a little time. I kept waiting for the concussion when she shot, but it never came. Like he thought that she was going to shoot at him. He threw an errant eight ball and knocked her out.

Come on. That's what he says. He said he ran away. Then as he crept back up the stairs, he said he could see only a portion of his wife's body on the floor. And he believed she was in a firing position. Like she was waiting for him to come up the steps like a sniper. She's going to pick him off. With a .357. With a .357 because that's how you hold one of those easily. Yeah, you lay down. No kicking those at all. That won't shoot out and hit you in the forehead if you do that. So he said, but then I see her gun.

And it's just lying there on the floor three feet away from her. So I'm in the bedroom and I roll her over to see and I see what's happened. She's bleeding from her eyes, nose and mouth. And there's no 911 to call back then. So I'm trying to call the police. How do you try to call the police? One ball.

One ball fired, not even looking, just, ah, get away from me, from the other room. Hit her in the head and destroyed her skull. From the mouth, eyes, and nose. He drilled her straight between the eyes? Yeah. He said he was trying to call the police, but then she makes a horrible sound and stops breathing. So I do CPR. I pump her heart, the whole thing, and the phone's making this horrible squealing sound.

Yeah. Okay. I think about calling the police or my dad, but he's had a heart attack, so I don't want to bother him. You know, I don't want to bother him. I don't want to bother him. I don't want to be a bother. He said, that's irrational, but I don't. I think about suicide, the whole thing. I'm thinking the pool balls hit her in the head. How could I have, how could it have, how could it have happened?

He said that he rolled his wife's body into sheets and blankets. He drove at random, stopping at a gas station and at a spot on the river where he often went boating. He said he looked for a place to bury the body, but the Mississippi River was flooded, as it often is. So he said he later put the body into a wheelbarrow and hid it in a 30-foot boat in his backyard.

So he's saying that when the cops came to search his house, the fucking... She was in the boat. That's what he's saying. I don't know if that's true or not. He eventually took the body to a flooded spot near the Mississippi River. He said, I walked into waist-deep water and I strapped Joyce to a tree with bungee cords. And I weighted her down with three 90-pound cement bags. I drove home and went to bed. I couldn't sleep all night. Oh, poor guy. What? What?

He said two days later, he returned to the scene in a swamp boat. He said, she's under the tree and I know the water is going down. So I drive out there with a chainsaw and two pieces of paneling and 12 bungee straps. I think about it and I just can't see me doing this, but I'm doing it. He said he chainsawed her out there by the river. Didn't even do it at home. He said, I get there to the tree. I stopped the boat and I put my, my chest waders and I'm talking to Joyce. I'm saying, Oh God, Joyce,

What the fuck? This guy is a fucking lunatic. He said he put his wife's body between the pieces of paneling, secured it with the cord, and used the chainsaw to cut the paneling and body into pieces. He sandwiched her to stop the mess. He did like people cut a bunch of tomatoes at once. Yeah. And you put them between two plates. That's what he did. That's what he did. Wow.

Wow. Unbelievable. The next line's wild. He said, you keep hoping helicopters will fly over and light up the sky and something will stop you, but nothing did.

Oh, my word. Then he said this at the end of the jail interview. Quote, I can tell you this. When I finally walk out that door, I'll be pure, pure as you'd ever want. Get out of my fucking life. You monster. Wow. I'm going to tell you every because I'm already convicted and I can. That's right. 2004, March 13th.

Jim will be released from prison here. Oh, my. Five days shy of the 21st anniversary of Joyce's disappearance.

Originally sentenced to 50 years, the sentence was automatically cut in half. Then he was given time off for good behavior under the laws in effect at the time. So that's why he's not even on parole. He's released. That's a free man. Free and clear. They said if sentenced today for the crime, he would serve at least 42 and a half years. Yeah.

He began serving his sentence at a maximum security state prison. He earned a move to a minimum security prison in Rockwell County in February 92. That's what they said. They said he worked in the prison kitchen and as a lead dog trainer.

So he was training dogs and working in the kitchen. He earned 47 cents an hour as a tutor for fellow inmates and will be given $100 upon his release, plus the money in his commissary. If he needs the items, the prison will also give him a T-shirt, a button-down shirt, blue jeans, underwear, socks, and a winter coat. He'll also be given any personal property that he had when he got arrested. So they said that he'll be issued papers saying that he's discharged from his sentence and he...

They give him a copy of his Social Security card, so he can definitely have that. And he did have a few problems in prison, including, they said, lying during an investigation of another prisoner's actions and inappropriate communication with a fellow prisoner. I don't know what that was. Blowing him or what? I don't know what that is. That'd be inappropriate communication. So they said, overall, good behavior figured into the reduction. He will serve 15 days shy of 20 years.

or about double the average for a second-degree murder back then. Well, that's good at least. Yeah, they didn't let him out when he was first—because he was up for parole in 10. Well, they went and said what he did, and they're like, we can't let this fucking guy out. No. The problem is they should have put him on parole and not done this because—listen to this here—he won't have to report to any authorities. Wow. So, yeah. Yeah.

I don't understand the cut in half thing. That's so weird. The director of the Crime Victim Assistance Division of the Iowa Attorney General's Office said this case is an example of why sentencing laws were changed. When we see someone like Mr. Clint get out, we have to consider the context within which he was convicted. It was a different time. It was a different understanding of domestic abuse. I don't believe it would happen today that he would be getting out of prison after serving as little time as he served. Yeah.

Yeah, that is un-both-fucking-leavable, man. Yeah, they said he didn't have DNA technology, which would have probably got them the first degree. Identification, yeah. And went on to say, this is a man who killed his wife, had two trials, was convicted of second-degree murder in 84, then in 92, after all that time proclaiming his innocence, finally confessed that he had done it. And that's when they moved him to a minimum security. Right. This is a man who was manipulating the system as much as he had probably manipulated his wife.

So two cops here that worked on it. One cop said because they asked about DNA. This case laid the groundwork for the future use of DNA in court. And it's cited. It's cited. This is a big case. One of the cops said, quote, I would trade all the physical evidence in the world for one good snitch.

Yeah. And his partner said, I was the physical evidence guy. He was the investigator. Like he doesn't understand physical evidence. He just wants a snitch. He just wants a snitch. The thing they say is they talk about they logged hundreds of hours. Marianne Roth recalls Kern calling them up at 3 a.m. a couple times. This is the cop. Just didn't know what time it was because he's been working for 36 straight hours. So he's like, oh, shit, my bad. It's 3 a.m. They asked about whether there's.

Whenever there's a mention of it comes up, he said they always ask him if he ever wanted to run a DNA test to make sure that it's her. Because now the technology is there that they can do that. And he says the last small piece of Joyce's remains was kept for 20 years in case of appeal. It was destroyed when he was released. Oh, my God.

So he said, quote, it's a debt. It's a debt now paid. So they just all the evidence is gone. They threw it out. This is awful. We'll never. Yeah, they'll never say yes. It's definitely her. I mean, we. Yeah. Wow. Somebody bought a pool table and the murder weapons and the murder weapons before they know idea. No fucking clue. He probably wiped it off, put it right back on the table and they went, holy shit, I wonder what ball it was.

Wow. So they said that the prosecution would have been in a much easier way to do this now. But, you know, they said the prosecutor at the time said, who was at the prosecutor at the time, later he said, I live by a system and rules. Jim Clint paid the penalty that was placed upon him. I don't believe the community is at risk because Jim Clint is free. Are you kidding me? He's not going to go rob fucking gas stations and shoot people, but...

Now, a lot of people have a lot of shit to say about this, by the way. People are pissed off. His parents say they can't wait to have him back. He's going to take care of them now, I guess, while he was in prison. They were the one raising Bart. Bart became a successful chiropractor in Kentucky, by the way. Atta boy. How weird is it to follow your father's footsteps after your father chainsawed your mother? Yeah.

You'd think you'd do the opposite of whatever he did, right? I bet he hates pool, though. He must fucking hate it. You play pool? No, I don't. Yeah, so they would travel all the way to see him every few weeks. His parents, his mom said, we're just bursting. They're so happy. They're there. They still believe that he's innocent. Ma, he said what he did. Oh, but he did it in self-defense. Okay, so they believe that.

And they also said he may try to get his chiropractor license reinstated. Can you imagine? The board of examiners said they would consider such a request and decide whether or not to approve it. They said Jim would be required to take an exam and continuing education courses as part of that process. Mary Ann Roth said as much of a dick and a murderer and everything else that he is, he did heal my back problems. She said he did. He did heal my back problems, but he killed my best friend, too.

She said it still hurts. So what is so painful is that it never needed to happen. Yeah, obviously not. So, yeah, there's a couple that lives in their house now, by the way, that we know about. We'll talk about that later on. They say that's not haunted. And also the Roths and all the friends say they don't fear his release. They don't think he's going to come to kill them.

Okay. August 2004, Jim pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge of interfering with officers and pays a $50 fine. Police were called to his residence in regards to a domestic dispute with his girlfriend. What? He disobeyed a police order against reentering the house, and he went back in. Then when the cops tried to arrest him and take him away, he tried to twist away from the officers, and then they handcuffed him.

He's a problem. Yeah. October 2004, he's charged with two counts of drug possession and possession of drug paraphernalia after he stopped at 3 a.m. at West 4th Street and Western Avenue. He was sentenced to one year probation for the drug possession. A female passenger was also charged. Yes. 2006, he's selling murder tacos now. What are you talking about? He's selling tacos, Jimmy. Where? Where?

In fucking Davenport. He's selling tacos. He has a business and he's making Mexican food. Yeah. A writer named David Heights wrote, I was a regular at a bar in Davenport called Mary's on Second. The owner of the bar told me the news about the infamous chiropractor's new career. He and his friend ordered the tacos there regularly. He said, quote, James Clinton, who cut up his wife with a chainsaw, is now running a taco stand. And they said, yes, it's called Eats and Sweets. Yeah.

I had to go check it out, and there he was, James Clint, the bald, once sophisticated-looking chiropractor who once lived in a stunning home with his wife and son. It's not stunning. It's just weird. It's not that big of a deal. The man who lobbed a pool ball at his wife, killed her, then cut her up with a chainsaw before throwing the pieces in the river. Probably beat the shit out of her with that pool ball.

And Clint, wow, he says that, Jesus Christ, they said he's been, they're talking about him being arrested. He said, quote, this is what Clint said, I learned how to make tacos from the Hispanics while I was in the joint. The what? The Hispanics while I was in the joint. Yeah, in the joint. He said, so he learned tacos. By the way, even Jay Leno made a joke on The Tonight Show about the chainsaw guy selling murder tacos now. Yeah.

So they asked, they interviewed him. They asked him if he was sorry for what he's done. He said, I apologize for the act and I apologize for the lies. He said he sent a letter to his wife's family, but they never got back to her. So I don't know.

He said, I'm caring for my elderly parents. He said, a lot of people didn't forgive me, but what are you going to fucking do here? The DA said, I'm glad he has a job at least. What am I going to say? I want him to sit in a corner and die? He said, quote, I assume because of his reputation that it would be difficult to hold a job with someone else. Because of his notoriety, it would become disruptive in the business place. But having that notoriety and owning a business where you're trying to attract people might come in handy.

You know, use your... Weirdos might want the murder machaca. They want little pieces of meat that this guy cut up. I don't. Does he carve the carny with a chainsaw? That's how he should do it. He should have it on a big spit like shawarma, but use a chainsaw.

Holy shit. His son has his own, Bartley, has his own chiropractic office far away from Davenport. He doesn't like it when reporters write stories about his dad's crime. And everybody said he spent his entire life trying to move past it. Sorry, Bartley. I apologize. But you're in your 50s. You can fucking deal with it. It's horrible. I feel terrible for you, what happened to you. That's just disturbing as fuck.

So Jim said that he has a good relationship with his son somehow. And he's enormously proud of his son's success. He said, though, he seldom leaves the house now, Jim does, except to cook tacos at Eats and Sweets. He said he's not dating anymore. Yeah. After I got arrested last time. I beat him off all the time. He said, considering what happened to the woman who was with me, it doesn't make for good dating.

Yeah, that first date's awkward. Why are you divorced? I'm not really divorced. Jesus. All the tavern regulars say his tacos are really good. He said, almost everyone, most everyone I talked to who tried them gave him two thumbs up. So I don't know. There are those who said he did his time and he makes good tacos. And there's those who said they'd never buy a taco from him after what he did. Uh-huh.

So, but yeah, a six pack of tacos are only $6. That's a great, that's better than Taco Bell's deal. That's fucking great. And goat cheese was 75 cents extra per three tacos. So an extra $1.50 for a six pack of goat cheese. Sometimes he would run out of tacos. He sold them so well. I believe it. Yep. He was also rejected from a charity gig. Also, he said, I'll make the food. And they were like, that's okay. No, thanks.

Yep. So someone from the local muscular dystrophy association approached him about participating in a lockup fundraiser where people in the community are arrested and then have to make bond by calling friends. He said he was excited about the idea, but then they told him, wait a second. No, not you. You are actually in there. He said, basically stand up comics that emceed it. Yeah. Two idiot comics that emceed it at two o'clock in the fucking afternoon.

We did that. So they said, basically, we found out you are an ex-convict, he said. So they said, would Jerry Lewis approve of that attitude? I don't know. Like, I don't know. I don't know if Jerry would care. 2008, Jim's arrested for another time and he pleads guilty in a drug case here. He pleads guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia, specifically a crack pipe.

He's smoking crack? He's smoking crack, Jimmy. And audience, crack. What? He's a crackhead now. He was fined $65. He was driving a Plymouth minivan at 10.30 p.m. on a Sunday when he was stopped for no fucking plate light. Smoking crack in a Voyager. Yep.

He was detained for safety reasons. They figured out he was a murderer. And during a pat down, one of the deputies found a thin round object in his right back pants pocket. It's a crack pipe with burnt residue. And one of the passengers in the van fled. The deputies had to find him. He was Gregory Irving, 24, who's 30 years younger than him. What? Of Rock Island, who was wanted in connection with a stabbing at Penguin's Comedy Club.

I give up, man. Get out of here. I swear to God they were able to track Irving down and arrest him. There we go. This is fucking Farts Against Humanity. That's what I mean. It's ridiculous. 2010, Clint falls down and dies. What? Falls down and dies. Dead.

Did he hit his head on a fucking nine ball? Yeah, he hit his head on a pool ball. His parents are still alive. Wow. And they said they'll miss his son. He was code blue and unresponsive and not breathing when they arrived at Genesis Medical Center here.

The father said that he died after a bad fall. Said,

Wouldn't it be amazing if he hit the corner of a table and ripped his fucking stomach open? That'd be awesome. They said they've been caring for him. And 2022 is when the house was sold, the murder house.

And the former owner said, it's kind of bittersweet for me. It's sad. I love this house. I love the neighborhood, the location, the size of it. We've raised our kids here, but they're ready to move on. She said, people are like, are there any ghosts? I'm like, no, there's no ghosts here. I promise. It's just a beautiful home. No, it was just a fucking weird home where a man murdered his wife.

So there you go. It's only on .33 acres, too. Three-bedroom, three-bath, two-and-a-half. Three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath. There you go. So that, everybody, is Davenport, Iowa.

Can you see why we made an exception on population for this story? It's fucking unbelievable. If you think it's unbelievable to tell everyone about it, get on whatever app you're listening on. Give us a review. Give us five stars. Doesn't matter what you say. Tell us what your favorite kind of taco is. You bet. And we will love it. Is it a soft taco? Is it a hard? Is it like a San Diego fish taco? Is it like a Taco Bell American taco? Tex-Mex type thing. Is it a street taco? What is it? Tell us. Uh,

Also, spread the show around. Tell your friends. Follow on social media. Share on social media. It helps immensely. Head to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Get your tickets for live shows. Oh, man, live shows, especially. They are selling fast. Two are already sold out, one of them in November. First up, Sacramento, April 5th. San Francisco, April 6th. Get your tickets now. Still some good seats available there. And Minnesota, especially. Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We got a bigger venue this year. And if you sell this out, it will be our biggest show of all time. Right. We'll beat Chicago from 2023. So when people ask us, and they do all the time, what's the biggest show you've ever done? We're going to go fucking Minneapolis, bitches. That's right. Because you guys rock. So do that for us. Thank you so much. And of course, all the other dates too. Shut up and give me murder.com. April 20th, 420 virtual live show, baby. No matter where you are in the world.

in your living room, in your yard, on your porch. You can watch us do a live show just like a regular live show, except we're in a studio that looks like a stage, and you are in your house, and it will be 420 themed. I'm going to break out all sorts of new smoking apparatus to scare the shit out of Jimmy, and we're going to dress up. It's got it all, so get your tickets for that. They're available, I believe, the 22nd, February 22nd. Those are available for purchase. Shut up and give me murder.com. That's my birthday.

That is Jimmy's birthday. Make sure to say happy birthday. As a present to Jimmy, buy tickets to the virtual live show. There it is. Come watch it. So do that. Get those. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports is where you get all of the bonus material. $5 or above gets you everything, the whole back catalog, new ones every other week. You name it, it's there for you. This week is no exception. This week, we're going to talk about, for Crime and Sports, what you get. We're going to talk about Paul Sasso, who is a fucking...

Like a mob guy. He was a gangster owner of a football team and did a lot of crazy shit, as you can imagine. And then for Small Town Murder, we have very fun stuff. We're going to talk about Natalia Grace. Oh, boy. That whole disaster. Somebody's lying. Who's lying? Is it the parents? Did she really try to kill them? Can anybody make tears pop out of their eyes like that, Father? It's insane. Yeah.

We'll talk about it all. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. Also follow us on social media at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Small Town Pod on Facebook. That said, I need to hear the names of those wonderful fucking people on the face of the earth. Jimmy, do me a favor. Hit me with them right goddamn now. This was Executive Producer Jordan Bennett, Kyle Norweg. Again, thanks.

Kyle, Caroline Moore, thank you so much. And Erica Magliacchetti, thank you so much. Hey, thank you. That's a great fucking name, Magliacchetti. I love it. I fucking nailed it. Nice. If I don't do something like fucking pasta. All right. Other producers this week. I knew somebody with a last name like that.

Really? Magliocetti? That sounds delicious. Good God. You had a girl in high school with that last name. A little meat sauce? Forget about it. Hey, put some... I'll have the... Yeah, no, I'll have the... No, the al dente. Make the magliocetti al dente. I like it better. Does the magliocetti have clams? I'll take the clams, yeah. Other producers this week are Liz Vasquez.

Go ahead. Sorry. Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Jolly Green Giant, Tyler Frazier's music. I didn't look up what Tyler Frazier's music is, but I hope it's good. Janice Hill, Jessica Wegner. Aaron Olin is a construction worker, James. He owns his own construction company. Goddamn. And he's crushing it. Good for you, Aaron. Keep it up. Jack S. Ward, Kelly Fuller, Ayanna Harrison-Riley, Mark Gichiro. Gichiro. Gichiro. Gichiro.

Mark, you got a tough name. Holly Bostany. Holly Bostany. Ada Urbanek. Urbanek. Urbanek. James B. Stephanie Longhurst. Joshua Sharp. Jay Sisk. Adam Hillsamer. Mary Fontana. Nate Gooden.

Uh,

Michael Brock, Erica Kenny, Kennedy, John Mackey, Jess Nordfors, Darlene Sheets, Melissa Nelson, Kristen Birch, Michelle Johns, Melissa McLeod-Clark, Michelle with no last name, Matt Fisher, Matthew Fisher, Robert Sabica, Sabiki, so backy.

Sobakee. All right. Jenny Acevedo. Josh Hines. Natasha McCunnins. McCunney. That's what that is. DeGuerra Cook. Bethany Wojtek. Wojtek? Like Wojtek Wojkiewski. Justin Carrington. Let's go, Manson. It's the only Wojtek I know. All of us. Hey, I know that one. Hey.

Angela McCullough, Sherwood, Bob Meeners, Miners, Odette Marie, Jody Stith, Lucy Shaver, Shearer, Lucy Shearer, Sean, Shan maybe? Yeah.

Ryan Foley, Texas Pete, Andrea Wagoner, Bliss without the ESO. I don't know what that means. Greg Hodge, Pamela Easterbrook, Hilary Chip, Bree McNeil, Lupe Rodriguez-Robinson, Regina Lawson, who's your nurse? All right. Jamie, Serechio, Serechio, Serechio, Ed Payne, Stephen Jacobs. Something Italian.

Jorge M. BJ Wilford. Travis Traversy. Well, that's a tough one. How do they do that to you, Travis? Parents did you wrong right there. Traversy. Son of a bitch. Jesus. How many names have Trav as the first four letters? You can't do that. One? You said, let's give him that one. Let's go Travis. It's not like half the names are Travertine and Traveresque. It's not like those aren't names. One name. Poor Travis. Emily Matsumura. Sorry, Travis.

Yeah, Matsumura. Good for you, Emily. Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel Quinner. Hannah with no last name. Andrea Lentine, Lentine, Lentine. Jill with no last name. Tracy Gamal, Gamal, Gamal, Gamal.

Gabe Benbrook, Scott Everett, Josh Bowe, Scott Mars, Kara Moreland, Caleb with no last name, Scott Payden, Nova's Dad 308, Lord Lucifer, Calista Oberhelmer, Oberhelman, Oberhelman,

Uh, Sean, uh, Suratsky, Bristie, Bristie, McKintare, Flandog, 1999, Leah Williams, Kim with no last name, Ethan Cher, Cherveny, Cherveny, uh, Kyler, Kyler Hoover, Nancy Hale Minix, Joe G. Uh,

Debra with no last name. Jessica Deerfield. Megan Conklin. Steph with no last name. Leslie Lick. Morgan Frazier. Dana C. Natalie with no last name. Heather A. Worley. Sandy with no last name. Shiloh Scarrington. Sheila. Sheila Scarrington. Shiloh. Who does that? Lisa G. Krista with no last name. Lana Vooley. Courtney Angler. Mickey Friesen. Kathy M. Bethany. Bethany Lovett.

Kyle D'Amizio. D'Amizio. D'Amizio. Is that right? Angel Scruggs. Amy Cornette. Piper T. Piper H. That's what that is. That's not even a T. It's an H. Dan Trotter. No, just one. Ashley Dahlia. Nicole Faulkner. OMOM43. Devin Abernathy. Brittany Britton. What? Why would you do it? There's only one name. It starts with Britt. It's Brittany. It's the only one.

That's fucking A, man. Alan would know. I rule last name. John Bentley Bobby would know last name. Jay would know last name. Marissa Rice Cat would know last name. That could be the Williams. Dara Noel. Kelly Sayers. Elizabeth Volz Temple. Jessica. Let me tell you something about this shit Patreon. Sorry.

These two white boys be up to some shit. Jessica Holmes. Bullshithunting.com. Carissa Scarola. Kayla with no last name. Jeremy Patrick Swayze O'Brien III. Joey Jojo Jr. Shabadoo. Alicia with no last name. Hadley Nair. Sarah Quartz. Austin Van Vleck. Marla.

Mo and Dan and Lux. No, that's just Lux. And Jonesy. Olivia Zook. Nikki Sabaski. Ashley Nicole Spencer-Trees. Sarah with no last name. Aaron Niedzolakowski. And all of our patrons. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, everybody.

You wonderful, wonderful, wonderful bastards. We just can't tell you how much we appreciate it. You want to find us on social media, shut up and give me murder.com, drop down menu, links to everything. You can't get lost. That said, thank you for joining us. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Rack them. Rack them.

She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.