Lighting Candles - Part 1 (Corey Wieneke)
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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. Somebody come out to my house, I think my fiance. The fact that out of the blue, some agent who's never worked this murder randomly gets this information from somebody just was extraordinary. This almost killed me 25 years ago. Literally almost killed me. I don't even know if I've ever, ever mentioned this before.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murders.

Here's a story you may be familiar with. A high school football star begins dating the school cheerleader. They live in a farm town where neighbors know each other's names and wave as they pass each other on the street. The man is charming, the woman beautiful. They get engaged and live happily ever after. That is sadly not the ending of today's story. Corey Winnike was a former high school football star at the prime of his life.

At 22, he was engaged to be married and by all reports, well-liked by the many residents of his hometown in Iowa. But his life met a tragic end. In October of 1992, he was found dead in the house he shared with his fiancée. And the culprit wouldn't be found until decades later. Today's story takes place in West Liberty, Iowa, which sits in Muscatine County.

West Liberty is a small community in the western part of Muscatine County. It's about halfway between Muscatine and Iowa City. It's a few thousand people, tightly knit, being in Iowa. A lot of corn and soybeans and pigs and chickens. That's Alan Ostergren, who got his start in the Muscatine County Attorney's Office in the late 1990s.

It's a really great place to have a prosecution career. It was a very supportive community to me, even though I wasn't from there. They welcomed me as an outsider to work there in the county attorney's office. It's a very interesting place in Iowa and a place that is pretty proud to be associated with.

So in talking with Alan about his office, one of the things we talked about how many attorneys there were, and his office had at the time a total of five. And so, of course, I can't help but compare it to the type of office that I came out of. Brooklyn, when I left, had over 400 attorneys. Now, yes, Brooklyn's one of the largest offices in the country, but it really goes to how different people

The offices can be, and while the mission is the same, how that size and where they are definitely impacts the work.

One area I really felt like you could see the impact was because you're in a smaller jurisdiction, each individual prosecution can really make a difference for quality of life in the community. You lock up a burglar who's out committing burglaries every night, that makes an impact. You can, with one case, make things better for your community.

Now, I came from a sheriff's office which had a few thousand sworn officers, which obviously is a lot larger than the department in West Liberty. But I would say this. Each one of our districts had a rotation of deputies who did create and maintain relationships within the district that they were. So in essence, each district is treated like a small town. And I think having that connection to the people you serve is always important.

So helpful in doing the job you set out to do, protecting and serving your community. West Liberty is the type of town where everyone often knew each other's name. It is custom. It is practically the law. When you drive by somebody on a gravel road in the state of Iowa, you do a little hand wave, you acknowledge them.

You know, in small-town fashion, West Liberty had a bar called Wink's Tap. It was a family-owned establishment that had been serving beer and bar food since the 1970s.

I'm definitely dating myself here, and a lot of you won't remember this show, but Scott, you will. This show Cheers, where it's like that bar where everyone knows your name. And it's all I could think about when I was reading about Winx Tap, which everyone called Winx. And Corey Winnike came from this line of the bartenders who had been there before him, which was his dad and his grandfather, because his grandparents owned the bar. He was a native. His father was a native. And his grandmother was a fixture in the community.

And in 1992, beyond being bartender, Corey was the main person running that bar. It was the job that suited him perfectly because Corey, who at 22 was definitely quick with a smile, he was also the guy that his friends referred to as the life of the party. You know, the nature of being a bartender in a small town, lots of people knew who Corey Winnikey was, had interacted with him in life. He's somebody who knew lots of people.

Knowing how tight-knit this community was makes what happened next all the more shocking. On a fall evening in October of 1992, West Liberty Sheriff's Office got a terrifying phone call. "West Liberty Police." "Hi, I need somebody to come out to my house. I think my fiance is dead." "Okay, where do you think he might be dead?" "He's all sweaty and he's not breathing and he's cold."

The woman who'd made that phone call, her name was Jody, and she was Corey's fiancé, and she had walked into the home they shared to this scene that she'd just reported. Jody came home from her job at a bank in Iowa City and found Corey face down on the floor in their bedroom. He was obviously dead. Blood all over his back, the back of his head, blood spatter on the walls, on the bed, on the bedding.

Walking into your own home and finding that type of scene sounds absolutely terrifying. But to make matters worse, it was 1992. There's no Waze or Google Maps to plug in an address to get directions. So Jodi had to stay on the phone with a sheriff's dispatcher and direct them turn by turn on how to get to their house. All the while, her fiancé is lying there dead and bloodied in front of her.

you know they just live on a rural postal route on a gravel road the locals know where it is but it doesn't really have an address like you would in town

I can't help but thinking about this, that, you know, here this woman is, this man who she presumably loves. It is her sweetheart since high school. She finds him like this. And again, it comes down to the logistics and the reality of situations that people don't think about. You know, in this time before the, you know, that you hit Google Maps to tell you exactly where to go, she had to have the wherewithal to be focusing on make a left turn here. And now you're going to go down here. And it just really...

shows you the type of things that people are faced with while really their worlds are falling apart. You know, I've only worked in urban areas where the entire patrol zone contains street signs. So I can't imagine having to work through a dispatcher turn by turn to get to a scene like that.

When police arrive, it's determined pretty quickly that Corey is dead. He's cold to the touch and covered in gashes and blood. Now, we've looked at crime scene photos while investigating this case. It's hard to put into words the brutality of this scene. Corey is lying face down on the carpeting next to his bed. His back is covered in welts and bruises, and the back of his skull appears to be broken open.

Now, as Corey was laying down, he was still in his underwear. And remember, he's right next to the bed. And as they looked closer at the various wounds that he appeared to have sustained, it ultimately was determined that he had suffered at least 13 blunt force wounds and multiple of those wounds, at least four were to his head.

Law enforcement goes out to the scene, sees that Corey is dead. This looks obviously like a murder. And so investigators are summoned and the investigation begins.

So a couple of quick observations about the crime scene. No forced entry. And quickly, I'd want to ask Jodi if she used a key to get in or was the door already open? And normally, would you guys lock the door? The reason for those questions are related to the victim. Were they targeted? Did he know his killer? Did he let him in? Just the nature of the injuries describes a very personal rage attack.

From what Jodi said, it was very clear to her that something was wrong almost from the time she'd gotten to the driveway.

Their screen door was opened. Corey's car was there and it shouldn't have been. He should have already been at work by the time she got home. Their dog was outside without a leash, which is something they never would have done. So the first thing investigators were able to notice, Scott just said, is that there was no sign of forced entry other than this door, which was open, that should have been. But also the fact that his body was cold meant that the murder hadn't just occurred.

So some of the early theories going in were the fact that it seemed like a very personal crime. Nothing was missing from the home. The house wasn't ransacked. Now they have to determine, could it be someone that actually Corey, the victim, knew?

What you do in a case like this, where you don't have an obvious suspect immediately, you haven't caught the angry spouse standing over the body with a knife in his hand. You're trying to figure out what happened to this victim. You start with the victim and you start working your way out. So who was Corey Winnikey? We already know that he had played football when he was in high school. We know that he worked at the bar.

He was definitely known to be popular and well-liked. He'd grown up in that area in West Liberty. And none of this was really giving investigators much of a lead. We know that he was engaged. But, you know, Scott, to me, one of the first things before we even talk about those close to him was his work. I mean, a bartender comes into contact with so many different people, you know, whether it's talking about interpersonal issues or

Dealing with the different problems in the neighborhood, they hear it all. And sometimes they have to get into it when people sometimes drink too much. Yeah, that really opens a potential list of possible persons of interest. I mean, we've seen this before out of Sega in stories we've done about waitresses.

where they come in contact with a lot of customers throughout the day. Could there have been a negative look or a bad word said between them? So I believe that really does work here as well.

Investigators also started asking questions about Corey around town. They asked friends if he had any drug issues, if he was a gambler, could he have owed somebody some money, or was he fighting with someone? These are the types of things investigators will first turn to when there is no obvious initial suspects.

It was very clear that he might have recreationally smoked marijuana on occasion. But I mean, there was nothing to indicate that he's some kind of drug dealer or something like that. You know, it comes down to a process of elimination. Asking questions is how you get leads. And again, investigators are looking at these type of things with anyone when there's no clear answer. It's kind of like they're checking off these general boxes one by one.

Now, there was one place that caught the eye of investigators. That was Wink's Tap, the bar that Corey's family owned and Corey worked at. It wasn't the kind of bar where, you know, there's a fight every weekend or something like that. I mean, it's a crowd of local regulars who get off work at the factory and drink beer. We know it's a very social place. It's a place where friends often meet up. It's also a place that's known to have some flirting going on.

And that may have been Corey's one vice. It certainly was clear early in the investigation that Corey was very popular with women. In addition to having a fiance that he lived with, that he had other women in his life and was concurrent in a number of relationships. And that obviously can be a likely candidate for why somebody could be murdered. So investigators asked the question,

Could one of Corey's romantic flings have gone so badly that it led to murder? And we've all heard that term, crime of passion. And I'm not talking about the legal defense, just exactly what it sounds like. You know, you have someone who has more than one relationship, either at the same time or even just over the years. But that one person now, because of another relationship, ultimately is provoked.

In one way or another, or here we're talking about someone who has or is known for a wandering eye. And, you know, Scott, right there, I've got to think that's where the investigators are going to focus very quickly. I think the working theory at the very beginning was this was a killing done by somebody who knows Corey.

There were no obvious signs of property being stolen from the residence. So it doesn't look like some kind of home invasion, burglary, robbery. It looks like interpersonal rage to beat somebody to death in their own bed and bludgeon them like that.

You always hear us talk about how investigators go through the process of deciding who they want to talk to in a fresh homicide investigation. Now, clearly the people closest to the victim and of course the person who found the body could provide crucial information. So for me, Jody would be one of my first interviews. She's the one who found Corey's body and made that chilling call to the sheriff's office.

From everything the investigators knew at that point, Jody was perfectly happy with Corey and intending to get married. And they were just kind of getting started out. Now, Jody clearly knew that Corey had a bit of a wandering eye. She was aware that Corey was likely not faithful to her all the time and had decided to continue in that relationship, notwithstanding that.

Now, this sounds to be like the kind of thing that happens in your 20s and figuring out what kind of relationships you want to have and the boundaries you should keep all things like that. But it also sounds like a situation that is potentially explosive, especially in a town of only 2,000 residents.

So while Jodi said that she knew about this and whether it was because of their age or just whatever understanding they had between themselves, isn't that also the type of thing that you would actually tell investigators here when your fiancé is found dead? And so again, while investigators have to analyze what she's saying and whether she's being truthful, at least of her outlook about Corey's wandering eye, she did have something working in her favor and

at least on the surface, and that was Jody Had an Alibi. But certainly from the appearance of the scene, his body was cold to the touch. It didn't happen right when she got home, clearly. There was no indication that she had killed him that morning and then went to work calmly all day acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. As investigators are looking into Corey's fiancé, an important piece of evidence is discovered, not by police, but by the press.

One of the local TV stations sent a news crew because they had picked up scanner traffic and knew that authorities were investigating this murder. And so they get there and, you know, of course they have it taped off and they can't get very close and it's pitch black and they really can't record anything. So one of the reporters takes a walk just a short distance down the road. And then he goes down and tells the investigator who's there, hey, I think I found something. And it's the first real clue ever.

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And so this news crew gets sent to drive down to rural Muscatine County and record some news. It was a fall night and already dark by the time they arrived. Now, it's not uncommon to see press arrive at a crime scene. We've all seen the news footage from outside a home that's covered with that yellow crime scene tape. But it was a little less typical for the press to arrive before the body had even been removed.

They were going to wait to maybe record the ambulance or the funeral home vehicle leaving with the body in it to have some video footage for the story. The reporter and his cameraman who arrived and staked out Corey and Jody's house ended up falling asleep while waiting to get the footage they came for. And when they woke up, the crime scene had been completely cleared except for one deputy guarding the home.

they realized they kind of missed the footage that they're supposed to get. And so the cameraman and he are kind of upset and the reporter gets out of the vehicle and starts walking out to kind of clear his mind. And I'm sure trying to think like, what am I going to tell my editor about why we didn't get the shot we were supposed to get because we fell asleep in the car.

And he's walking down the road a short distance from the house and sees a bloody bat laying on the side of the road. And then he goes down and tells the investigator who's there, hey, I think I found something. And they get some great footage of recovery of the bat.

So if this turns out to actually be the murder weapon, just think about it. It's not really a sophisticated weapon. It's an aluminum bat probably worth about $15 that you would see used in a Little League game. So it's kind of ironic that it was found by a reporter and it turned out to be a weapon like this. We certainly had blood evidence from the bat that matched up in terms of those class characteristics, blood type and superior for being Corey Winnikee's blood.

Based on the testing that investigators soon did, they were able to determine that that aluminum bat was the murder weapon that killed Corey. But having that critical piece of evidence, the murder weapon itself wasn't enough to crack this case.

They pursued the lead that would have been the best, and that is they processed the murder weapon for fingerprints. They did not produce any useful fingerprints, unfortunately. And they retested some of those samples that had been collected originally of just obvious blood on the end of the bat.

We knew it was Corey's blood, but I mean, that doesn't help the investigation at all. We already knew he was beaten to death with the blunt object. So that additional forensic work really did not lead anywhere. So while the bat itself, the murder weapon, was providing little for investigators to go off of, they now turned their focus to retracing Corey's steps in the days before he was murdered.

They were trying to reconstruct the timeline of Corey's activities, figure out who was in his circle, interview those people, get a timeline of people down at Wink's Tap and elsewhere who could help them understand what Corey had been doing for the several days leading up to his death. So on the night before he's found, Corey had been working at the bar, Wink's, like he did most nights. It was a Monday night, so you can assume that it was relatively quiet. Corey serving drinks to whoever was there.

But then after the bar closed, which is a little bit after 2:00, Cory left the bar. But he wasn't alone. He was with a woman named Wendy.

Wendy was a young woman, about 19, and had a baby with Corey. That baby was almost a year old when the murder happened. I think Corey was trying to make some effort to have some sort of interaction with this child that he had. But he certainly was not dropping everything in order to try and be a good dad and make things right by Wendy or anything like that.

So Corey was on again, off again with a woman whose child he had fathered. And don't forget, he was engaged and living with Jodi at the very same time. This is sounding like a situation with a lot of potential for heartbreak and a whole lot of drama.

So Wendy goes to get into Corey's car, which was a Cadillac described as a baby blue Cadillac, which again is going towards the times. But there was already another woman now in his car. It wasn't Jody, his fiance. It was a woman by the name of Annette. Annette would have been back then somebody who frequented the bar where Corey worked, who was somebody that Corey would regularly have sex with.

Annette is now the third woman we know Corey's having some kind of intimate relationship with. All at the same time, things are definitely getting awkward. And so instead of Corey walking out of the bar by himself, he comes walking out of the bar with Wendy in tow. Annette is sitting in the front passenger seat of this baby blue Cadillac. Wendy gets the back seat. So you can imagine how awkward that scene is.

I mean, just think about the lengths that people go to to prevent running into an ex just because of how awkward that might be. And here, Corey is absolutely juggling multiple women, not only at the same time, but now in the same car. So this incredibly awkward scene comes to a head during the drive.

Annette did not expect that Wendy was going to be coming out of the bar with Corey. Annette basically makes Corey pull over on the highway. They get out of the car and have the argument outside of the car. After they argue on the road, Corey and Annette get back in the Cadillac. It's a super awkward situation.

Corey now takes Wendy home, but tells her in front of Annette that he's going to come back after taking Annette home. A lot of drama going on inside of that car. But, you know, at the same time, we have three different women here, Jodi, Wendy, and now Annette, who were scorned by Corey in some fashion or some way.

And at the very least, all three of them seem to have a reason to be very, very pissed off at him. And that, to me, makes them all worth looking as potential suspects. Corey drives back to West Liberty and takes Wendy back to her apartment and drops her off. Corey takes Annette then back to where Annette lives. And they have what Annette describes as angry sex on the couch, on the porch. And then Corey leaves.

After he leaves Annette's, Corey still doesn't go straight home. He goes now back to Wendy's house. According to Wendy, they sat on the porch, they had a beer, and then he said goodbye and headed home for the final time. So investigators hear this story on the night before his murder from Wendy and Annette. But remember, they can't take this kind of information at face value. They have to take steps to corroborate every piece of evidence that they're told.

And so one way of doing that back in the 90s, and in fact, still today, is that police will use a polygraph test. And remember, it's a tool. Sometimes people, just from the idea of being hooked up to something, might admit something or deny it or something in between just with the threat of that machine. But that's what police go to here. They decide to polygraph those that they are looking at. Anastasia, we have talked extensively about what the value could be of polygraphs. And I think we both agree

fall out on the same position. And also, not to give any trade secrets away here, but in my experience, the real value is not the test results.

I'm not a big believer in those, but it's the pre-interview before you hook someone up to the machine. And it's the fear that can set in. The line of questioning normally begins with, you know, the machine is very sensitive. It can detect the littlest of lies. So if there's anything you want to tell me, then perhaps tell me right now, or I'll rephrase the question to help you getting someone to admit that

It right there that they may already be lying. What about you, Anasika? I think that's exactly it. It's the idea of what the machine might reveal that sometimes spurs people to admit things to police or open up in ways they might not have before. But we all know that there is a reason that the results are not admissible in court.

I can tell you, based on 23 years of being a prosecutor, polygraphs are not reliable. You know, if we're looking for the place where this got off the rails early, at that time, the DCI, that's the Division of Criminal Investigation or State Police, were, I think, too much believers in the power of the polygraph as an investigative tool.

And Allen isn't alone in his thinking. Polygraphs were deemed so unreliable that, in fact, it was in 1998 that the Supreme Court actually ruled them inadmissible in court. But remember, here in this case, we're in the early 1990s, so investigators did polygraph several people, including Wendy and Annette.

When Annette first goes in for the polygraph, she's too upset to do it. She vomits in the room and then comes back the next day and takes the polygraph. And the examiner offers the opinion that she's not being deceptive in her answers, which include denial of knowledge of what happened to Corey. Why or who killed him?

So now with the polygraphs clearing everyone, at least by their results in Corey's immediate circle, investigators are once again stumped.

We would have cynically joked and said that half the county was a suspect. I mean, that was probably hyperbole. But at that point in the investigation, there were lots of second, third, fourth hand rumors that had been chased down by law enforcement. You know, there were interviews in there where somebody said, well, you know, I was at a party and I heard somebody say that he knew somebody who

who worked with a guy who said it was the drug dealers who did it or something like that. Well, I mean, that information is essentially useless and it's just rumors in a small community. It doesn't lead anywhere. But then a West Liberty farmer comes forward with potentially game-changing information to share. On the day that Corey's body was found, the farmer was harvesting the fields with his sons.

The combine breaks down that he's using and has to haul it into West Liberty to be repaired. And so they're hauling the equipment into town at about nine o'clock in the morning.

He later goes back into town to pick up the combine, and that's a little after 1:00 in the afternoon. And he notices on his way into town the bat on the side of the road. And actually thinks to himself, "On the return trip, I'm gonna pick that up. It's a nice bat." And then later forgets to do that. He gets distracted by something else and doesn't go back and pick up the bat.

This bat he spots on the side of the road, of course, turns out to be the murder weapon that the reporter had found later that night.

It's one of those other facts that leads into us being 100% confident that Jody is not the killer because we know the bat is the murder weapon and it wasn't on the road in the morning and it is on the road in the early afternoon. And Jody is at work at a bank in Iowa City, 30 miles away, being seen by a dozen people that whole time. So those were important things in our timeline.

So laying out the different elements, investigators are basically here as far as the timetable. You had Jodi leaving for work at a little after 8 a.m., and now you have the farmer returning home, which again, driving by and finding that bat, or at least seeing it at about 1. So that gives us at this moment about a five-hour window of the potential for when things were most likely happening to Corey.

Now, there's no doubt about it that a timeline is the spine of your homicide investigation. Knowing that information as part of your victimology investigation, as part of your persons of interest investigation, knowing whether people's stories line up or potentially a big hole in an alibi that Intel can help that timeline develop, that is critical. And this information is helpful to investigators, but so many questions in this case still remain.

The farmer says he sees yet another thing on his drive. And what he saw has less to do with the question of when in this case and everything to do with the question of who. He says that he sees two people by a car in the driveway of the house where Jody and Corey live.

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at the time he saw them, falls right into the window that investigators had locked down as when Corey was murdered. It's valuable for the timeline. It does help to constrain, you know, what the universe of possibilities are, certainly.

So the obvious question, Scott, is who did he see? Men, women, one of each. Does he recognize the people? What did the color of their hair look? What are they wearing? What type of a car were they driving? I mean, it's all really, really important questions. You have to look at this as an investigator, is that information and these details can take you in different directions. It's just that he saw two people with a vehicle, could not identify the vehicle, could not give us anything more than two people.

So this is one of those moments that every one of them must have just been shaking their head in frustration. You know, they just kept getting so close to making headway in the case, and then it just fell short. The farmer's information about when he saw the bat and the people he saw at Corey's home could eventually be a big boon in solving this case. But after six months of intense efforts and chasing down tips and leads...

Investigators still couldn't figure out who had killed Corey. And then the case went cold. And the one question I'm asked all the time is at what point is a case considered cold? How long does it have to be unresolved before it's classified as such?

And the answer really is, is when you're one out of leads, witnesses, and to be frank, a growing workload of cases that are in the early stages of an investigation that needs your attention. Anastasia, I know in your office that happened very often.

I mean, we've worked on anyone in homicide, certainly in Brooklyn, has worked on dozens, if not hundreds of them over the years. And exactly that, there's no time frame. But, you know, with this one, you know, while it went cold after they had gone through the round robin, if you will, of was it this woman or this woman, it just sat. But it didn't sit, you know, for years on end because a couple of years later there was a

a new, at least a potential break in the case because there was a local farmer, a different farmer than the one we've been talking about.

And he killed his wife and then himself. And all of a sudden now there's this theory out there that he had perhaps killed Corey back in 92 because there had been rumors that his wife, the one that he murdered, had been having an affair with Corey right before Corey died. So again, there is this now rush of information. They're working on the case. But again, it went nowhere. They determined that was not what happened. Certainly not the who. And so then the case sat cold again.

Allen joined the county attorney's office in 1997, five years to the day after Corey's murder. He recalls seeing Corey's case file for the first time a few years after joining the office.

It wasn't all that long into my career I was interested in stretching my wings a little bit and moving into different cases. And at one point asked, you know, what cold homicides we had in the office. And this was one of them. I went out to the sheriff's office and sat in the detective's office and looked through the file. And I remember it was very hard to make sense of the chronology of everything by reading just a series of interviews and left not really convinced.

knowing any more about it than when I started other than the basics of the murder. As he looked through the paperwork, it seemed to Alan that the case really seemed to fall apart at the point that the various polygraphs were done to Corey's close circle of friends.

And the investigation, you can just tell from reading the file, completely lost focus at that point. Earlier, I used that description of you start the victim and you start circling out to do the background investigation on the victim. Well, then all of a sudden that circle gets huge because now you're looking here, there and everywhere. It got so diffuse. They were to the point where they were interviewing, you know, any drug dealer we ever arrested for knowledge or things like that.

They never had a really focused look on any group of people other than women in Corey's life. As the years passed by, it became less and less likely that anyone would be held accountable for Corey's murder. The case even developed a reputation amongst law enforcement in the county as the one they just couldn't crack.

It was kind of Moby Dick to Captain Ahab in law enforcement. It's this thing that, frankly, I think some of us might have said had beaten us because there's nothing out there thinking like, oh, we're going to solve that someday. So let's fast forward now to 2010. Now Allen had been elected to the position of the Muscatine County attorney. He hadn't thought about Corey's unsolved murder in years. Remember, he didn't get anywhere as he had gone through that file.

And when I got elected, I certainly was mindful of it would be nice to solve one of these cold homicides that we have and bring them to completion. In 2017, Allen hadn't thought about Corey's case since the first time he opened the file seven years earlier. But then he got a completely unexpected phone call.

A friend of his at the attorney general's office told him to expect a phone call from someone in the DCI office, and DCI was the Division of Criminal Investigations. I had a little bit of forewarning that I was going to get a call from an agent about the Corey Winneke homicide. And so when I talked to him and he told me what had developed, I just thought, this is the most amazing thing I've ever heard.

The agent Allen spoke to was Trent Villada. Trent had been at the University of Iowa Hospital to interview an assault victim in a completely separate case. But when he got to the room of the patient he was there to see, it was crowded with doctors and medical equipment. So he stepped outside into the hallway to wait.

So Trent is outside, kind of just cooling his heels, waiting for his partner to finish up. And he's just standing there at the nurse station. Well, DCI agents, they're not wearing police officer uniforms. They wear slacks and a Columbia vest or something casual, business casual, typically. And I can tell you, and Trent would tell you, he doesn't really look like a cop.

But for the nurses working that floor, Trent's location was less than ideal. I mean, he's literally in the middle of where they need to be going back and forth and often quickly. And they're about to make that very clear to him. So the head nurse, the lead, she heads right over. She's got 36 patients that she's responsible for. Some of the sickest people in the state of Iowa, she's in charge of. And she comes back to the nurse's station and sees this dude standing there and immediately says,

I mean, like, who are you? Why are you here? You can't be here. This is not the waiting room. And Trent, before he gets the hook and thrown out on the street, manages to tell her, well, I'm a DCI agent and my partner's in there interviewing somebody.

It's very common for detectives to spend time at local hospitals for various different reasons during an investigation, from interviewing surviving victims, witnesses, and on occasion, as we saw in a recent episode, a person of interest who checked herself into the hospital because they believed they were going to avoid an arrest by being laid up in that hospital bed.

So as the nurse is basically telling him to get out of the hall, Trent identifies himself as an agent. And now that nurse just stops dead in her tracks. She went from trying to get him to leave to asking him a very pointed question.

Do you know anybody that works on cold cases, unsolved murders? And Trent says, well, I do that. And as it happens, Trent Villita is the cold case expert in the Division of Criminal Investigation. He is the guy. And Trent says, well, why do you ask? And she says, when I was nine, I heard somebody confess to committing a murder and I wanted to talk to somebody about that.

Now, at first, I found this story to be completely strange. Why would this nurse drop a bombshell like that on an agent she had just met, who just showed up at a work completely out of the blue? Alan apparently felt the very same way.

When the story was related to me, I was just blown away by how improbable it all sounded. Not that I didn't believe that this might have happened, but just the fact that out of the blue, some agent who's never worked this murder is in some place and randomly gets this information from somebody just was extraordinary.

So Trent plays it kind of cool. He's in the moment and he asks a few more questions, including the most obvious. Well, which murder exactly are you talking about? The nurse says it was about the Corey Winnike case, which Trent hadn't ever even heard of at the time. But he knew the potential impact of meeting a witness to a potential murder confession. That wasn't something that happens every day, especially in cases that had long ago gone cold.

So Trent and another agent sit down with the nurse at the hospital, and she begins to detail this murder confession that she overheard all those years ago.

In 1992, the nurse was nine years old living in the town of West Liberty. Around Christmas time, she went to a friend's house for a sleepover. As little girls often do during a sleepover, they don't go to sleep. And at some point in the evening, the girls decide they're going to sneak downstairs and find some snacks in the fridge and bring them back upstairs. Typical nine-year-old sleepover stuff, right? It's dark. It's dark.

The house is quiet, but there appears to be some motion in the front room. This nine-year-old sees a woman sitting alone, lighting black candles. She appears to be upset and is weeping while she rocks herself back and forth. She hears the woman say these words. I'm so sorry, Corey. I never meant to hurt you. I loved you, Corey. I never meant to kill you.

On the next episode of Anatomy of Murder. I don't even know if I've ever, ever mentioned this before. That was the very first night Corey ever told me he loved me. I think the people who were shocked were shocked for legitimate reasons. When Corey died, he was with Josie. I was going to be Josie. I was going to be the next Josie. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.

Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

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