Lovers' Lane (Robert Farberger and Eva Caudell)
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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. It's kind of a lover's lane. The officers will cruise through there, you know, once or twice a night just to make sure that everybody knows that it's patrol. So that's when he approached the car and saw it. 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 Murph.

One of my most favorite Adesiga-isms, if you will, is something she may tell a detective who's bringing her a case, a case that may not be quite baked yet. Don't tell me what you know. Tell me what I can prove. And that really will come to play in today's case. And Adesiga, I love when I get to quote you in the podcast. And I had to see what was coming to see if I liked it too, but that's a good one, so I'll take it. ♪♪

For today's case, we spoke to retired Detective Rafael Tovar. I started my career at the Des Plaines Police Department on July 23rd, 1970. And Detective Tovar, his jurisdiction was the city of Des Plaines, which is a police department located just north of O'Hare Airport. The Des Plaines Police Department was a 110, 115-man police department.

Detective Tovar began his career in 1970 and has worked on some very high-profile cases, including the John Wayne Gacy case. But today's case is a different type of homicide. It takes place in the section of the city often used as a lover's lane, a secluded area frequented by people looking for some private time inside their cars.

You know it's going to be somewhere quiet, but that also makes them potential targets because of that seclusion too. The officers will cruise through there, you know, once or twice a night, just make sure that everybody knows that it's patrolled.

It was just before 1 a.m. on the morning of January 10th, 1996. An officer on routine patrol near an industrial park passes through that lover's lane section and sees a 1987 red Chevrolet. He notices the man lying with his head back on the headrest and music was still coming from the car and the car was also still running.

Just out of the corner, I saw that the passenger, the male, was sitting up and there was nobody in the driver's seat, so he assumed they were doing something. So he just passed on by and then he came back later. 90 minutes after passing that vehicle and going to the industrial park, the officer returns, gets out of his vehicle, and he is slowly walking towards the car. He begins to notice that the man inside isn't engaging in anything promiscuous.

In fact, he's not engaging in anything at all. And he saw that nobody had moved, so that's when he went over and he approached the car and saw it. As he approached, he saw that the male individual was leaning back on the headrest. His mouth was open. He could see blood coming out of his mouth. He had one arm down on his thigh and the other one on the armrests.

Now to him, this is not just a sleeping situation or a couple at Lovers Lane. This is a homicide. And as he looked in, he saw there was a female who was laying on his left thigh and looking forward. And he could see that she had blood in the back of her head and on her shoulder. He could also see blood there.

So I think my first thought looking at the crime scene would be a potential murder-suicide based on the absence of a weapon that would change and leave me to believe it's likely a double homicide. And I had a very different thought when I saw it, which is that, you know, there was one detail that was left out here. The man's IDs were sitting on the dashboard of his car.

So now you have two people in the car, clearly dead. And all I could think about was that they were targeted and maybe by someone posing as sort of law enforcement. You know, hey, take out your license. Because why else would they have their license out? They take out their license, they put it on the dashboard. And then this person, whether from outside of the car or even inside the car,

takes that moment of whether it's confusion or they're not knowing who they're dealing with, and then goes on to commit this crime. That's an interesting take for sure. And again, Scott, like, I have no idea at this point, but that's all I could picture when I had the two people dead in this lover's lane and an ID sitting on the dashboard. After securing the scene, officers radio for crime scene investigators and detectives, and one of them was Rafael Tovar. I was off duty and I got called in as one of the detectives.

Just a little bit more about Rafael Tovar's journey to law enforcement. It did not take a traditional path.

I started out to be a history teacher, actually. I'm a history buff. I've traveled to six of the seven continents, 68 countries, and I go where there's stuff to see that I studied about, like the pyramids, Machu Picchu, you know. I just love history. It helps me in my conversations with people, especially working narcotics. That's your biggest weapon, your mouth. How well can you lie to these people to make yourself believable?

After he got out of college, Rafael ended up going to work for an airline out of Chicago. And he was there for a short time when his then father-in-law said, you know, the local police department is looking for specifically Spanish-speaking applicants.

I went and asked for an application. They told me that the deadline was the day before that. I said, okay, fine. So I started to walk away. And a lieutenant came running out after me. He says, you speak Spanish? I said, yeah, fluently. He says, can I talk to you? I said, sure. At that time, they had a height requirement for a police officer. You had to be at least 5'10".

And unfortunately, most of my race are short guys at that time. So he was impressed that I was over 5'10", and I had a college education. And so he said that he would waive the deadline rule, and I filled out an application on the spot. And within a week, I was in the police academy. Being a Spanish-speaking police officer was a real advantage of the city of Des Plaines, Illinois, in the 1970s.

There was a lot of Spanish-speaking people in the area, and they'd have to use these services that had interpreters, and they're not very good witnesses in court.

We used to have in New York City, we called language line. And we used to all just roll our heads when you were doing that because there was so much that was often lost in the translation. We'd be speaking to people often on the phone when you're writing these complaints and they spoke another language. So you would have an interpreter on the line. And so there was so much loss in translation that it's just so much better when you have someone sitting there with you like a police officer who speaks their native tongue.

More often than not, you know, when there was a problem, I had to handle it. And it was a good training for me. You know, it's always a motivation for any police department anywhere in the country to have their agency reflect the community. And the agency would find real use in his language skills, especially when it came to working narcotics. Rafael worked as an undercover agent for more than 20 years.

And in between those times, I would go back and work as a detective. And that's where this case came in, among other cases that I worked. And a little bit more about the area that we're talking about, Des Plaines, Illinois. It's an affordable area, a bit transient because it has major highways connecting the community.

When Rafael gets to the crime scene, he finds things very much as he was told by the initial officers, with two exceptions.

There was too many people near my privacy, mostly the ones with gold badges. But once we cleared everybody away, I could see the car where it was located. It was still running. As they looked at the car more closely and also the surrounding area, Rafael began noticing a few things that seemed whether they're out of place or that weren't part of the initial call.

I looked further with a flashlight. I could see a couple of casings on the floor and in the back seat and the front seat.

Raphael could tell the majority of this crime scene was inside the vehicle, leading him to believe that both victims were shot by a suspect or suspects that were likely sitting right behind both of the victims in the back seat. And the medical examiner, obviously, in the next days would do autopsies on both the man and the woman and determine that the manner of death for both was gunshot wounds to the head. And the bullets recovered from both their bodies were .380 automatic caliber bullets.

She had been shot in the back of the head also, and one kind of ricocheted a little bit, went in through her shoulder.

So there's clearly a number of bullets fired into the car, but there were no bullet holes in the windshield. So that either is going to mean that the windows were down and were fired through that opening, and they were down, or the killer's in the back seat. And remember, both these individuals were shot in the back of the head. The crime scene search expanded around the vehicle to determine if anything could be recovered, and two important pieces of evidence would be located in the vicinity of the victim's car.

It's generally very cold in January. You get a lot of snow at that time. And I tried to keep everybody away because it had just been snowing a little bit. Hopefully we could find some footprints or something. One of the other detectives found some tracks that actually led from the backseat of the car to this tree. And then they found some yellow snow. We all know what yellow snow is, so we made sure we blocked that off to recover it.

The first question that Rafael thought, though, was could this be a potential source of DNA? So, Scott, when you think about, you know, Rafael and obviously other investigators are already starting to formulate theories about who could have done this, you know. So, you know, you have to start to think about was this a thrill kill because there's nothing missing. So it doesn't say robbery to me. How about you?

Well, the term up close and personal really speaks for itself here for me. And to go to the urine in the snow for a second, the first question that comes to my mind is, had it been done prior to the killings, it would mean to me that there was some connection with the victims. And here's why. Someone who would be able to nonchalantly go out and relieve himself means that they weren't worried about attracting any attention or surprising the victim.

Now, if it was done after the fact, well, that says to me the killer felt confident enough that he could just stand there after murdering two people and just relieve himself. So that starts to build in my mind a theory of who the killer may be. I still really believe at this point it's certainly personal.

You know, carjacking is worth a big thing then, so I don't think that we would have thought that. At first, one of the thoughts was, "Okay, somebody's ripping somebody off for some dope." I'd been working narcotics off and on, so, you know, my mind went to that right away.

Remember, both these people are killed in this area dubbed a lover's lane. So could it be some sort of crime of passion, you know, murder-suicide, or someone that's mad that one of them is with the other in this pair? And it doesn't speak to me like that at all. First of all, crime of passion is usually something is happening right before it to now lead to the homicide. So I'm not seeing that one here either. The second discovery besides the urine at the crime scene would be seen as the best working lead on the night of the murders.

footprints in the snow leading away from the crime scene. - Right outside the right rear door was a nice set of shoe impressions. Also looking around, we found the same set of footprints going in a northeast direction from the scene towards a house that was located nearby.

There's been some cases where we followed grass that has been pushed to one side knowing that someone just passed by or those items even, if a suspect drops something along the way, guide you to the direction that they may have fled. But footprints provide two big pieces of information. It not only tells you the direction of travel, but the footprint evidence itself may end up telling you who was making those tracks.

The shoe impressions walked all the way to the front of the house, and then they walked away.

And yeah, you hear about it, it's like, wait, what? So someone is going to commit these brutal execution-style murders and then just walk through this snow right up to a house that you could almost see from where they were? I mean, while killers, just like criminals, like anyone can easily make mistakes, it almost just seems too much on its face. So when investigators followed those footprints from the crime scene, from that red Chevrolet to the door of this house, it appeared that those footprints actually passed the house.

but they would still want to see who is in that specific house. So we went to the house and knocked on the door. Just picture what it's like for them as they're approaching that location. Because if, by chance, the attacker has actually gone into that residence...

Well, now you have someone who obviously or most likely doesn't want to get caught. And it doesn't take rocket science to come to the conclusion that bad things can easily happen when someone's feeling cornered. And you know, based on the way that this crime was committed, they have a gun. So they knocked on the door and they were greeted by a group of friends that were all living together. It was kind of one of these, almost like a frat house. A whole bunch of guys living together. Everybody agreed to let us come in and look around and

And the first thing is they wanted to find out who these victims, the man and woman laying in the car, who were they? And this group was able to confirm their identities as Robert Farberger, who was 24 years old, and Eva Caudell, who was only 20. They knew that it was Rob because he had been there several times. It was kind of a loose confederation of friends.

And within those interviews, they also wanted to do one other thing, is check everyone's shoes to see if it was any type of visual match for the shoes in the snow. First of all, none of them were wet. And secondly, none of them matched the footwear impressions that we found in the snow. They were all totally different. I mean, most of them were, these were definitely like hiking boots as opposed to what was in the house. Mostly everybody had slick soles. So we knew it was none of their shoes at that point.

But again, there's a group. If they know the person who was wearing the shoes, would they even give that to investigators? It's really too early to tell. While both bodies were being transported to a medical examiner's office for autopsy, Rafael and his team began to develop the timeline by using the first officer on scene's account of events and then reaching out to the next of kin of both families for notifications and to fill in some of those gaps in time. We figured it right around midnight that it had occurred.

So detectives don't get much of anything, at least not concrete, from those conversations inside the home. But they were about to get a very big break. When they ran the license plates on the various cars that were outside that residence, they did find one name that they didn't recognize. And they asked someone inside the home, well, do you know who this is? And that person very quickly said, yes, it's our friend's car. And the name that they gave was Jim Thievel.

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$45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Investigators now begin to zero in on Jim Thievel. We learned that James Thievel had called there earlier saying he was coming over. And then he called again, said he wasn't coming over.

They knew they had some potential forensics to compare, and while that was still in process, they head over to his last known address to speak to him. - He was not there at the moment, but the roommate allowed him in and gave him permission to search. We're looking to see what kind of shoes he had.

I'm looking for a lot of different things, right? We know we have 380 rounds that are used in this double homicide. So I'm looking for the weapon, a box of ammo, if it compares to that. And also I'm looking for the boots. I'm looking for clothing. I mean, it could be a treasure trove of a forensic find there. But then in the middle of their search, police got a visitor.

And while they were there, James Zeebel, he finally shows up. He also gave them permission to search. And they looked. They found a couple of boxes of ammunition. But at the end of the day, it is just that. It is ammunition, and it wasn't even the same type that was used to kill our victims here. ♪

But that search definitely paid off because they were able to locate something of great interest, potentially a direct connection between this new person of interest and one of the victims. And it was in the form of a Polaroid picture. And it was a Polaroid picture that was actually taken at a state penitentiary. And it was someone who looked identical to one of the victims, Robert. And it's of James Stiebel with the twin brother of the victim.

So now this is a potential connection between Jim Thievul and at least one of the victims. Further interviews revealed that Robert and Eva were boyfriend and girlfriend. And while they knew Robert had a twin brother, another interesting fact came to light, that Eva had a twin sister.

And this is one of those things that it's just such coincidence. You know, you have one twin that's now dating someone else who also has a twin. And it's just kind of like, what are the odds of that? It doesn't mean anything beyond that, but I thought it was really interesting. And here's what police learned of the two victims. The 1987 Chevrolet belonged to Eva's parents, and Eva lived with them along with her twin sister. She had just graduated from high school two years earlier.

Robert's life had taken a different path. He had had various contacts with law enforcement over the years, multiple lower-level crimes. There were property crimes, there was burglary, narcotics possession, damage to property, theft. So in the end, these two, certainly on paper, seemed very different, yet they were linked based on their relationship. Ava was a poor soul who kind of went along with Rob. Rob was kind of a forceful guy, and we really didn't know a lot about her.

For me, knowing that Robert had some sort of criminal past, including drug possession, you want to explore the potential that this was a drug deal gone wrong between Robert Farbinger and Jim Thievel. Was Robert the intended target or even taken out to prevent any eyewitnesses to this murder? Or could this been related to some type of love triangle? Now, nothing pointed that way, but it is an aspect or an angle that you need to investigate.

Back to the photograph that they found. Remember, they've just been going through the apartment that Jim Thievel stayed in with his roommate. And the photograph they found, the shoes that he was wearing were quite distinctive. You could see them, but you couldn't see what brand they were. And they looked fairly new. From that point, our objective was to try to identify the shoes because we had not found those shoes at his house, but there he was wearing them.

Armed with a fair amount of information, Rafael thought it was the right time to get Thievul on the record. His side of the story and his statements about that evening connected directly with the victims, and everything started to come in focus.

That night he said he was supposed to come out to the house and decided not to come because he had been drinking. Ava and Rob, the two victims, came over to the apartment and wanted to talk to him. And his story was that later, before they left, he remembered that he had been in the backseat that night, talked and smoked some weed. Thiel's story was simple. He never left his home that evening, except for one reason.

Thievul told detectives that Rob and Eva had come to his home and he followed them back to their car into the back seat where they all smoked.

And all I could think about, Scott, is the admit what you have to, deny what you can. It's like that now this guy happens to be in the car the same night that these people are shot at the same place. And it's just a very convenient way of placing himself there as an innocent explanation. Again, not enough to take him in the courtroom yet, but I'm certainly looking in his direction for a lot longer time as he talks.

Anytime your prime person of interest puts themselves with the victims in your investigation, that is a huge box that is checked. The one thing that you may want to do is take the opposite approach. You may want to ask him, we have this evidence that you were with these victims. Why wouldn't we think it's you?

How can you explain the fact that you were with them and now they're dead? And that may place him in a corner to have to come up with more reasons why the connection was as real as it gets. We wanted his jacket and clothing to see if there was any residue on his jacket because, I mean, he would have been wearing a big jacket, that army jacket that he wore 99% of the time.

The shooting all occurred within the car. Multiple gunshots are fired from a semi-automatic handgun, which pushes off a lot of gunpowder as it's discharging. Imagine if you're in close quarters of a car and a gun is fired, some of that gunpowder is going to blast back on someone's jacket, on someone's wrists or on their shoulders, anywhere else that a gun can be close to, the gunpowder will transfer to.

And now while this is all going on, remember, they do collect that yellow snow, which is most likely, of course, urine. So they find that at the crime scene, detectives are sending it off to be processed to see what, if anything, they can find out about that forensically. But while that's all going on, there's something else taking place, and that is that the press gets a hold of this, too.

It was inevitable that this story would receive a substantial amount of media attention. But without any information being released, often misinformation about the case swirls within the community and rumors are seen as just facts. There was some fairly good coverage. Everybody was speculating it was a hit by the outfit. Memories of the mob guy, the guy shot in the back of the head when he lived. They were comparing that.

Yeah, and while all these news stories are on television and in newspapers, investigators are still pounding the pavement trying to talk to witnesses to build their timeline to see what the victims may have been doing prior to the homicide.

Our situation was that there were so many people that they knew and so many people they'd seen the night before they'd gone to movies and concerts that our whole time was being taken up with just tracking down and interviewing all these people and then sitting down and saying, okay, this is what he told us. And then this is what the offender told us. So we had to compare all this to try to see basically where the truth was. Obviously, his truth, their truth, and the real truth.

And ultimately, there's going to be some more bumps in the road for detectives, and this time when it comes to gathering any potential forensic evidence. When we found the urine near my privacy, we did send it, we gathered it, and we sent it to the lab, but they said it was too degraded. So, no, we did not get anything from that.

Crime scene investigators were able to also lift multiple fingerprints from Eva's car. The question that would come up is, since Thievul and both victims knew each other, would that evidence even be useful? Remember, fingerprints tell you who they are if they can be read, but it doesn't tell you when they were left there.

And based on my reading on this case, Thievul's prints didn't come back at all. So what does that tell you? The one thing about fingerprints is it doesn't tell you someone wasn't there. It's just that if you have them, it tells you that they were. And just like, you know, Scott just pointed out, it doesn't tell you when.

And cars are notoriously difficult when it comes to latent prints. Because just think of your own cars. How many times people are in and out of them, whether it's someone doing work on the car or friends, family, you know, someone knows someone. So you end up with all these prints. And if they don't have a reason to have their prints in the system, that you end up with a whole lot of question marks, which become potential problems later.

A few weeks into their investigation, detectives find another piece of information that might get them one step closer to an arrest.

We started talking to people about who was around the area, and we learned about a car being towed out of the area. At approximately 1:00 a.m. on January 10, 1996, a tow truck driver was called out to assist a vehicle because it had battery trouble. Is the driver a witness? Or maybe they were even involved themselves?

The tow truck driver met with a person who led him to an 80s-style Nissan sports car. But here's the catch. James Thievel didn't own a Nissan. He owned a Dodge Omni, which was inoperable at the time of the murders. And a Dodge Omni and a Nissan are two very different types of cars. And the tow truck driver obviously knows cars very well, and he could never mistake it for each other.

So while James Thievul doesn't own a Nissan, ready for this? His brother Jeffrey did. When it comes to bras, stop compromising, because now you can have it all. Beauty and comfort, support and breathability. At last, BallyBreathe has arrived. A breathable and breathtaking collection of bras, underwear and shapewear that feel as good as they look.

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So why are we even talking about that the car that was being towed belonged to Thievul's brother? Well, remember, we've been looking at Jim Thievul all along here, at least pretty closely, so...

Were investigators on the completely wrong track, or at least a right track but a different lane? You know, was this maybe the brother Jeffrey who was involved? Could this have been done by two people? Could Jim Thievel be one of two shooters involved in this case? So now their initial theories or this hypothesis are thrown out of whack, and they have to expand at least the horizon to look to see if the car is going to lead them down a different road than they were thinking before.

So they go back to the tow truck driver, right, to figure out the who, who it is that he's dealing with, because he had said from the beginning he primarily dealt with one person. First of all, it was a male. He was smaller in stature than the tow truck driver, probably younger than he was. He described that he was dressed appropriately for winter. He was wearing a hat and gloves, unless, remember, there were no fingerprints leading to either of these in the car.

And he was also wearing, and I quote, plastic framed, slightly larger than average glasses. And remember, the driver doesn't know whether he met with James Thievel, Jeffrey Thievel, or who that person was. He can only give the description of the car that he handled. But Thievel was 24, 25 at the time, and the tow truck driver was 31. So Thievel is younger. Check.

The driver said the man wore glasses and James Thievul wore glasses. Check again. So the obvious next step is for Rafael to show the tow truck driver a photograph of Jim Thievul. He did that, but the driver was unable to make a positive ID. He couldn't remember who the guy was. He just said there were several people there.

But the story's not over because the tow truck driver has more to say. Because he says that he's ultimately led over to start up a van. It might be a lot to keep track of, but we're talking about three vehicles here.

Jim Thievel's car, which wasn't working and was at his house. And then you have his brother's car, which was in the area of the crime scene. That too wasn't starting. And now you have the third vehicle, a van, which, surprise, surprise, also wasn't working. They called a tow truck to start the brother's car. For some reason or other, they couldn't start it. So therefore, they couldn't use that car to start the van.

So the investigator's best guess at what happened is, if James Thievul is the killer, he couldn't take his car. So he took a van.

But after the shooting, the van wasn't working. And remember, it was below freezing that day. But they didn't want to call for a tow because the last thing you would want after committing a double homicide is another potential witness. Then Thievel walked about half a mile to his mother's home, grabbing his brother to help him start the van. But when that cart then went kaput, he had no choice but to call the tow truck driver.

So they towed the brother's car to the mother's house, and then the tow truck driver was able to start the van up. And all of their attempts to conceal the van don't work, and this game of musical cars comes to an end.

And you know, here's something to remember with the tow truck driver. While he's talking to people, he's really focused on the cars, the vehicles that he's there for. And so he is documenting things about that, specifically the license plate numbers of all of these that he is talking about. Part of the responsibility of impounding or towing a car is writing all the information down, including the license plate, the make, the model, and even sometimes the VIN number of the car. So if that's not too specific, I don't know what is.

Those of you out there, I don't know if you've seen the movie Fargo, but first of all, if you haven't, you should. It is one of my favorites. It's just so well done. And it's a Coen Brothers movie. But it's kind of like you cannot believe some of the missteps taken by the ultimate ones committing the crime. So is it just someone who doesn't know how to get away with murder or they just don't care if they're caught? These guys were not driving, you know, state-of-the-art vehicles. Yeah.

And so now when investigators go back and look at that van, boom, it belongs to no, not Thievel, but just as good, his roommate. What are the odds of that? So again, they're full circling, still having the same person at the top of their list. So we went to interview the roommate of James Thievel. The roommate was very vague in the sense that, you know, well, I took a call, I gave it to him. I called him out, said, take the call.

He did share that Thievul owned guns and the roommate outlined a possible motive. Just one day before the murder, January 8th, the roommate noticed Thievul was angry with Robert because he thought Robert had taken one of his favorite guns. He stated that he was going to, quote, get him for that.

He had mentioned that to several people that he suspected that Rob Farber had stolen it. And he was really pissed off at that. So he was severely angry at this guy because, like I said, the gun was on, I think he called it his baby or something, you know.

Later, Thievel told his roommate, remember that thing I was talking about? Well, I did it. Thievel also asked his roommate that if the police are ever asked about his whereabouts that night, to say he had been home all night with him. James Thievel told us that he never left the house that night. So that would contradict the story that he was at home this whole time. And obviously he lied to me, so what else did you lie to me about?

Right away, this roommate as a prosecutor just became my most important witness, at least right now. Because again, if it all comes together in the end, just think about this. Like he gives a motive, which by the way, he didn't even say he saw Robert take it. We don't even know if he's right about that, but he says that he's angry at him. He's going to get him for it. Then he says, I

I did it. Well, that is clearly an admission. And then he asks him to cover with him with an alibi and say that he was home when he wasn't. But for investigators, they want that final piece on the top of that pyramid. And they keep coming back to those footprints in the snow. And they keep coming back to Thievul's shoe because they know that if they can connect the two, well, that is going to be the cherry on top. So they go so far as reaching out to the FBI to try to get some help.

You know, Anasik, I had a little bit of a chuckle here on that last line. You know, I wouldn't be calling you for this if I knew it already. It's a bit obvious here.

So while they didn't get anywhere with that connector, they still had a big question mark there, there was something that complicated these matters even more. And that was towards the end of that year in 1996. Jim Thievel was no longer even in town. He moved to Oregon and moved in with his sister. His sister was an attorney. She was clerking for some federal judge there at the time.

Still convinced they had the right guy, Rafael flew to Oregon with two other detectives and managed to get a search warrant for the sister's apartment. Three of us went out there. We met with a state detective. We were able to convince a judge there to give us a search warrant for the house, his sister's house. She was very protective of him. I mean, she even told me, even if you had a video of him doing it, I wouldn't believe it.

Investigators did recover two things that we should note. The first was part of a weapon, a gun. The second thing they found was Thievul's army jacket. Rafael is getting really, really close to gaining some valuable evidence. You have the jacket. They have on it what they believe to be human blood. So now you think you're finally, you don't have the shoe dots being all the way connected, but this jacket might be the thing they need.

Investigators had enough circumstantial evidence to believe that Thievul was indeed the killer and maybe had enough to arrest him. But was it enough to secure a conviction at trial?

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So while they debate whether or not they have enough if the case ends up in a trial in a courtroom, the Des Plaines Police Department decided to put the homicide case, at least the arrest process, away for a while. But Robert Farberger and Eva Cardell's case was obviously never forgotten by Rafael Tovar or the others that worked on the investigation. And they kept tabs on Gin Thebel over the years, and they decided to open the case back up a few years later in 1999.

Rafael always knew that he needed to find more concrete evidence linking their prime suspect to this crime. So they decided to revisit the forensic evidence once again, this time focusing back on those shoes. We did a massive search in the area.

So detectives this time made a call up to New York and spoke to a man who was referred to as Bingo.

He knew shoes like you and I know our kids, you know, I mean, he was really good. He took a look at them and he said, oh, those are Elk Woods or Oak Woods or something. And he named the brand. How good this guy was, he was able to find out that there was 80,000 of those shoes sent to the United States for five different companies. So there was five different outer soles.

And he narrowed it down that Walmart sold most of them. And then we called Walmart and they figured out that they had sent X number of pairs to a Walmart store that was down the street from where James Siebel lived.

Anastasia, I know what... I'm laughing. Yeah, I know. You know I'm going to talk about Walmart because we always talk about how Walmart is involved in so many of our cases, whether it's surveillance, whether it's carrying receipts or keeping receipts or getting interviews with workers. They seem to be really working hand in hand, and here's no different. I'm starting to think that we need to see if Walmart wants to be an AOM sponsor because they are law enforcement's best friend in these because, like she said, Scott, so many times...

It comes back to that store. But luckily, for the way that we're talking about in ways that are an aid to law enforcement. We found that that store had sold, I think, two pairs, one with a credit card. So it was no brainer. And then the other one was a cash sale. So it's probably the one he bought. And for them to be gone with less than a year, you know, more circumstantial evidence to show that he was the one in those shoes.

One thing that detectives learned now in this new phase of the investigation was that Thievel was living with his girlfriend in Oregon. So when Raphael talked with the ex-girlfriend, she said she had thrown him out because he was abusive. And she also told investigators that while they were together, he liked to watch and discuss crime shows. And there's a reason why this is important.

Let's just talk about the timing for a moment, because so many of you probably said, wait, what? They stopped and just let this case sit for a few years? Well, here's the exact type of thing that you hope helps with the passage of time.

So he had this girlfriend that he was living with who very likely might not have spoken to investigators when their relationship was active and ongoing. But now they're apart. You know that it ended, you know, not well based on at least allegations of abuse. So now she is very ripe to speak with them and look at this wealth of information based on what she starts to say.

Now, they may have been sort of off comments during that show, but when you put that in the mix of this investigation, it's pretty interesting.

He was talking a lot. I mean, really silly stuff that would come back to bite him in the butt, you know, but that's what he was doing. So there's this question, like, why do criminals so often like to talk about their crimes? Because so often it ends up getting them in trouble. And it really comes down to very often this like bravado, this bragging, whether they're proud of it or they just want to impress the person that they're with or they are themselves impressed in their own minds, like it sounds like this guy was.

with what he had done, that he thinks he is being a bit discreet in the way that he's putting out there. But these are fantastic admissions if ultimately they get this woman to give these things later on in court. - In May of '99, they decided that we're gonna go forth and issue a warrant for his arrest. And that's when we went back to Oregon. - So now that they had their arrest warrant in hand, police decided to make their arrest of Thebel at his workplace.

We walked in and we walked in behind him and arrested him right inside the plant. You know, people say, well, why not arrest him at home? Well, there is different privacy laws when it comes to that sometimes.

I could tell you my thought on a SIGA. The primary reason is someone's work schedule. People normally arrive at the same time every day to work. So if you're trying to find someone and plan their arrest in a situation where you can control that in custody situation, you wait for them to arrive at work because you know you're going to be prepared.

And once he was under arrest, Jim Fievel called his sister, who, remember, she was an attorney, and she advised her brother not to speak or to waive extradition, which means not to go willingly to that other state to be prosecuted. It took from May 24th to August 27th before he was extradited.

The state attorney focused the trial on the most convincing pieces of circumstantial evidence, like the ammunition. And from the witness stand, Rafael was able to succinctly lay out the evidence. I've got a pretty good ability to memorize stuff, so I was on the stand for a while and I was able to just recite the case, you know, step by step.

And then the witness who becomes maybe my favorite, which is the ex-girlfriend. And she was understandably quite hesitant about being part of the process and certainly in testifying. She was afraid of it, first of all. She didn't really want to do much of anything. It took a lot of imploring to get her to come to testify. We all know how juries love hearing direct testimony from somebody who interacted with the alleged killer and how her story weaved into the entire package of evidence for me was so interesting.

During his trial, Thievel's roommate told a story that leading up to the murder, the defendant described how he felt. He had fantasized a scene from the movie Reservoir Dogs where the person in the movie is tied to a chair and gasoline is poured all over them, adding how he said it would be so much fun to get revenge on someone who had done me wrong.

And after all the evidence and testimony was before the jury and they were given the charge, they came back quite quickly in this case. And Jim Thievel was found guilty of all counts. Later, when we talked to some of the jurors, they said that they weren't quite as hard on the circumstantial as we were. They said it's obvious, you know, to them. They said they had no problem in finding him guilty right away. Jim Thievel was sentenced to life in prison without any possibility of parole.

You know, when I think about where I come out on a particular case, very often it comes right to me. Something strikes me in it. But one thing that struck me was this.

We don't know as much about Robert Farberger and Evo Caudell as we do in other cases. And that in and of itself I find sad because we talk about remembering them, so I wish we had more to say. But I did keep coming back to the word of senselessness in this. You know, whether it was that Thievul was right and Robert had taken something, whether it was the gun or something else that belonged to him, he's going to murder him over that?

And by all accounts, Eva had nothing to do with any of it at all. Farberger was accused of just stealing one of his guns. Eva, something Thievul considered to be just collateral damage. And it really comes down to, you know, you get angry at people and the way that people decide to

get retribution for whatever it is on their mind. There is just a senselessness and tragedy of it all. And I think this case just really stands for that to me. 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 and Submit David are executive producers. This episode was produced by Philjean Grande. 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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