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Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Barbara, you say what you did, but you don't know why you did what you did, and you can't, you don't accept any responsibility for what you did. Welcome to Season 11, Episode 259 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real.
So here's the thing. I can't talk about the because otherwise you guys go crazy and start making up rumors online about where to find it out in the wild. I'm talking about the app, of course, which we're working on. And I don't know what to say about it because we're in this weird period of time where we put out these episodes a week ahead of time on Plus and then they come out to everybody else a week later. So the information changes after a week.
I don't know what to say to you right now other than, I don't know, just sit tight, I guess. And the app will be here eventually. By the way, in the meantime, we have a store we're working on with all kinds of brand new merch and stuff. It's partially functional right now, but there's that. So if you want to support us, head on over to store.swordandskill.com and take a look. ♪
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The national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new Toyota truck. Like a rugged, half-ton Tundra, workhorse by nature, powerhouse by design, the Tundra combines raw capability with premium comfort and advanced tech to fuel your wildest adventures. And with the available i-Force Max hybrid powertrain, you can take electrifying horsepower farther and
than ever before. Or check out the fully redesigned Tacoma, delivering trail-dominating power and captivating style. The new Tacoma was born to make your off-roading dreams come true. And with the new available tech, this legendary truck is getting even better. And when you buy a Toyota truck, you buy Toyota dependability, meaning your truck will hold its value long into the future.
So, visit your local Toyota dealer and check out amazing national sales event deals when you visit BuyAToyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. There's no denying it. Teachers hold an immense power and influence in shaping the lives of their students. If your kid is anything but homeschooled, they spend a good chunk of their week with their educators.
A good teacher creates an environment where open communication and trust are fostered, allowing students to confide in them about their experiences, fears, or concerns. This is necessary because, as we know, teachers are mandated reporters. Because of the vast amount of time spent with their students in a routine-based environment, teachers are likely to notice if something seems off or
If a child is showing signs of abuse, they become the ears and eyes tuned in to the well-being of their students beyond just the academic performance. And when they suspect something isn't right, they are mandated to take action and report it, ensuring that these children get the help and protection they deserve. Ultimately, once a teacher turns a case into Child Protective Services,
It's up to that agency to deal with it. And the teacher who reported it doesn't get any updates on the case. The story we're about to tell you is indeed about a teacher opening up a CPS case. But this case went a little differently than most others. I have taught mathematics for 33 years. I just recently retired during the pandemic. This is Tammy Cooper. She spent her long career teaching math to students.
Wait for it... Middle Schoolers Can you imagine what a pain in the ass that is? And this woman did it for 33 years. Back on the 1st of October 1997,
Tammy woke up early in the morning and got ready for another day of turning adolescent chaos into calculated brilliance at Joseph Kerr Middle School in Elk Grove, California. I had been teaching middle school at Joseph Kerr Middle School for 10 years when Jessa came to me the day she came to me. And so I was an experienced teacher, but it was shocking what she had to tell me.
Interestingly enough, this is one of those rare cases where we have nearly every single important perspective directly from the source. This girl Tammy is talking about Jessa or Jessica is now in her late 30s. Her name is Jessica Rael and at the time she was just starting 8th grade and Tammy Cooper's math class was Jessica's final class of the day.
Because it was all very early in the school year, Tammy didn't have more than an acquaintance-level relationship with her students in the classroom. She was just starting to get to know them. It was sixth period, and this is the end of September, so I'd only known her for, you know, maybe six weeks. As the kids began slowly filtering into the room, Tammy's
Tammy noticed Jessica timidly walking toward her. She came up to me right before class started and said, I can't go home. I need to find my granny. And I said, what? I was confused. She goes, I can't go home. I can't go home. I got to find my granny. And then she said they poured bleach on me. And in my mind, I'm going crazy.
Bleach.
This poor girl had just told her brand new math teacher that someone had poured bleach on her hair. It was clear the longer Tammy looked at Jessica. Her hair was changing colors. It was crispy and fried. Her clothes had bleach stains all over them and
She smelled strongly of the chemical. She was absent a lot in just that short period of time. And it probably was closer to five weeks, maybe. But she had a bee in the class. She always did her makeup work. And the ironic thing is I knew she had a friend who had ran away.
And it came out, you know, on her email at the middle school. And so I came up to her and said, hey, do you know anything about her? I can't remember the girl's name. And she said, no. At that moment, I would never have in a million years even crossed my mind that she was in trouble herself. It was just incredible.
At that moment, the way she told me and the burns on her arms, it just was, it just hit me. Upon further investigation, the damage was even more shocking than anyone realized. Jessica's clothes had disguised the chemical burns on her skin throughout the day. I just remember feeling dirty and wanting to brush my teeth, but couldn't go into the house. And my hair was like,
I couldn't see it, but it felt like straw. It was just changing texture as the hours went on. And I was in a lot of pain from the leech burns. And then I got dressed, got my backpack and rode the, I think it was like three miles to the junior high and went to school.
My first class was supposed to be gym and I was like, I can't change to gym clothes and they'll see all these burns. So I went and I told them that I fell in bleach, but I think they thought I said I fell off the bleachers and that I hurt myself and I couldn't do gym class and then they let me get out of it. And then I went through most of my classes.
I knew I smelled, but I don't know if other people noticed it. And then I saw my face in the bathroom and my hair was like changing colors as the day was going on. And at lunchtime, I told my only friend that I had at school what had happened. And she was trying to convince me to tell someone. But I at that point, I wasn't 100 percent convinced that.
But right before my last period class, I was like, this is it, either now or never. Like, I either tell someone and see if maybe someone will actually help me and believe me, or I go home and face whatever's going to happen. We waited till the end of the period, and then I had taken her up
the counseling office. And I just recently saw her counselor like a week ago and updated him. So this is 25 years later. And he had in fact checked on her earlier in the days as some student had reported that
He or she thought something was wrong. So the counselor did check with her and she said nothing. She doesn't remember that, but he did just recall that to me. So we sat down. Sheriff was called. I took her into the bathroom and took pictures. I mean, her bra was burned. You could see the burn marks where the bleach had burned a bra to her back.
And it was just all over her hair. It was, yeah, it was really, really shocking. Then we came back. We did finish all the CPS report. And the sheriff came. And then the next place she was going was to the hospital. And right then as a teacher, that was the moment that was a pivot for me in the sense of I decided to go to the hospital with her.
Though at first it was unclear to Tammy what exactly had happened to Jessica,
The confusion quickly dissipated as she shared more of the horrifying details with her teacher. According to Jessica, who lived with her biological mother and stepfather in a nice-looking single-family home in Elk Grove, it was her stepfather who had poured bleach all over her the night before. This was not an accidental thing, this was very malicious and very intentional. Not only that,
But it later became clear that Jessica had actually been sleeping in a shed in the backyard when this occurred. Though it appeared relatively normal from the outside, there was something evil happening behind closed doors. No, it was probably the third or fourth time I was made to sleep out in the shed. Eighth grade had started and I was already at school and I was made...
Woken up in the middle of the night, told to go out there because I couldn't be in the house. So I went out there and I was sleeping on the lawn chair. And in the middle of the night, Larry comes out, opens the door and pours a bottle of bleach all over me, screaming about, hey, you like that, don't you, demon? And then they left me there covered in bleach for I don't know how long. And eventually they came in and sprayed me off with the ice cold hoes.
and then I got up, changed, and went to school. I was lucky because it did have multiple windows because we used to have the animals in there. So it did have like a cross breeze and it was early September so it wasn't terribly hot.
Jessica's mother, Barbara Carrasco, raised and bred French bulldogs at one point, keeping up to 10 dogs crated in the shed at a time. It smelled like old wet dog because there were still dog kennels in there and like old dog food and it just smelled dirty because it was a storage shed now. But it wasn't terribly hot or uncomfortable.
It might be worth noting here that though Jessica says now that the shed wasn't particularly hot or uncomfortable, her threshold for discomfort is likely a lot different than those of us who had even somewhat of a normal upbringing. For example, though she was sleeping out in the shed, you might assume her parents would allow her to come inside and use the restroom during the night, or at least before going to school.
Right? Oh, there was a bucket, a five-gallon bucket in the shed that I was to use to go to the bathroom.
We are trained every year to recognize what we look for. And I'm trying to think if I did file a report before her. I filed several after. I honestly can't remember. And if I did, it was nothing of this violent nature. But we got to the hospital. She had to strip and shower and do a rape test. And I knew...
when just by her body movements that she had been molested. And she has denied that to me forever until just this last year. And I knew it was just not the kind of movements that a 13-year-old girl would do when they're being tested for rape. Like, oh, okay, no big deal. And I expected her to be
Jessica hadn't been molested by this current stepfather, 49-year-old Larry Carrasco.
But she had been abused by her mother's former husband, Charles, who is also the father of the rest of Jessica's siblings. It had been seven years since Jessica, her mother, and grandmother bounced around different states before settling down for a while in a motel across from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California. Charles owned the motel and Jessica's grandmother worked there.
She and Jessica stayed in the attached apartment that was reserved for the motel manager, which had become her grandmother's job. Well, we always kind of always lived together. I was born in New Jersey. I know we did maybe a year in Florida when I was little, but she was there too.
And then we drove cross country, ended up in California and multiple different places. But I've always been with my grandmother and my mother. But my mom would always leave to, when I was little, I'd call them her adventures because I didn't know what she was doing. I usually involved a new man. When we moved to Santa Cruz, it was a
it was always been me and my grandmother anyway so it wasn't any big change for me to be just kind of left with my grandmother things were relatively normal for me my grandma made a good life for us i went to school had friends socialize all those things and my mother would come around whenever she felt like it or wanted something from my grandmother
And eventually she had my brother Chad and then dropped him off to live with us. He was probably two months old when she dropped him off for a permanent stay. I mean, she came back once in a while. I mean, not often, but she did come back from time to time.
Every city they lived in, Jessica's grandmother lamented Barbara's erratic and negligent behavior. I mean, honestly, at that age, I didn't really know anything different because my grandmother basically raised me and I used to call my grandmother mom because my mother was so sporadically in my life that her not being around wasn't any different. I did have moments where...
When she would come around and I would try to get her attention, I would feel bad because she would always say, don't hang on me. Don't touch me. Like, just go away. And I'm thinking, why are you even here? Like, if you're not coming to see us, why are you even here? But she was never really a mother, so it didn't really make a difference. Soon, Jessica, her grandmother, and her new brother, Chad...
who was dressed in a tiny baby tuxedo, attended Barbara's wedding to Charles.
Charles, by the way, was already married with three kids when Barbara got pregnant. When I first met him, I mean, I thought he was weird because he was Asian and they had different cultural things. Like, he scared me because he ate fish eyes and he told me he was going to make me eat them if I didn't quit sucking my thumb. That was like the most vivid memory I've ever had. I'm like, I barely even know this man. And he's like branding this whole fish at me with eyeballs. And I'm like, um...
It was just I wasn't used to the cultural differences, but we didn't really spend much time together before they got married or even after they got married. It wasn't until he basically lost everything and they all decided to move to Nevada that I actually lived with him and spent any amount of time with him. She saw dollar signs because he owned a motel. He had other homes and, you know, it was in Mountain View, which is very like.
By the time Chad was about to turn one, Barbara dropped off another of her and Charles' babies. This time, it was a little girl named Alexia, born on September 23rd,
1991. Early the next year, everyone, including Barbara and her new husband, moved to Stagecoach, Nevada. The six of them, three adults and three children, lived in a double-wide trailer, if that surprises you.
That summer, Barbara gave birth to her third baby by Charles. This one, a boy named Michael. She knew his name was Michael because the guy who was adopting him is named Michael. So they knew while she was pregnant that they weren't keeping him. I don't know if their relationship was already starting to fall apart or what was happening at that point. I know Charles became weird and more distant because his oldest daughter was killed in a car accident.
So it kind of just changed him and he just locked himself in his office most of the time. I just think it was a downward spiral after the move and after her death, another baby just wasn't going to be feasible. Just a few weeks after he was born, once the doctor cleared him to fly, Barbara sent Michael off to live with this old friend of hers who lived in Pennsylvania. Eventually, Barbara also sent little Chad to live with the same man.
So, this timeline tells us that at one point Jessica had three siblings. By the time the incident with the bleach happened, Jessica was the only child living in the home with her mother and her second stepfather Larry. So, where were the other children? Were Michael and Chad really with a man in Pennsylvania? And where was Alexia?
Oh, yeah.
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In early September 1997,
Thirteen-year-old Jessica Rael confided in her math teacher that she was being abused at home, lifting her shirt to reveal horrible chemical burns on her skin. Jessica's teacher, Tammy Cooper, stuck by her through her hospital evaluations and all of the CPS paperwork. Tammy and Jessica both knew she wouldn't be returning home to her mother, Barbara, and her stepfather, Larry Carrasco. She'd been shuffled right back.
into the system. By this point, Jessica's mother and stepfather had forced her grandmother out of the home, leaving Jessica with no protection from their atrocities. Jessica's grandmother wasn't in a position the court saw appropriate enough to place Jessica in her care, so she instead went to live in Sacramento Children's Receiving Home. Sounds like a much better option.
I guess. When I walked in, I didn't realize even what a receiving home was. But when I walked in, it almost looked like a doctor's office in the front. All the chairs lined up and a front desk where you can check in.
It was quite a large facility that housed 70 children ages 0 to 18, boys on one side, girls on the other, and we were separated by age groups. And then it was just supposed to be temporary care until they can either go home or find foster placements.
I think it was after the hospital or before the hospital. But we did go to the sheriff's office and they called Barbara Rael, who is Jessica's mother. And Jessica was on the phone and me and the sheriff could hear. And she was saying, why did you do that? Trying to get her biological mother
to admit to what she had done. It became obvious that she was not going to admit anything. So the sheriff had Jessica stop the conversation.
And then the next thing we did was go to the receiving home. That was the last thing. And I was told because I was a family, I would not be able to see her for three days. But I promised her that I would see her as soon as I could. And then her mother and stepfather were arrested that night about two o'clock in the morning. The average stay in the receiving home is less than 30 days. A lot of people just get other family members who can take them.
During Jessica's first month at the receiving home, there was an FBI agent in Sacramento who was just starting to investigate this case. Not because of the child abuse, but because
Jessica's grandmother had called into the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office worried about her grandchildren. We know that little Chad and Michael were shipped off to live with a man in Pennsylvania, and this was confirmed by the authorities. Alexia, however, was reportedly living with her father Charles in Chicago. The FBI agent who helped Sacramento County with this case is Jeffrey Rinnick.
And we talked to him, too. The way Alexia started, and the guy in the, in fact, I just saw him the other day. His name is Steve Hill, and he was a missing person detective for the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department. I got a call from Steve, and at the time I got the call, what I was told by Steve Hill was that they had received a call from a woman in Pennsylvania
And the woman in Pennsylvania claimed to be a grandmother of a little girl down around Elk Grove. She was calling the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department because she couldn't reach anyone and she was worried about her granddaughter. And that's what they started with. And then when they got that, they called me.
All we knew was that we had this little girl that was unaccounted for. And all I knew was even though the FBI had no business in it, I was going to go with Steve. I mean, he was one of my best friends. And I know the guys I worked with, we cared about those guys. So if it was an issue or a concern for backup, we would be there for each other. So that's how I started, just being backup for Steve Hill. Jeff has had a long, successful career in the FBI.
Before getting involved in cases of missing children, Jeff was actually the agent who pulled a murder confession from Cary Stainer, a Yosemite killer. If you know or remember that case, Cary was the older brother of Stephen Stainer, a teen who was kidnapped back in 1972 and held captive for seven years. Eventually, Stephen escaped, bringing with him another little boy who had also been kidnapped by the same man.
Stephen went on press tours and was a veritable celebrity after his escape, but was tragically killed riding his motorbike home from work in 1989 when a car hit him and drove away, leaving him to die of his head injuries. Ten years later, in 1999, Stephen's older brother, Kerry, began murdering women near Yosemite National Park.
It's a fascinating story that the brother of a kidnapped teen would turn into a murderer. But here we are. He murdered four women between February and July, but authorities quickly caught on and he was arrested on July 24th of that same year. Jeff went through all the training at Quantico many, many decades ago. His training on interrogation consisted of a two-hour class.
Most of Jeff's tactics, though, seem to come to him naturally, even mirroring the read technique in some ways. You know, it's funny because, you know, you read about these other techniques and they teach you how to feign like you care, you know, how to act so they believe you. I don't act. I mean, if I'm interviewing you and I tell you I'm going to do something for you, I'm going to do it. In Stainer's case...
You know, I promised him that his family had no idea what was coming and that I needed to go down there and tell him. And that was one of the things that he was considering before he started confessing. Now, everybody thinks killers to be monsters and mean people, but...
Before I retired, I helped with an interview of a young boy, he's about 19. He had drowned, deliberately drowned, a 15-year-old boy. He wanted to talk to me.
And I was leaving. I had promised that I wouldn't do any more interview shoots, but they came and got me, said he was asking for me. So I went back in. So I went in and I took his confession. But here's the thing. Like when I do my interviews, like I want to know about this person. What's what's his story? So like in this guy's case, I said, you know, if you could have anything in the world, what would you want?
And, you know, you can see him going through and going through and he looks at me and says, you know, if I could have anything in the world, I would want someone to love me and someone to love. Now, this is coming from a kid who just killed a 15-year-old kid. So, you know, it doesn't fit. It doesn't make sense. How do you explain it? And I think that's one of the things that wears out investigators and detectives because, you know, there's just some things that
that are not going to make sense. And when you see them in conjunction with crime scenes that are beyond the ability to tolerate, you know, it just does what it does. There's a lot of confusion around the FBI's protocols, specifically when it comes to cases of missing children. In the 1990s, the director was Louis Freeh. And Louis Freeh determined that
He was going to enable the FBI's resources and people to be utilized if a child is harmed or goes missing or whatever. And so he took away, for some reason, everybody always says, oh, you got to wait 24 hours for the FBI. That is, no, you don't wait at all. And I think a lot of what determines how the FBI is going to answer is going to be the person that you're dealing with.
for instance, in our office, because I was the coordinator, if we got cases in that, I didn't care who worked them. And what started happening was that we started seeing that what would start out as a runaway would end up as an abduction or a false imprisonment because the child had changed their mind and wanted to come home, and then the adult wouldn't let them come home.
When you talk about the difference between, you know, local cases and FBI, this is an example. The FBI doesn't go, you know, we don't do that. It's not that it's below us or anything, but we are required by law to address what the law tells us to address. And those things are going to be federal crimes or any other such thing that is legislated.
So that's why, you know, normally we wouldn't get calls like this. But because of the relationship we had, we did. So when they got the call, basically, there was me, I think one or two other agents from the office. We went with their squad, the Child Abduction Squad, or they called themselves the Child Abduction Bureau. And then we were down there with them just covering them. But what we found, we were unprepared for.
We'll get to that in just a little bit. You might be thinking,
Why would this guy try to scare or guilt a child who was a victim herself? As we were conducting investigation looking for the little girl, we saw there were pictures in the house with her face cut out of them. So that was not a good feeling.
And then as the day went on, we learned that the victim's older sister, her name is Jessica, it's our Jessica, had reported to a teacher that day at school that her stepfather had poured bleach on her while she was sleeping in a shed in the backyard.
And because of that, they had removed her from the house and were holding her at the child's receiving home. We realized on the first day, based on learning and talking with the detectives, the sheriff's detectives, that something really catastrophic had happened here.
And so at that point, as the day unfolded, we realized that we had no evidence that Alexia ever existed. And so we would stop at nothing to look for her and to find her. So from that point on,
It became a situation where the Sheriff's Department was bringing up the resources, bringing up their people, and we were helping them. If interviews need to be done, that kind of thing, we would do it. As we know, when it came to interviews, Jeff was the man for the job. This is really hard for me because I'm not proud of it, but I will tell you what happened. We spent a day looking for Alexia. I was with my partner who was a new agent.
And we were heading back to our office and I decided the children's receiving home was right across the street from our office. So I went into the children's receiving home and we asked the administrators if we could see Jessica. So they put us in a room with Jessica, glass door, you know, it was glass, and they left us there. Jessica's opening remarks were utter profanity.
As a law enforcement person, one of the hardest things in life is to try and convince a person that is afraid of you that you're there to help them. It's really, it's not only hard, but it becomes emotionally just really taxing. And in this case, she refused to tell us anything. She would, you know, throw profanity at us like it was, you know. He told me like things like,
Who do you think she was calling for when they were abusing her? You were her only person to help. We know you know what happened to her. Like, it was some harsh tactics. And he remembers her differently than I do, but I don't remember telling him what happened. I remember walking out of that meeting. This is how Jeff remembers that interview. I don't know. Something clicked inside of me. I wasn't going to... I believed...
She was the only one who could tell us where that child was, and I wasn't going to leave there. Yeah, according to the FBI agent, when I spoke to him not too long, a few months ago, they found not a single solitary DNA strand, not a hair, not a fingerprint, no toys, nothing to indicate that a child lived in that house. Every picture she was in, her face was cut out of it.
I started back from the beginning with Jessica, and I started taking every memory she had and establishing from her which of the memories had Alexia in them. And so she had to do nothing but think about Alexia. And she's smart. She knew I was getting a little, we were getting upset. She said something that indicated she was there. I heard her say something like that.
And I just very nonchalantly got up and I locked the door to the room. And I went back to Jessica and I started having her describe for us her favorite times with Alexia, which invariably would turn out to be the two of them cuddling in and watching TV. We knew about Alexia, but the only person who could tell us is you. And she was...
screaming and yelling. They were trying to get in the room. I wouldn't let them in. And so they were very, very angry. But the end result was that Jessica described everything that had occurred.
It started when she was very, very little, even when we were still living with Charles in Stagecoach, Nevada. I remember coming out and she's, Lexi is in a high chair, probably eight, nine months old. And Barbara's just taking a lighter to the bottom of her feet. Walked out, saw her doing it. And the baby's obviously crying. And my mother had a look. And if she gave you that look, you didn't say anything back. So I just turned around, walked out.
Another memory Jessica can recall from her childhood really puts Barbara into perspective. My mother would love to tell me that I was ugly and fat and worthless and that I would never amount to anything. I'd be pregnant in high school. I mean, it was just, I never got any racial slurs, but, you know, I was called a bitch and a cunt, anything. I mean, she took all my awards that I saved and all my cards for like birthdays and
And she burned them all in the fireplace just because they meant something to me. Barbara and Charles obviously didn't work out long term as a couple. So they split. And Barbara quickly went on the hunt for another man, as Barbaras often do. We moved again. We were in another city in California. And I was in sixth grade going to school. Chad finally started kindergarten school.
And she was off all the time, supposedly working or looking for work. And she came home one time and she's just like, I met a man and we got married and we're all moving into his house in Elk Grove. And my grandmother tried to convince her to let us finish out the school year. So we didn't have to change mid-year, but she was hearing nothing about it. She's like, they're my kids. I'm taking them. So we ended up moving while I was in my sixth grade year.
Whenever she could show us off to some boyfriend or at some event, she would. But when it came to actual parenting or being there for when we needed her, she wanted nothing to do with it. By this point, only one of Jessica's younger brothers had been sent to live with the man in Pennsylvania. So it would be Jessica, Alexia, Chad, and their mother, Barbara, and grandma making the move.
they'd be moving into a home in elk grove california owned by a 49 year old man named larry carrasco i don't even know if how he met her if it was like at a bar or just down the street she never gave us any information she just said she married him and here we are so i thought he was just completely normal everyday guy
one of the most well-put-together guys I've ever seen my mom date. I thought, well, maybe this will be good. Like, maybe we'll stay here for a while and, you know, mom will be all right and we'll get to be a family. These hopes didn't last long. Barbara never enrolled Chad in kindergarten and sent him to live in Pennsylvania that same summer. Just a reminder, because these names can get confusing. Michael was the name of Jessica's little brother,
and also the name of the man their mother sent the boys to live with. When Barbara was pregnant with Michael, she knew she would be sending him off for this unofficial adoption. So she named the baby after the man who would be taking custody of him. How thoughtful, I guess. Chad was shipped off a little bit later and was slightly less planned. After he's sent to live with Michael...
Things got weird. My grandmother was noticing more and more of the, I guess, the addictive behaviors and the odd punishments and the meanness towards Alexia. And she was speaking out about it more and threatening to call the authorities to get us taken away. So Barbara and Larry decided to kick my grandmother out. And once my grandmother no longer lived there, I missed a lot of school taking care of Alexia.
because Barbara wouldn't come out of her room. From time to time she would tell me to stay home just because she didn't want to deal with that Chinese bitch is what she would call Alexia a lot of times. But then other times she's like you have to go to school because if not the cops are going to come after me for you missing too many days. It was hit or miss with her. But some days I would stay home if Alexia was feeling emotionally like unstable I guess you could say because there would be some times where she would be like I just don't want to be here alone.
She's always told me when I came home from school that they don't feed her. Nobody comes out of the bedroom and they don't feed her while I'm gone. So it made me not want to go to school because I didn't know what was happening to her when I was gone. Just like Chad, Alexia approached five years old and was never enrolled in kindergarten. She was pretty smart. I mean, I think she would have been a highly intelligent little girl. I mean, I will never know because she didn't even get to go to school to see if she could, you know, read or anything like that. But...
Things were getting weird. Not only because Barbara's own addiction to methamphetamine was getting worse, but because she had gotten Larry on meth as well. He once had a stable job before a workplace injury, but was unemployed by February of 1997.
and had begun skulking back into the bedroom with Barbara on a daily basis. At one point, Larry, before his accident, he agreed that she needed to get help and he kicked her out. Both my grandmother and him decided to kick her out. And within like a few hours, she was back at the door just crying and begging to come back, swearing that she was going to do better and go to rehab and all of this. And they both let her back in and
No rehab ever happened. Soon, they were making paranoid accusations, claiming the girls were possessed. Every day held a new, scary encounter with Barbara or Larry. And this was all just the beginning. What's the easiest choice you can make? Window instead of middle seat? Picking a vendor who sends a great gift basket? Outsourcing business tasks you hate? What about selling with Shopify? Tsk, tsk.
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13-year-old Jessica Rael sat in an interrogation room in late 1997, rehashing every single detail of what happened to her little sister, 5-year-old Alexia. There was not a crumb of evidence that Alexia even existed in the Carrasco home.
But she had lived there with Jessica, hidden within the confines of the deceivingly normal-looking outer walls. As she began to divulge more of her story, police officers and FBI agents couldn't believe what they were hearing. Especially because they didn't have any evidence that could corroborate that Jessica's story was even true. This would soon change. Very shortly before the worst part of Jessica's story happened,
She told detectives about her mother and Larry's drug use and increased paranoia. Something that eventually led to the couple accusing both Jessica and little Alexia of being possessed by demons. It's important to note though that Barbara's behavior can't be mitigated by her drug use. It would be easy to blame everything on drugs. Of course it would. But Barbara's personality was poison from the very beginning.
just, you know, added a little spice to the mix. A little chaser on your cocktail, if you don't mind the comparison. My grandmother raised her with her father,
And I know she was very spoiled. My grandmother had my uncle and then she had like eight miscarriages over like 13 years before she got pregnant with my mother. So she spoiled the hell out of my mother. She had everything under the sun. Like, I don't think she ever worked for anything in her life. High or not high, my mother was, it was always what she wanted, how she wanted it.
If only it benefited her. Fearing for her little sister's safety, Jessica began missing more and more school so that she could stay home and keep an eye on her. Though she stayed home as often as she could, there were, of course, still days when Jessica had to be away at school all day long, anxious the entire day knowing that Alexia was without her protection. I think that was one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed is
I came home from school and she was in her room and she was playing and the door was slightly open and I see her just playing with the stuffed dogs. And I'm like, well, where's your baby dolls? And she's like, they're under the bed. And I'm like, why? She goes, well, because babies are babies are bad and they need to be locked up. And I just was like, then why are we playing with the puppies? She goes, because everybody loves puppies.
And that was just like the most heart-wrenching, saddest thing I think I've ever witnessed. And I was like 12 at the time. And that's what the first thing I thought was, well, if she's playing this with her dolls, something has to be happening while I'm at school. All I really got out of her is the fact that they left her alone and they never fed her and she was always hungry. Once summer started...
I got to witness a lot of what they were doing and it was a lot of locking her in a closet, cutting all her hair off one time because my mother didn't want to deal with it. And that was an emotionally hard thing to watch because I hear her crying and I go find them in their master bedroom closet and she's got Alexia taped, like duct taped to a four poster chair while she's just cutting all her hair off. And I'm like, I don't, didn't understand why.
Why would we need to do that? And Barbara's excuse was she didn't want to take care of her hair. And then I, with my smart mouth, said, well, you don't. I do. Like, leave it alone. Like, I'll take care of it. It didn't work out. She still cut basically all of her hair off. She said lots of nasty things to her while she was cutting her hair off. The demons and the vampire talk started going.
probably right after my grandmother was kicked out but it wasn't on a regular basis i finished my seventh grade year and then during that summer more and more talk of the demons and the vampires apparently alexia and i were demons and barbara thought she was god at one point and she was pregnant with jesus and she told me that i had to die because i was sucking the electricity out of her baby
It was just random, out of nowhere things. And I just, I never said I was, I never said I wasn't. I didn't go against her. I just let her talk. On two different occasions, someone, probably Jessica's grandmother, called CPS or the sheriff's department to go out to the Carrasco home and check on the girls. Of course, Barbara and Larry had prepared the girls for events like this.
And they behaved accordingly. It was in the summer, like the very beginning of summer, right after my grandmother was kicked out. The cops came and I told them everything was fine. But I wasn't going to say things were horrible or anything was going on because Barbara and Larry were standing right next to me. And the cops weren't even coming in the house. They just stood in the doorway. So I just went with it. Everything's fine. I'm good. We're all good.
And then the more talks of demons and vampires and Barbara putting like cameras in the ceiling to watch me because apparently I was trying to sneak out or kill her or whatever she thought I was doing. We had my bedroom windows was bolted shut. There was really no escaping that house. She took the phone away so I couldn't call anybody. And it was summertime so it's not like I had a reason to leave the house.
And then all of a sudden she and Larry sit us down and tell us that they figured out how to get rid of the demons and the vampires and that we would need to drink these bleach milkshakes three times a day for eight days to rid us of our demons. Three bleach milkshakes per day for eight days meant that each girl would have to consume 24 total milkshakes, which were often mixed with garlic and other spices.
Jessica was a middle schooler, but Alexia was a tiny little five-year-old. Jessica knew there was no way Alexia would be able to survive all 24 of those shakes. It was very an intimidating process because Larry and Barbara both sat at the table with us and like stared us down. We weren't allowed to leave unless we drank it. But initially I had refused and Larry punched me in the face and gave me two black eyes because I refused to come out of my bedroom to go drink.
drink this concoction. After he did that, I realized I had no choice and that if I didn't, I was probably going to end up beaten. So I started drinking them, but it was chalky and it burned and you wanted to throw up and it was just a horrible experience. And Alexia had to drink the same amount as me and
obviously would have major effects on someone being so little as opposed to me was a little bit heavier as a teenager and a little 40 pound year old big kid drinking the same amount it burned my throat and burned my stomach but it didn't like last long for some reason and it didn't like make me nauseous or anything after like the third day it was it was horrible tasting but I was able to just get them down
The first couple times we had those shakes, I was able to sneak Alexia and I off into the bathroom and throw up. I had to basically put my fingers down her throat because she didn't understand the concept to make her throw up. But Larry and Barbara caught us doing that. And then after that, we were always kept separated and weren't allowed to go back to our rooms until they determined it.
to be safe, or they would just put us directly in our rooms and lock us in there so we had no way of throwing up unless we wanted to puke in our beds. I think we barely made halfway through the second day, and we were separated the rest of the time. For most of the time, honestly, I didn't get to see or know. I mean, I would hear her, like, crying and whimpering, so I knew she was still alive, but a lot of times...
Unless both of them were there, we weren't allowed to be together. As if the bleach milkshakes weren't bad enough, Barbara and Larry began doing the unthinkable. They did bring us out together sometimes to add additional fun torture. When she put bleach in our ears and our eyes on a daily basis, we got to do that together.
But other than that, she was normally, I pretty much believe, locked in the master bedroom closet. I mean, I just remember every time Barbara did it to her, she just screamed, like uncontrollably screamed. Yeah, it was horrible, but I honestly, I blocked a lot of stuff out. I didn't allow myself to think or feel about a lot of things because I just, I felt just so defeated because there was nothing I could do anyway. No matter what option I thought of, none of them ended well, right?
So if I thought of escaping, like, how do I get Alexia out? Because I can't leave without her. I can't get to the phone. And eventually it just became too much and I kind of honestly gave up. It was nearing the end of the eight days and Barbara had even more in store for the girls. Jessica in particular. At this time, Barbara and Larry still had their ten French bulldogs back in the dog shed. And Barbara loved those dogs more than her own children did.
Even so, she killed them all. We probably had two days left, maybe three days left of the bleach shakes, and Barbara made me come outside and watch, well, help her. I guess I didn't help, but she made me bring the dogs out one by one, and she drowned each one of them in a bucket of bleach water in the backyard. In the middle of summer, and nobody knew a thing, nobody heard a thing, no neighbors called, and it's not like we live far from...
Just as Jessica feared.
Alexia didn't make it through the full eight days of bleach shakes. Each time Jessica saw her, on the occasions they were both dragged from isolation for torture sessions, Alexia looked more pale and sickly. Her skin had a grayish cast, and the sparkle had left the little girl's eyes. It was day seven, and Alexia had failed to drink her milkshake. She was, after all, nearly catatonic by this point.
Barbara dragged Alexia out of the kitchen by her hair and locked her in the master bedroom closet. When lunchtime rolled around and it was time for another round of milkshakes, Alexia was absent from the table. When I walked down the hallway to come out to have my, who knows, 20th shake, Alexia was completely naked.
in the bathtub and there was a enema bag in the bathtub with her. She was making small sounds but she wasn't really moving. I wanted to go in but Larry pushed me and told me to go sit down and have my shake. So I'm sitting with Larry at the table having my shake and Barbara goes into the bathroom
I don't know what she was doing to Alexia while she was in the bathroom. But then she brings Alexia out of the bathtub, lays her naked on the floor, and realizes that she's not breathing. She swears she's already died. So she leans over her and gives her one half-assed attempt at CPR. One breath, no compressions, no nothing. And then...
So that was it. Alexia was gone. And Barbara and Larry seemed relieved. Barbara had killed her own little girl before.
and ten of her own dogs. What would stop her from killing Jessica, too? My mother was always looking for a way to keep me locked up. She told me that there was bad men out there, that they would take me and do worse things to me. She told me that the cops were on her side and they would just bring me right back. She also told me that nobody would believe me because who's going to believe that this is happening? They would just think you're crazy and lock you up.
She had a lot of reasons, you know, not really having much contact with the outside world for quite a long time. Maybe she was right, so I didn't even attempt to try to leave. Even praying to God as her grandmother had taught her seemed like a futile effort. She had tried it before and God clearly hadn't heard her or hadn't cared. For a little while I was in my room because I guess they were discussing what to do with her, but immediately before they made the decision
huge plan what to do with her they put her in a black trash bag and put her in the freezer in our garage i didn't believe in god because how could a god allow things like this to happen to children and then i was also highly confused because barbara said she was god and then pregnant with jesus and while i knew that wasn't right i also thought well why would my mom lie like
In the time before they finally disposed of Alexia's frozen body, Barbara and Larry made a game out of sending Jessica to the garage to get sodas for them.
sometimes even requiring her to get meat and other things out of the same freezer that held Alexia's corpse. She was in the freezer probably for about a week before they really decided what their process of elimination was going to be and their backstory. I was brought out of my room one day and sat down and told that if anybody asked what happened to Alexia, we're just going to tell them that she lives in Chicago with her biological father. And
As they were telling me this, they're bringing me into the master bedroom, into the closet, and Alexia's body in the trash bag is on the closet floor. And I'm forced in the closet with Larry standing by and sitting next to me with a gun pointed at me, telling me to repeat the story over and over again while they work on dismembering her body.
They had a whole set up. All of the clothes were gone. There was like... They had redone the floors, so it was like linoleum on the floor in the closet, and they had the trash bags and plastic taped to the floor, and there was a meat cleaver and an axe and some kind of saw and extra trash bags. They had it all set up and ready to go, and they... At first, Barbara couldn't do it. She couldn't start dismembering her, so Larry...
Gave her the gun. She kept the gun trained on me. And Larry removed Alexia's head from her body. And then after that point, Barbara was like, oh, I think I can do this. And she takes over dismembering her thoroughly there. I didn't know you could make a body look the way she ended up looking and just handfuls of her in a trash bag like at a time until there was nothing left.
They more or less made it like she went through a meat grinder. Though they had a huge mess to clean up, Barbara and Larry were on meth. So just imagine a couple of meth heads cleaning up a crime scene. What I'm trying to say is they left not a single stray hair to be found by law enforcement. They got everything. I mean, they should start a business for cleaning homes. Just immaculate, really.
And they also had a plan for what to do with the remainder of Alexia's body. Once they were finished in the closet, they had placed all of her remains in a trash bag. I was allowed to go take a shower finally, which was well needed because I had bits of body pieces that hew from the force of her chopping all over me. So I was allowed to take a shower. After my shower was brought out into the family room,
And they burned her body in the fireplace, literally, Larry, one handful at a time. And after three to four hours, they eventually burned the whole bag. Just a reminder, this all occurred in the middle of July. The smoke from a burning body looks and smells much different than any other kind of smoke.
It's not like a burning pile of leaves or a cozy fireplace. It's not even like a backyard barbecue cookout. Not even a pellet grill. Me, I like the Traeger. It's easy to keep your temperatures regulated. And there's all sorts of different flavors of pellets to choose from. I like the hickory. A lot of people like apple, but I like hickory. It smells pretty good. It leaves a nice...
sharp, smoky taste on your meats. Anyway, this must be part of California that has a lot of cookouts because nobody complained about the smell or the fact that there was even a fireplace on in California in the middle of July. Despite these oddities, nobody bothered to call police. Not even one anonymous tip was left. I guess people in California are so used to seeing just horrible, fucked up shit that they just don't even bother anymore.
In any case, in the middle of the night, the three of them drove off in Barbara's white Ford Bronco to dump Alexia's ashes into the Sacramento River, along with all the tools they used to dismember her, and also the ice chest that held her frozen body. And then on the way back to the car, they realized that they locked the keys in the car, so they had to break the window to get in so we could get home.
This would be the one detail in Jessica's story that corroborated evidence found by law enforcement. This meant that police could believe what she was saying even though Alexia's body and the rest of the physical evidence were long gone.
Jessica had told us that Larry and Barbara had locked themselves out of the car at the Sacramento River and that they had to break the window to get in. And based on her description, there was a ton of glass right there. So the labs took the glass and it turned out to be from their car. Just a side note and something that is totally on brand for Barbara. In case you missed it, she drove a white Ford Bronco in 1997.
The same exact kind of Ford Bronco that OJ Simpson was famous for driving. This was no accident. I hated that car. She had to buy one when OJ Simpson went up for trial and he had that white Bronco. She had to buy one and she loved driving it because it was around the same time as the trial was going on.
And everybody would be like, go OJ as we're driving. And she just got the biggest kick out of being like the center of attention over this stupid car. As we know now, Barbara and OJ have a lot in common. She too would soon become the center of attention. Not just because of the Ford Bronco, but because she had murdered someone. First, law enforcement had to make sure the case would be prosecutable.
The lack of physical evidence would certainly make that a challenge. Alexia's case, I never was successfully able to guess where we were going ever. Mona Fjord was the detective in charge of the case. And I think she went back and got like five search warrants. I mean, she just was absolutely determined to go back there. And we brought a...
a crime scene investigator who literally peeled the paint off the walls looking for residue of blood or anything that could have been there underneath it. We also sent the fireplace from the house back to Quantico and had that tested by the FBI lab, and that didn't give up anything either. I knew that I deliberately caused Jessica
to experience an emotional upheaval. And I knew it was my fault. The choice I made that day was, was it more important to leave Jessica alone or was it more important to try and find out what happened to Alexia? I chose Alexia and I'm glad I did and I think Jessica's glad I did. But, you know, when Jessica's demeanor
and how she described things, there was no question that she was telling the truth. Both Larry and Barbara's convictions would rest on Jessica's testimony.
and the broken glass from the car window. The testimony was fine, but they also said because I lied for so long, the jury would try to make it seem like I wasn't credible because I had lied for so long. But once they did serve Barbara and Larry with the arrest warrant for the murder, they both started like basically telling the same story, just blaming it on each other.
Both Barbara and Larry still pleaded not guilty, which meant both of them would go to trial. Larry's trial was first in February of 2000, and it lasted three days. The jury found him guilty of second-degree murder and 10 counts of child abuse and torture. A month later, he was sentenced to 40 years to life. Barbara's timeline was a bit different.
Her first plea was a not guilty plea, but then she changed it to not guilty by reason of insanity. On the day of jury selection for both of their cases, Barbara changed her plea to guilty. In May, a judge found her legally sane when she committed the murder, which meant she'd spend her sentence in prison.
Not a mental institution. She finally did take a plea deal where they dropped basically all of the torture charges. And she took a, I believe it was murder one and got sentenced to 15 years to life. I was pissed off because yes, she, I guess technically admitted to killing my sister, but she wasn't getting any time for what she did. The other torture that she did to me or my sister.
If you have an insane attention to detail, and most of our listeners do, unfortunately, maybe you've done the math by now. It's been well over 15 years since Barbara's conviction.
She's already been up for parole several times. Jessica and I both thought, because California law right now is to let people out of jail, and that's, you know, the politics. And so we really are surprised that she has been in there still 25 years and again was denied parole. We have thought for a good...
the last two or three hearings that she would be released and prepared for that to happen. The thing, what the reason that they always give at the end of when they make their decision, they come in and they'll takes 20 minutes or whatever. They come back in and they say, no, Barbara,
You say what you did, but you don't know why you did what you did. And you can't, you don't accept any responsibility for what you did. Barbara's been up, I think, four or five times. The first one I wasn't aware of. I found out about her being denied through a newspaper article because Tammy saw it in the newspaper in California and sent it to me.
And then I, after that, I requested through victim services to be notified whenever she had a hearing. So I would attend them via the phone because I didn't have a local courthouse to actually do it via teleconference. Her most recent one was last December, December of 22. And I did that one via Zoom from my house because COVID allows us to do it that way now. So I got to see her and
hear about all of her wonderful successes and how, you know, she's got her education and she's found religion and she's mentors all the new lifers and she's just this wonderful human being now. And I get to tell my piece and debunk everything she says. And she still has not taken full responsibility for her part in my sister's death.
And she still has no remorse whatsoever for anything that happened. And basically the only truthful thing I got out of her in the last hearing was that she never wanted us and never loved any of us. Despite spending her entire adolescence in the foster care system, Jessica now has three children of her own, a college degree, and her own business. Yet further proof that you do not have to be confined by where you come from.
There is a way out if you put in the work. Nowadays, Jessica strives to be a good mother by deliberately avoiding any resemblance to her own mother, a common tactic by many who come from abusive homes. When Jessica had her first child, a girl, she wanted to memorialize Alexia, so she named her firstborn after her little sister.
Jessica's math teacher from all of those years ago, Tammy Cooper, still keeps in touch with her. And they visit each other's families regularly. I'm really glad I picked Miss Cooper, Tammy, to be the one to tell out of all my teachers.
She made a promise to me that day that she would stay with me and she would always be there as long as I wanted her in my life. And I didn't believe her because nobody ever stuck around. But then she did. She stayed. Through the hospital visit, she stayed while I was getting registered in the receiving home. She started visiting me afterwards and she was instrumental and
Getting my grandmother, because she didn't have a car, getting my grandmother able to come see me because she would pick her up from me or take me to my visits. Everything she said she was going to do, she did. And she really did end up becoming like my best friend as a teenager. Jessica, I never gave Jessica any money. I never...
her as a mother or father would. I gave her, you know, money here and there for a birthday or whatever, but never supported her as my child. And so I would teach her. And that's the role that we agreed kind of without talking. And
I followed her. I did several GoFundMe pages when she was at a really bad time, like being kicked out of her home that she was renting. And we got her through everything. But she never once depended on me as her advocate to change her life and make her life better.
All that she ever, I think, wanted from me was what I could give, which was my love and respect and that shared history. I'm the only person who's known this. I'm the only person that she has known since this happened. There's nobody else. And so, you know, we have that connection. And I am so, just so proud of her. Just really, really proud of her.
Jessica wrote a book that she self-published this year. She only began therapy for her traumas in recent years and went through something called memory regression. After every session, she began writing journal entries recalling each and every detail of her horrible experiences. When she was done, she figured she'd turn it into a book. It's called "I'm Not Broken: Surviving the House Demons."
And you can pick up your own copy if you're interested at Amazon. The link will appear in the show notes at swordandscale.com. Jeffrey Rinnick also has a book detailing his most memorable cases throughout his 30-plus year FBI career. It's called In the Name of Children, an FBI agent's relentless pursuit of the nation's worst predators. If you found this episode entertaining or interesting, you'll love their books.
Barbara and Larry Carrasco tried to erase the very existence of five-year-old Alexia, but she is forever memorialized in Jessica's oldest daughter, in Jeffrey and Jessica's books, and in this podcast episode you're listening to right now. Now all of you know Barbara's name also. So,
If California ever does let her out, more of us can be aware that she is and will forever be a child murderer. And look at that. Another one wrapped up. Every week. Just like clockwork. Isn't that weird? How they just keep coming? Head on over to swordandscale.com to support us and keep them coming if you want to. And until next time, stay safe, I guess.
so
Forget it.
Pay more. 25 bucks. Bottom line. Support the show. Short and scale TV. Holy shit. Like, this is amazing. I cannot wait. I screamed when you announced that. You're such a sweet soul. So excited. It's natural for life. Funny what happens when we turn off RSS feeds, huh? ♪♪♪
So
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