Episode 201 - Who Killed Jennifer? - Part 1 of 4 - A Son’s Quest For Answers
46:41 Share

The following series is based on extensive research conducted over a two-year period, reviewing various sources including police reports, interviews and newspaper articles. Throughout our research, individuals involved in the case were attempted to be contacted in order to share their experiences and perspectives. The opinions expressed in this series do not necessarily reflect those of the Minds of Madness podcast. Listener discretion is advised.

Andra Sherm spent his entire childhood terrified of a man his family thought was responsible for his mother, Jennifer Lynn Sherm's disappearance. Even the sight of this man's photo sent Andy into panic attacks.

Laying there on the kitchen table was that picture of that dude. I lost it. And I ran, ran into the back room. I ran into the closet. I shut the door. They could not get me out of that closet. I think I was in there for like three or four hours. And anytime they'd open the door, I would just scream at the top of my lungs because I was immobilized with fear.

But as Andy got older, he'd learn that his mother hadn't just been taken, she'd been murdered. It wouldn't be until decades later that he'd find out that the man his family referred to as A-L-E-X hadn't been his mother's murderer at all.

Even as an adult, Andy knew very little when it came to the details of his mother's homicide. Just the basics covered in newspaper articles and the minimal information his family told him. Anything else he'd learned about whodunit and why were just rumors and speculation. Over the years, police identified several suspects in Jennifer's murder investigation, even making two arrests.

Yet still, close to 40 years later, the question still remains, who killed Jennifer?

Join me now into the beginning of our four-part series, Uncovering Long-Buried Secrets, after an independent two-year investigation into Jennifer's cold case. In each episode, we'll transport you back in time to Jennifer's original homicide investigation, scouring through police documents and interview transcripts with witnesses and suspects, revealing new information to Jennifer's son.

When Andy was a child, trying to make sense of what had happened to his mother was confusing.

His family tried sheltering him, speaking in code about the man they thought murdered Jennifer. But as Andy got older, his family slowly revealed more and more, initially telling him his mother had been taken by a bad man. An explanation that wouldn't appease a curious child for very long. And eventually, Andy started wanting to know more.

Where is my mom? What happened to her? Did she just leave me because she didn't love me? Where's my dad? What is all of this? Who is this A-L-E-X? Why won't my grandmother drive me down this certain road in Albuquerque? She'll avoid it at all costs. She'll drive half an hour out of her way if it means that we don't have to go down Central Avenue.

Only 15 months old when Jennifer was murdered, Andy has lived his entire life without a mother. But he hasn't just lived without the physical presence of her. He's also lived without any memories of her, knowledge about her life, the struggles she faced, or who she was as a person. In fact, he only has a handful of photos of her.

But Andy's family hadn't just tried protecting him from what had happened to his mother. They also tried shielding him from the dangerous life she led and the people she was involved with. So much so, Andy's grandparents even placed iron bars on all the windows of their home, trying to prevent bad people from breaking in.

Raised by his grandparents, Andy knew there was something different about his situation. He wouldn't understand the full extent until he went to school. I sat in a car seat in the back of this old 68 Ford Galaxy. It was yellow with a black top and a banana boat. And my grandma would take me to school. And this, we're talking elementary school. And that's how I'd arrive.

She dropped me off like right at the fence. And so all the kids would see me. And for the longest time I called to other people, I called my grandma, my mom. Kids would ask, is that your mom? Eventually it was like this pressure because you get so many kids asking and they're super mean. I got made fun of a lot because I didn't have a mom. Literally like that was, that was the thing.

I didn't understand what happened to her or why I didn't have a mom. I remember there was times whenever I was younger that I thought my mom was just gone. Not dead, but out of town or something. That was probably my way of trying to cope.

Eventually, it came to a point where I was getting bullied really, really bad. Ha ha ha, you know, you're the kid who don't have a mom. You're the kid who don't have parents. You're the kid who gets dropped off by his grandma every day. Eventually, the bullying got so bad, Andy's family and school agreed some sort of intervention was needed. I think I was about six years old, maybe. It was myself, my grandma, I believe my Aunt Judy, and

and then principal and my teacher and then all the kids in my class. The principal took the lead and he tried to explain to kids that had parents what it was like not having parents. And I mean, you can imagine that's like impossible. It's like just as impossible for me to envision having parents.

My grandma and my aunt, they didn't go into any details. They didn't want to discuss the murder or anything. But basically what they said was like a bad man took her. And this is to my class. This is to all the kids. The purpose was to try and get these kids to understand like I'm in a unique situation. You know, looking back now, that was a terrible f***ing idea. The bullying just got worse and worse and worse. And eventually...

I left school. They ended up passing me. It was probably around then, sixth grade, where everything really hit. I just kind of put two and two together, like this is what happened to my mom. And I had a really tough time. I started acting out. It was like seventh, seventh grade is where I took all that sadness and me getting bullied and I fought back.

I've gone through these stages throughout my life where I've obviously tried to find different coping mechanisms and different ways to deal with this. For Andy, another difficult aspect about growing up without a mom was how the circumstances of her death seemed to overshadow everything else about her life and identity. So like I didn't get to learn like odd little things. My cousin Andrea told me her favorite cereal was Cheerios.

I know she liked to draw and paint. She was an artist. When Andy finally did learn how his mother died and about her lifestyle, he experienced another traumatic time in his life.

Once I understood that not only was my mom dead, but she was put to death in a very brutal fashion. And not only that, you know, I had to come to terms with the fact she was on drugs. I had to come to terms with the fact that she was a prostitute.

Boy, let me tell you, people really treat you different when they find out that your dead mother was a prostitute.

Andy spent his life wondering who killed his mother and why. Most of all, he's wondered what his life might have been like if his mother was still alive. If she'd been there for all those important milestones in his life or when he needed her motherly support. Recently for Andy, it's been the frightening experience of battling cancer, not once, but twice.

I do not like going to doctors. I don't like hospitals. I just tough things out. But I had some really severe stomach pain I was dealing with and it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. And so I went to the hospital and talked to the doctors and let them know and it ended up being pancreatitis.

During this whole, you have pancreatitis thing, they looked at the little bit of medical history that I had put down for my family. And the only reason I knew that is because I watched members of my family go through chemo. And they were like, "You know, you're really young, but we want to check on this." I was in my early 30s. I remember it vividly of being in a doctor's office and getting those results. And they're like, "Oh, you have cancer." I was almost to the point of going to stage four.

Not only was Andy's mother not alive to support him through his battles with cancer, but by that point, neither were the majority of his other family members either. Because most of Andy's relatives had passed away over the years, and with them went all the valuable information they held about his mother's murder and who she was.

One by one, they all kind of passed away. Everyone was dead. Once everyone was gone, what could I do? And there was like once or twice that like I went down on Central and I went like around like the, you know, the side streets and what they call the war zone. There was a couple times where I just walked up to like an old timer and started dropping, you know, like the couple names I did know.

Nothing ever came of it. And so a point came where it's not that I gave up, it's just that my hands were tied. And up until recently, I feel as if APD did not do their due diligence with my mom's case because of the lifestyle that she lived.

Interestingly, when Andy requested his mother's case files, he was sent one page and told the rest had been destroyed in a fire. Early on, our head writer Ryan realized there were going to be some challenges looking into Jennifer's case.

The first thing that I knew would be tough about this case is the fact that no one had ever looked into this one before. That means that there's no documentaries made about it, there's no other podcasts that have covered it, there's nobody else that has compiled a list of sources to look into for this case. So everything we were going to do was going to be completely from scratch,

Looking into a homicide case is complicated, especially one that's close to four decades old. Then there's the amount of public information available on Jennifer, with several online articles about her case not even mentioning her name. And that's when I realized we definitely needed a little bit of extra help if we were going to really do this story. And that's when we decided to reach out to Shane.

Shane Waters has investigated other cold cases for his podcast, Foul Play Crime Series. In fact, we covered his work in our episode 129, The Redhead Murders, where he looked into a long-forgotten case involving six Jane Does from the 80s.

I learned about the case because my cousin lived in Barberville, Kentucky. And one day she mentioned that there was a Jane Doe victim who was buried in her small town of Barberville. So I ended up looking up this Jane Doe and how she ended up in this small town. And I ended up coming across these really old articles from the mid-1980s.

And that's when I discovered the Redhead murders. At that time, in the mid-80s, only one of those six women had ever been identified. The remaining five were Jane Doe victims.

And so as I started reading through the articles, the only victim who had ever been identified was found in West Memphis, Arkansas. And as I was reading the article talking about her identification, the sheriff who was in charge of her murder case, he referred to her as having a rap sheet that stretched from the floor to the ceiling two times. I get so emotional talking about this because I get so upset. And that she had a drug problem worse than his car had a gasoline problem.

And this is the very sheriff that was in charge of solving her case. And in that very moment, I recognized that this is the very reason why the public forgot about these women. And I think that as a whole, you can look at that instance and share that this is why people forget about sex workers in general that get murdered.

Because the language that we use to describe them, and the language that we use to describe the work that they have done, in that one moment of their life, when they're murdered, it matters.

After Andy learned his mother's case files had been destroyed, he believed his search for answers had reached a dead end. And like many family members of homicide victims, this is where the pursuit of justice for their loved ones also ends. Most people have no idea how to navigate the justice system, trying to obtain information like police documents.

I think for most people, the idea that someday you would have to ever try to find the case file for a murdered loved one, it's not in our mindset. Even finding a specific case number, that is so difficult. And if it's a case that's as cold as Jennifer's, you know, that case spanned a decade.

So when you are a victim's family member and you go years, many, many years later to go check upon a case, suddenly the detective who you thought was working the case isn't there. And families are suddenly left with that daunting task of trying to search for the next detective. You have to go to a website, fill out a form and hope that someone contacts you. It's such an archaic system.

Once Shane started requesting documents, we were all on the edge of our seats, curious to see what he'd dig up, or if he'd find anything at all. Honestly, we had no idea what to expect when Shane put in the FOIA request. You never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you don't even know what they have, so you don't know what to even ask for. And depending on who you're dealing with, they may give you everything you ask for, they may make it really difficult for you, they may give you nothing at all.

I've worked a number of Jane Doe cases dealing with sex workers from the mid-80s, and something that's always the case for these cases is that the case files are typically a single or two pages, and most of the time they're handwritten, hard to read, and there's no physical evidence still left, unfortunately.

And one thing that really shocked me is when we requested the case file, what was delivered to us was 180 pages of the case file. And this wasn't just useless paperwork that didn't matter. This was real information, hard information. It was Jennifer's real case file. It was interviews with every suspect police talked to. It was many different officers' versions of the same events, handwritten and then typed up.

It was honestly way more than I ever expected to get. And really, once you started digging into it and reading all the words and all the details, suddenly you actually have this very vivid picture of what police knew at the time, what people were saying. All of a sudden, the name Jennifer Sherm wasn't just a Google search term or a term that I was putting in the newspaper archives to look up. All of a sudden, Jennifer Sherm was the name of this witness's friend, this witness's girlfriend.

this witness's family member. And all of a sudden, Jennifer Sherm became a very real person and you got to see what other people thought of her, felt about her, knew about her from so many different perspectives.

Within that 180 pages, we could see that these detectives, I mean, they gathered so much information. They collected a lot of forensic evidence. And all of that evidence was very carefully sealed. And then it was carefully stored away. Like, how ideal is that? And it's so unique to a case that involves someone who was a sex worker when they were murdered.

We all soon realized there was way more to Jennifer's case than it appeared at first glance. But what was it about Jennifer's case that made it possible for police to investigate more thoroughly than other sex worker victims' cases?

We believe one possibility was that Jennifer's family relentlessly pursued their own investigation. In fact, there were a number of people police interviewed and leads they followed early on. Jennifer's sister and mother tracked down themselves.

Her and my Aunt Jessie used to hang flyers that had my mom's face. Literally, it said in big bold letters, "Murdered." Grandma's an old lady walking around in some of the roughest parts of a boot game, man. All by herself, too. She'd talk to anyone if she thought that they'd have information about my mom.

Jessie was always the diligent one. All these years, like, she was out there. There was a couple times where she kicked in someone's door. She wanted to know the truth. All of us, that's all we wanted.

To find out who was responsible for Jennifer's murder, her mother and sister regularly went to the most dangerous part of Albuquerque, looking for answers. The place where Jennifer worked, a notorious strip known as The Cruise, or more recently, The War Zone, a name that accurately represents the danger women face who work the streets there, the place where Jennifer would end up in her early 20s.

Andy had no way of knowing just how bad some of those people were.

Over the course of several decades, the war zone had turned into a hunting ground for serial killers and became rife with criminal activity. Opportunists looking for vulnerable women, women like Cynthia Vigil,

At just 14 years old, Cynthia's mother was murdered by a man she'd later be told was a notorious serial killer. A man who eventually confessed to killing 93 women between the 70s and 2005. For the longest time, they just never investigated it and just called it an overdose.

Orphaned and trying to survive, Cindy turned to working on the streets.

And so I learned the hustle really quick. I learned how to make money and survive on the streets by sex work. The fastest and easiest way for a girl. And so I was working Central in the mid to late 90s. In 1999, Cindy would have her own encounter with a serial killer. I was kidnapped by David Parker. I escaped and that's how he got caught. And they found video of him killing women.

Also known as the Toy Box Killer, it's estimated that David Parker Ray abducted, raped, tortured and killed anywhere between 14 and 60 women in a trailer he called his Toy Box. Before torturing his victims, David Parker Ray played a pre-recorded tape preparing them for what he was about to do to them.

Hello there, bitch. Are you comfortable right now? I doubt it. Wrists and ankles chained, gagged, probably blindfolded. You are disoriented and scared too, I would imagine. Perfectly normal under the circumstances. For a little while at least, you need to get your shit together and listen to the state. It is very relevant to your situation. I'm going to tell you in detail

Why you have been kidnapped, what's going to happen to you, and how long you'll be here. I don't know the details of your capture because this tape is being created on July 23, 1993 as a general advisory tape for future female captives.

If it hadn't been for Cynthia's brave escape, it's unimaginable to think how many more women David might have terrorized or murdered. After her harrowing experience, Cindy transformed her trauma into a catalyst for positive change, founding Street Safe New Mexico, a non-profit organization focusing on reducing the detrimental effects of street life, providing assistance to those in need.

A lot of guys out there think that because we're selling sex, they can take it and they don't have to pay for it because we're nothing to them. They think they're just drug addicts, they're worthless. Now with social media, they record the women and make TikTok videos and they throw stuff at us when they're driving up the street. We have rocks thrown at us. They spit on us. We get robbed for our money. There's a lot of violence happening

Back in the 80s and 90s, it wasn't just the Johns sex workers believed viewed them this way. It was the police as well. At that time, they didn't care about the girls. We were just another arrest, and when we're targeted, it's not priority for the police department. Perhaps this was why, when women started disappearing off of East Central Avenue and being found murdered in the 1980s, it didn't appear much was being done about it.

Before long, Albuquerque police had a string of unsolved homicides on their hands. Jennifer was among them. When Andy set out to learn more about his mother's case, all he was able to uncover were the basics. He knew the address where she'd been found, and that she'd been beaten to death. Details that had all been reported in the newspapers.

This is where Jennifer's case files became a wealth of knowledge, helping us piece together some of those other missing details. And this is some of what we learned. On the morning of May 29th, 1985, Jennifer's body was discovered just steps away from an apartment complex at 187 Montelago Drive, only about 400 yards from East Central Avenue.

She'd been dumped just off the curb, fully clothed, wearing a pair of jeans, World Cup basketball sneakers, and a three-quarter sleeve shirt. She'd been brutally beaten all over her body, with blunt force trauma to her head. The shirt she paired with her trendy Rag City blue jeans had been ripped and practically torn off.

Initially, Jennifer wasn't able to be identified and was considered a Jane Doe. It had been six days since the last time her family saw her alive. Although the crime scene itself gave no indication of how Jennifer wound up in front of that apartment complex, one thing that was clear was that this wasn't the place where she'd been murdered. She'd been dumped there.

Before we examined Jennifer's final movements leading up to her murder, we wanted to see if we could pinpoint a time in her life that had brought her to work the streets of East Central Avenue, a time when things took an unexpected turn.

To do that, we needed to go back far, with three people from our team, including Shane Waters, sifting through newspaper archives looking at articles from almost 50 years ago. And what we discovered would be the first bombshell of information we'd delivered to Andy.

I've been reading through my mom's case file, and it's been hard, obviously, especially when it comes to the grim details. But it's also given me, like, so much insight. In 1974, it was about 10 years before her murder, Jennifer was 12 years old at that time, and she was living in a neighborhood of Albuquerque. And that neighborhood was considered relatively safe, right?

But little to her knowledge or anyone else's, evil was lurking in plain sight. As Jennifer sat with a friend on the sidewalk, just across the street from their school, she heard the voice of a man who'd changed the course of her life forever.

It was this encounter that we believe triggered a domino effect in Jennifer's life, leading her to develop a drug addiction and ultimately altering her perception of men. You better be careful, the man said. The man that was warning her was 57-year-old Frank Turkle. He lived in a house just behind where the girls were sitting on the sidewalk.

And Frank Turkle was a man who held a lot of authority in that community. Really, since the 1950s, he worked for more than a decade as a deputy sheriff. He was promoted to a sheriff's captain. He was a city councilman at one point in his life, and he even tried to become a sheriff.

This was a well-respected man in the community. And for all intents and purposes, this should have been someone that Jennifer should have been able to trust. There should have been no reason why she shouldn't have been able to trust him. And I think anyone in Jennifer's situation would have trusted him.

The campaign promises Frank Turkle made in the papers while running for sheriff spoke of the need to "rid the county of its moral pollution," which, according to Frank, was drugs, specifically children using drugs. "What drugs are doing to our children is murder," he said, "and I intend to do something about it."

But while Frank warned his community about the evils of drugs and the danger to children, the reality was, Frank was the evil and danger children were facing, specifically in the neighborhood where Jennifer grew up. When Frank Turkle saw Jennifer sitting in front of his house and spoke the words, "You better be careful," it wasn't meant as a warning. Instead, it was meant as a pickup line.

That year, Frank's home, which was across the street from the middle school, it becomes the hangout spot for all the neighborhood kids. And Frank is supplying them all with drugs and alcohol. At the same time, he's also starting to groom Jennifer. He's giving her drugs and he's making sure that this becomes a habit for her. And I think that this is where you can see that this is when he is getting her ready for what he was planning next.

In the winter of 1974, Frank started taking nude photos of Jennifer. But before tucking the photos away, Frank labeled the back of each one with dates. Something he'd regret later. While Jennifer was in the seventh grade, Frank started blackmailing her with these photos, threatening to show them to her family if she didn't have sex with him.

She remembered the first time it happened, the same day she finished seventh grade. She also remembered it happening at least three more times over the next few weeks, before her 13th birthday. The reason she remembered so clearly was because on her 13th birthday, her mother allowed her to get her hair cut.

The reason Jennifer's exact age is so important is because at that time the legal age of consent in New Mexico was 13.

Over the next several years, Frank starts to break her down. He's destroying Jennifer's self-worth and her sense of security one step at a time. And this is someone that she should have been able to trust. Everyone in the community seemed to have trusted him. I think at some point he starts worrying that other people are going to find out. So in 1977, and Jennifer is only 15 years old at that time,

Perhaps Frank knew that eventually, someone might come knocking, wondering what a 50-year-old man was doing with a teenager. And he was right.

Around November 1977, police got a tip from another young girl claiming Frank Turkle asked her to post nude for some photos. At the same time, police had also been tipped off that Turkle had been supplying kids in the neighborhood with drugs. For the next three months, police began quietly investigating him before securing a warrant to search his property for drugs.

But instead of finding drugs, what police found was far more disturbing. A secret recorder taped under Frank's bed, a drawer full of tapes he'd made, and nude photos of Jennifer. Handwritten on the back of these photos were dates beginning in December 1974, six months before Jennifer turned 13.

Currently, the youngest age of consent anywhere in the United States is 16. But back in 1975 in New Mexico, the issue of whether Jennifer was 12, as she claimed to be, or 13, as Frank insisted, was the difference between life in prison or perfectly legal.

The entire case against Frank would hinge on exactly how old Jennifer was when Frank started having sexual interactions with her. Frank's lawyers challenged Jennifer's memory, pointing out that in her initial statements to police, she said she was 13 when it all started. But Jennifer and the prosecution would say she'd made that initial statement because she was afraid of Frank.

Frank's lawyer called the entire proceeding a monumental waste of time and that the case against him was the result of two sheriff's deputies framing Frank because of long-held personal grudges. One of the things that really blew me away when I was researching this aspect of the case were the closing arguments made by Frank's defense attorney who said this about Jennifer's claims and this is from the newspapers:

Either she does not remember how old she was, or she remembers that she was 13 but does not want to lose the support and attention she's been receiving for the first time in her life from her family and others. According to Frank's defense, because his client had married Jennifer in Mexico in 1977, he was essentially being charged with having premarital sexual intercourse with his wife.

Fortunately for the prosecution, they not only had the victim's word, they also had evidence. In the end, the nude photos of Jennifer, dated from the time she was 12, would be the key piece of evidence. In addition, one of the secret audio recordings Frank made in his bedroom was also played. A recording where Jennifer can be heard telling Frank he started having sex with her when she was around 12.

Ultimately, the jury found Frank guilty of rape and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after serving a minimum of 10 years. But in reality, Frank would only serve 17 months.

So after only serving 17 months, Frank's conviction is actually overturned because they ruled some of the evidence is inadmissible because of a search warrant that was actually for, I think, drugs, but then that's when they found the underage pornography. So his convictions overturned and there was a retrial ordered. But then, Jennifer and her family decide that they don't want to go through the entire painful ordeal of this trial again if they don't have to.

So, they accept a plea deal that is supposed to guarantee that Frank still serves a minimum of 10 years behind bars and a maximum of 50. So, this completely goes against the characterization they made of Jennifer doing all of this for the attention anyways. In fact, she was willing to let him serve less time if she didn't have to be put back up on that stand again and tell that story again in public because it was so painful for her.

And then, after agreeing with the prosecutors that Frank's still going to serve a minimum 10 years in prison, instead, they decide to suspend Frank's sentence entirely after getting Jennifer and her family's consent to make the deal. And in March 1980, he was officially a free man.

So according to the newspapers, the judges stated reasons for allowing Frank Turkle to just have a suspended sentence instead of go to prison were all based on sympathetic grounds. They blamed his age, he was too old, he had poor health, he had ulcers. And they also said that prison was inherently more dangerous for former police officers, which may or may not be true, but...

This lack of sympathy that they had for Jennifer, the actual victim in this story, is just mind-boggling to me. After being set free, it appeared that Frank took that opportunity to use Jennifer one last time.

One of the things that I did really early on in this case was I tried to just throw as many darts against the wall as I could, not thinking that we would find much, honestly. And so I just sent out as many requests to any agencies in Albuquerque and New Mexico that I possibly could.

And at some point in time, while doing that, just randomly in the mail one day, I receive a second marriage certificate for Frank and Jennifer. All right, so I'm going through my mail here. It says it's from the office of the county clerk, which is for Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm going to open it here.

or an application for a marriage license. State of New Mexico to the county clerk office. The male was born May 16th, 1917. Woo, that is very old.

Female, was born July 26, 1962. Alright, so it's dated August 5, 1980. But it is between Frank Turkle and Jennifer Lynn Sherm. So it says at the bottom, which has the marriage information, that they got married on the 11th day of August, 1980, in Albuquerque. Ken Wood

was the United Methodist minister, and the witnesses were Mina Wood, Alan Wood. It is a legitimate marriage license, which happened after that court date where she laid out his abuse, which is both sad and can't imagine what Frank would have done to trick her into marrying him again. Crazy. Disgusting.

Did he do it through blackmail? Did he forcefully get her to do it in some way, shape, or fashion? Or was it because she was still fearful of him? And we also wondered if maybe Frank arranged for the second marriage in order to prevent Jennifer from testifying against him when his case is overturned.

When Turkle's case was overturned and sent back to be examined for retrial, the prosecution decided not to retry him, citing the reason as the victim's unwillingness to go through another trial. Up until finding all this information out, Andy hadn't known the full extent of what his mother had endured as a child. I get it now. She didn't have a chance.

You know, nowadays, man, that dude would have been crucified. You know, like, you got this f***ing dude, you know, saying, hey, I'm, you know, I'm going to show your family these pictures. And, like, he's secretly taping her. Like, that dude is, was a real special piece of s***. She never had a chance, man. She didn't get to understand what, like, a healthy relationship was.

I believe if Frank Turkle never, ever entered the picture, never met my mom, we'd be seeing a different story right now. I think she would have probably made it.

After Jennifer married Frank for a second time, we couldn't find out much about what had happened to her over the next few years. We know she briefly served in the Army Reserves, studying to become a dental assistant. And then in 1983, when she was 20 years old, it seemed she found herself in Colorado, living with a man named Bill Duran.

So once Jennifer becomes an adult, we see that she falls into this pattern of re-victimization. It's something that we wouldn't have even known if we wouldn't have discovered everything that had happened to her from the time she was 12 with Frank Turkle. It actually makes a lot of sense considering all the studies that show that the prevalence of re-victimization of people who were victims of childhood sex abuse, it's nearly 50% is what the studies show.

A year after moving to Colorado to live with Bill Duran, Andy was born on February 5th, 1984. But Andy would lose all contact with his father and wouldn't reconnect with him until he was 18 years old. According to Colorado police, Bill had a history of physically assaulting Jennifer, resulting in at least one instance where he was incarcerated for it.

Police in that town physically put her on a bus, sent her back to Albuquerque, not once, but twice, just to get her away from this man. The second time they sent her, she stayed. And that's when she met someone new. It's also when her dangerous life in the war zone began.

In our next episode of Who Killed Jennifer, you'll hear about the dangerous scene unfolding in the war zone at the time of Jennifer's murder, the list of suspects police considered in her homicide investigation, and about a woman who came forward claiming to have witnessed Jennifer's murder. Would this witness be the person to provide police with the answers they were looking for, or would it only lead them on a wild goose chase? Stay tuned for episode two.

Whenever my grandmother would bring up Alex, she'd spell out A-L-E-X. I'm sure that was kind of their way of trying to shield me. This guy was the boogeyman.

Follow the Minds of Madness on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. To support the show and get access to ad-free episodes, extra content, and Patreon-exclusive episodes, go to patreon.com slash madnesspod. To find us on Instagram and Facebook, search The Minds of Madness, and on Twitter using the handle

at MadnessPod. And also, by checking out our sponsors and using our promo codes, you're also helping support the show. We've got all the links in our episode notes. So until next week, thanks for listening.