Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome back, bingers, to another episode of the podcast. Okay, honestly, I'm just gonna jump right into the episode by saying not everybody is parent material. Probably a good third of the population or greater isn't parent material.
But people who aren't fit to be parents have kids anyway, and many of those kids will grow into troubled adults, some of which themselves will become unfit parents, and the cycle just perpetuates itself. No one likes to talk about child abuse. It's a taboo topic, and people often prefer to turn a blind eye to it. And there's this kind of bogus notion that how people choose to raise their children is nobody's business.
But bad parenting is at the root of, well, probably most of society's ills. An abusive parent is, in a way, one of the most monstrous kind of people in our society because they're entrusted with the ultimate responsibility. They have total control over the life of an initially helpless human being and it's their job to sculpt that person like a lump of clay into a whole human being.
Unfit parents often approach this responsibility differently. They see it more as an opportunity to completely dominate and control another being, or to shape that little person into a servant, into a source of validation. Other types of unfit parents see their children as burdens they'd like to unload.
Sometimes, if they have the resources, they'll send their children away to boarding school or they'll abandon their families. And in rare instances, they'll kill their kids so they can, you know, according to them, shed that pesky baggage. And then there are the children who become missing persons due to non-custodial parents feeling so entitled to possession of their child or children that they take them from the custodial parent and disappear.
Today's case falls into one of these categories. So let's dig in. Blossie Avenue in Spokane, Washington was a peaceful residential street in a low-crime neighborhood, a neighborhood that was mostly populated by elderly retirees. And living among them in the fall of 1999 was a 33-year-old truck driver named Brad Jackson and his 9-year-old daughter Valerie.
Brad was a single dad with sole custody of Valerie, and the two of them lived with Brad's parents in a three-bedroom house of less than 1,200 square feet. Brad had not had any contact whatsoever with the girl's mother, Roseanne Pleasant, since 1992. He and Roseanne had never married, and the woman had seemingly up and vanished, abandoning her baby daughter.
And as Valerie got older, she never heard from her mother who just wasn't in the girl's life at all. She, in a way, had her grandmother and grandfather in the household as well as her dad. And she seemed to all of her teachers and the faculty at McDonald Elementary School to be a happy and well-adjusted little girl.
A bright, intelligent, and friendly fourth grader, Valerie, with her red curly hair that earned her the nickname Annie, was sort of a teacher's pet. But on the morning of Monday, October 18th, 1999, the tranquility of Blossie Avenue would be shattered, and it began with a frantic knocking on the front door of the Jackson's neighbors.
It was around 8:40 a.m. and Arlene Horn opened her front door to find Brad Jackson, her neighbor, crying and shaking.
By God, by God, he said, I can't find Valerie. He explained that he had been getting ready to walk Valerie to school, and as she was in the backyard playing with the dog, he went down to the basement to do the laundry. And he heard the garage door open, which meant that she'd gone into the front yard. And at 8.30, when it was time to go to school, he went to the front yard to get her, but she was gone. Her backpack was on the front steps of the house, and Valerie was nowhere in sight.
Arlene helped him look around the neighborhood, but to no avail. Brad went to Valerie's school and asked if anyone there had seen her. Maybe she walked on her own, but she never showed up. At 8:45 a.m., Brad called the Spokane Sheriff's Department. In a weepy and quavering voice, he told the dispatcher he couldn't find his daughter, that they were getting ready to go and she'd gone outside to play because she was done early and now he couldn't find her.
He gave a description of his daughter, brown eyes, red hair, and described in exact and precise detail everything Valerie was wearing that morning. Six detectives and three trained dogs were immediately dispatched to the Jackson address. They searched the inside of the house thoroughly, two times, but the girl wasn't there.
Brad, in going through his account of that morning again during the search, explained that he'd been in the basement doing laundry when Valerie vanished, and when he was asked what he was washing, he explained he was washing Valerie's bedsheets because she had suffered a nosebleed the night before.
During the search, one of the investigators, Detective Dave Madsen, found blood spots on Valerie's pillow and some faded blood on her sheets, which seemed to corroborate Brad's story, though he didn't find anything else in the house that would have been used in stopping a nosebleed, like bloody paper towels or towels or anything like that.
which he thought was a little interesting. He asked if he could take the sheets and pillow, and Brad had no problem with this. So he was being cooperative and seemed genuinely distraught by his daughter's disappearance. Exploring the possibility that Valerie had walked to school by herself, detectives contacted administrators at McDonald Elementary, but again, as they told Brad earlier in the morning, they hadn't seen her since the previous week.
As noon struck, police and volunteers from the neighborhood began a larger search effort for Valerie. One of the volunteer searchers from the neighborhood was Shelly Eagland, who happened to know Valerie well. She was a crossing guard and also a teacher's aide at Valerie's elementary school. She arrived at the house and consoled Brad, who seemed beside himself. She then helped in the search while Brad stayed behind at the home.
The searchers went house to house, block to block, covering about 120 homes in the area, but nothing turned up.
And during the neighborhood canvas, not a single clue to explain what might have happened to Valerie. Could she have run away? Valerie was not a troubled kid. She'd never run away before and had no known problems at school or with her family. Nor had she ever talked about running away. So her disappearance was a complete mystery.
Neighbors and friends were shocked. No one at her school saw any signs of trouble. The McDonald Elementary faculty was hit hard by the news of her disappearance. They considered Valerie like a member of their own families. When Karen, Brad's mother, returned home that afternoon and discovered Valerie had gone missing, she prepared a written statement pleading for her granddaughter's safe return and read it on the local news.
Brad himself appeared to be so devastated by his daughter's disappearance that he holed up in the house most of the day and was so out of it that it took him hours to provide a picture of Valerie to the news media. As night began to fall, the search was called off until sunrise. When it resumed the following morning, the sheriff's office expanded their canvas area.
and upon talking to area residents they got their first potential lead two days earlier a 13 year old girl had been approached by a long-haired man in a flatbed truck who attempted to lure her into his vehicle the man told the girl he had cigarettes and marijuana and he even offered her money
but the girl was wise enough to turn him down and flee the area. Detectives connected this girl with a police sketch artist, and they sat down and created a drawing of the man who tried to potentially abduct her.
People in the community now feared that a child predator had appeared in their town and they worried whose child might be next. Flyers went up in shop windows, area supermarkets, on car windows, and online. Broadcasts on local news stations asked the community to report anything suspicious. Investigators also wanted to connect with Roseanne Pleasant, the girl's mother, but were having a hard time tracking her down.
They learned that Roseanne was a drug user and had long been involved in sex work. The last time anyone had seen her was on September 29, 1992, one week before Valerie's second birthday.
She had just visited Brad and Valerie, and shortly after that visit, she phoned her older brother, John Stone, an evangelist minister and owner of an advertising firm. And Roseanne told her brother she was scared. Her relatives believed that it may have had something to do with the murder of a friend of hers, a fellow sex worker, who was found shot to death in southern Spokane County, Washington, a few weeks earlier.
She had gone to the morgue to identify the body and it had spooked her. Seven years had passed since the disappearance of Roseanne and now her daughter was missing. And Roseanne's family wondered if she had perhaps returned and taken her daughter. Although they'd long presumed that Roseanne was dead before this.
And it didn't seem characteristic of Roseanne, if she were alive, to cut contact with her biological family for so many years. But of course, you have to look into the mother. Three days after Valerie's disappearance, there was still no sign of her. Investigators broadened the scope of their efforts. They began interviewing local sex offenders and even did a second canvas of Valerie's neighbors.
Dozens of tips were phoned in. There was a report of a suspicious blue Chevy Blazer with an unfamiliar male driving with blonde hair. But this tip, like all the others that were phoned in, led nowhere, as is often the case. But Roseanne's brother, John Stone, had suspicions of his own. And those suspicions fell squarely on Brad Jackson.
Roseanne's family actually had long suspected that Brad was the person responsible for their daughter Roseanne's disappearance seven years earlier. Her life with Brad was a nightmare, full of physical and emotional abuse, and their problems only intensified after Valerie, their daughter, was born. In John Stone's last conversation with his sister before her disappearance,
She told him she was afraid of Brad and that he had a bunch of lye lying around, no pun intended, and she knew that lye is often used to dissolve dead bodies. When Roseanne's family stopped hearing from her and she missed her daughter's second birthday, they knew something was very wrong. She had left all of her belongings behind, along with an uncashed check. At the time, Brad worked in construction and was working on cement and building foundations.
Roseanne's family suspected that Brad may have buried her body near or underneath one of those building foundations. So back then, at the time, Brad was questioned by police and asked to submit to a lie detector test, but he refused. Roseanne's family flew into Spokane at the time and went around to local businesses and churches with flyers, and they did their own detective work, but no trace of Roseanne ever surfaced.
and investigators eventually concluded that she had probably just been the victim of a serial killer. Seven years later, with her daughter Valerie now missing, Valerie's uncle began to suspect that Brad had done it again, possibly sold Valerie into a pornography ring for money. And the money Brad was raising for a reward to help find Valerie, he had opened a bank account into which he was receiving thousands of dollars in donations from the community.
John believed Brad was raising that money to pocket it himself, to pay his drug debts, not to help in the search with his daughter. And with a prior conviction for theft, Brad didn't exactly have a clean criminal record. Police were also suspicious about aspects of Brad's phone call, like the way he was able to recall in such vivid detail everything Valerie was wearing that morning.
"She's got blue jeans with dark blue down the side," he had said. "Purple socks, bright pink coat with little blue flowers on it." And also how he was so specific about times. Like when he kept saying that he first discovered Valerie was missing at 8:32 a.m. That's very precise. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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She had reached out to Johnstone, Valerie's uncle, who had flown in from Arizona to help, and she confided in him that Brad hadn't left her alone since the disappearance. And although the principal of the elementary school told the faculty that Brad was a good father, in fact, he often showed up at school to eat lunch with his daughter, and they should be supportive of him rather than suspicious,
Shelly wasn't on board. She'd been spending too much time with Brad and saw too many concerning behaviors to ignore, like how he seemed more concerned that police suspected him and that the media wouldn't go away than he was about Valerie's whereabouts. In fact, he hardly mentioned Valerie, his missing daughter. He seemed worried only about himself. And he told Shelly at one point, it's my story and I'm sticking to it.
But he sang it to the tune of "It's My Party" with a weird smile on his face. I was just about to sing that for you guys, but I'll save your ears. Investigators also learned that Valerie had been having conflicts with a woman her father had been dating named Danette Schroeder. Brad and Valerie had been living with Danette until about seven months earlier when they moved out and into his parents' house.
When they lived together, Valerie and Danette clashed hardcore. And Danette eventually talked Brad into taking Valerie to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist ended up prescribing the little girl Paxil, which is an SSRI, more commonly known as an antidepressant. But the relationship between Danette and Brad ended up souring anyway, and eventually, like I said, they moved out and Danette stopped seeing Brad.
The police at this point were growing increasingly suspicious of Brad and he could feel it, especially when they executed a search warrant on his house and his two vehicles, his truck and his car. Among the items they found and took into evidence were Valerie's prescription bottle of Paxil and Valerie's diary, which they found in her bedroom.
And the most interesting thing in her diary was an entry dated October 12th, 1999, about a week before she had disappeared, in which she complained that her father wouldn't leave her alone in her bedroom. Investigators wondered what this meant. And during the examination of the bedding they had confiscated from Jackson's home on the day of Valerie's disappearance,
the forensic lab found two red pubic hairs. Pubic hairs that they later determined resembled Brad Jackson's. But the problem with that potential evidence is that pubic hair can be transferred from one room to another just by moving around. It can be picked up by someone walking in socks.
So because there were multiple possible explanations for why Brad's pubic hair may have been found in his daughter Valerie's bed, this alone wasn't hugely significant. While in the house, the investigation team tested the wash cycles on the laundry machines in the basement, and they found inconsistencies in the timeline of Brad's account. His story just wasn't adding up.
They impounded Brad's vehicles, a 1995 Ford pickup and a 1985 Honda Accord. And while they didn't find anything in Brad's vehicles, they did leave something behind in both of them before they returned them to him. And what they left behind was, at the time, a fairly new technology, at least in terms of its use in criminal investigations.
They left GPS devices in both of Brad's vehicles without telling him, of course. They wanted to track his movements, curious to see if he might lead them to where he was possibly hiding Valerie's body. They were theorizing at this point that Brad had killed his daughter Valerie and buried her somewhere, but police kept it on the down low that Brad was a suspect.
The community continued to rally around him and offer their support in helping locate his missing daughter. A candlelight vigil was held two weeks after the disappearance. The mass of people gathered there were praying for Valerie's safe return. Meanwhile, Brad himself told the media that he was being looked at as a suspect and offered to take a polygraph test so the police would shift their focus off of him. Although the sheriff's office contradicted this,
They reported that detectives had given Brad the opportunity to take a lie detector test, and he told them at the time that he'd have to think about it. He also seemed uncomfortable about the news media being as ubiquitous as they were. You'd think he'd welcome the publicity and support if he truly was committed to seeing his daughter found.
But instead, he complained that he was being followed around and had to keep shaking off tails. Paranoid talk, which was also highly suspicious to investigators who weren't in fact telling him at all because they had those GPS devices in his vehicles. But they were getting a bit antsy in their wait for Brad to lead them somewhere significant.
And so lead detective Dave Madsen tried to hasten things up by approaching Brad and making it explicitly clear that investigators believed he had murdered his daughter. We know you buried her somewhere, he told Jackson, and it's only a matter of time before we find her. You probably didn't bury her deep enough. The animals will find her and then we'll find her and then we'll throw you in jail.
Detective Madsen was hoping this would trigger Jackson to go to the burial site and bury the girl's body even deeper or take her to another location. And shortly after this conversation, they noticed that Brad Jackson had made an interesting trip. One with multiple stops.
It was on the morning of November 6th, shortly before noon, that Brad drove to his rented storage unit on Highway 2. He was there only briefly before then driving to Danette Schroeder's house where he stopped for a brief period of time. And then after this, he went on a 60 mile drive across Highway 395 to a remote area known as Loon Lake.
Once he was there, he turned onto an unmarked logging road and stopped in this area, spending approximately 45 minutes at this location before returning home. It was later learned that Brad Jackson and his family were familiar with this location and they would go hunting here. And then four days later, the GPS showed that he drove to another wooded, desolate location about five miles from his house.
He spent about 15 minutes there and then from there drove the 60 miles back to the logging site he'd visited earlier that week, where he stopped for half an hour. On his way back home, he made several stops, including another visit to Danette Schroeder's home and another visit to a storage unit. That same day, police went to the Vicary Road location near Brad's parents' house and they brought cadaver dogs with them.
The dogs immediately led them to a shallow grave which police discovered was empty. However, they did find some valuable items left behind. Namely, two plastic shopping bags and duct tape with red hair attached to it. After processing this location, they traveled to the logging site and the cadaver dogs led them to an area of freshly excavated dirt.
They began digging and inside, in a grave deeper than the shallow grave they found at the other location, they found the body of Valerie Jackson lying face down. So Detective Madsen was right on the money in his thinking and Brad did exactly what he had hoped. But this find meant the unthinkable. Brad Jackson had buried his own daughter.
At autopsy, the medical examiner determined that Valerie had died from asphyxiation. On November 13th, Jackson again visited his rented storage unit and afterward he visited his friends Kelly and Sean Bash and asked to borrow their pickup truck.
He was carrying a welding mask during this visit and explained that he had a job to finish. He then drove to his ex-girlfriend Danette's house again, and when she asked him whose truck he was driving, he explained that he had to borrow a truck because he knew he was being followed. And then from there, he drove back to the remote logging site. And when he was there, he discovered that the grave he dug and placed Valerie in had been dug up and was now empty.
His nervous system at this point probably went into overdrive because when he returned to his friend's pickup truck, he left behind the shovel he'd used to dig the grave. And later that night, a warrant was put out for Brad's arrest and when police stopped him in Spokane, he was acting erratically and seemed to be suicidal and had a shotgun in his vehicle. So he was hospitalized for evaluation and when he was released, he was immediately charged with murder in the first degree.
But police still had more work to do in building their case against Brad Jackson. So the plastic bags they found in the shallow grave that Valerie had been moved from, traces of Valerie's blood were found inside of them. And these bags were identical to dozens of other plastic bags stored in the kitchen of the Jackson house. And the duct tape that was found along with the bags, that matched duct tape that the Jackson stored in the basement.
And then, Brad Jackson's footwear and tire impressions were located at both grave sites. And soil from these locations matched soil found in the bed of his pickup truck, on his boots, and on his shovel. To further strengthen their case, the district attorney had the plastic bag sent to the U.S. Secret Service for fingerprint analysis.
They wanted to prove that Brad handled these plastic bags, which had apparently been taped around Valerie's head, which they theorized was to prevent her blood from leaking into his vehicle while he transported the body. The forensic labs used by the Secret Service implemented a special, very high-tech process called vacuum metal deposition.
And this technique is used to find even the faintest fingerprints on non-porous surfaces like plastic.
The bags were placed into a vacuum chamber with gold and zinc powder, which is then heated and vaporized. And within the vacuum, they adhere to finger oils. And indeed, the process was effective in this case. Fingerprints were found both inside the plastic bag and on the duct tape. And those fingerprints matched the father, Brad Jackson. The medical examiner found no evidence that Valerie had been sexually abused.
But telltale bruising around her face and nose revealed that Brad had smothered her to death, probably with the blood-stained pillow found in her room, and probably in the middle of the night while she slept. That was probably why he had been bothering her in her room, as she had indicated in her diary. He was probably contemplating killing her, working himself up to do it.
And after he killed her, investigators believed he then dressed her in the clothes he later described to the 911 dispatcher, which is why he was able to remember them in such vivid detail, down to the color of her socks. And once he buried her, he went straight back home to report her missing. And of course, every time he drove to and came back from the grave sites, the GPS showed him making a detour to the home of Danette Schroeder, his ex-girlfriend.
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and they'd surely be together if only it weren't for his daughter, Valerie. And on the day before she disappeared, Valerie had refused to go to church with her father and Danette, and this made Brad very upset.
So it was believed that the reason Brad Jackson killed his own daughter was to remove her as a perceived obstacle between him and the woman he'd been seeing. In fact, Danette was the first person he called after he was taken to jail. He called her and proposed marriage to her and did this a few more times following his arrest. She declined all of his proposals and then she changed the locks on all of her doors.
At his arraignment, Brad Jackson pled not guilty. He had claimed that a new friend of his, a guy named Craig whom he planned to go hunting with, he was in fact the guy who killed and took his daughter Valerie. He claimed that Craig killed Valerie and then showed him where the gravesite was located.
But this story made no sense, and he later admitted to making it up, but he continued to insist he had nothing to do with his daughter's murder. And at his trial, he admitted to digging both graves and burying his daughter in them, but he still claimed he did not kill her. He told the court that she had died from an accidental overdose of Paxil. And by the way, I'm seeing some parallels here between this guy and Casey Anthony. You might be too.
But the levels of Paxil found in Valerie's body were normal. Anyway, the jury didn't buy anything Brad said. They found him guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to 672 months in prison, which is equal to 56 years. Brad has never admitted guilt in his daughter's murder and he's also never admitted responsibility in her mother, Roseanne Pleasant's disappearance. That was seven years earlier, even though her family remains convinced to this day that he murdered her.
Her disappearance was at the time being looked at for a possible link to a serial killer who'd been preying on sex workers in Spokane.
In fact, Brad himself was considered a suspect in those murders since one of the victims was found with a grocery bag over her head. But all those victims had been shot in the head rather than suffocated, and that serial killer was nabbed in April of 2000, and his name was Robert Lee Yates. The faculty and student body of McDonald Elementary School painted a tree in Valerie's memory. It remains there to this day.
Pretty much all abusive parents fall under the umbrella of the dark triad, which in psychology is defined by three traits: the inclination to manipulate and deceive others to meet their own ends, subclinical or undiagnosed narcissism, and subclinical or undiagnosed psychopathy.
Brad Jackson is a creature that embodies all three. He deceived others into seeing him as a doting father and into believing after he killed Valerie that he was wrecked by her unexplained disappearance. He put his own needs above all others to a pathological and dangerous degree. And he had, apparently, no empathy for his daughter whom he viewed as a disposable obstacle standing in the way of a relationship with a woman he probably would have abused and maybe even killed.
And he certainly has expressed no remorse for having killed his daughter because he's never owned up to it. So that's it for this week. Join us next week as we begin a new mini series of waterlogged stories that'll leave you gasping for air. I'll see you then.