Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
Nitro Extreme is coming to Marion.
0:02
Experience this motor stunt show June 15th
0:04
to the 18th at Marion County Fairgrounds. Featuring
0:06
auto stunts, two-wheel driving, epic jumps, motorcycle
0:09
tricks, and much more. For tickets, visit nitroextreme.com
0:12
or call 941-704-8572.
0:15
Previously on Unsolved.
0:21
I don't understand why you guys keep going out
0:23
over the place and disturbing me. Oh,
0:26
so I'm really sorry to disturb
0:28
you. You're pleased to do that. You went
0:30
to Lisa's house. You went to her boyfriend's house.
0:32
Why are you doing this? Because there's
0:35
still... Because there's nothing. Well,
0:37
but there's still a lot of questions
0:40
in Milwaukee. So we're not trying to... We're not
0:42
trying to bother anybody.
0:51
From USA Today and the Milwaukee
0:53
Journal Sentinel, this is Unsolved
0:56
Season 4. A missing girl.
0:59
A search for truth.
1:01
I'm Gina Barton. Chapter 7.
1:05
A DNA Discovery. As
1:12
I told you back in the very first episode,
1:15
I started working on this season in
1:17
early 2020. Then the
1:19
pandemic hit and the news business
1:22
and the world got a little crazy. At
1:25
the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where I was
1:28
still working at the time, it was all
1:30
hands on deck. Everyone
1:32
shifted away from other projects
1:35
and toward coverage of the pandemic.
1:38
I was no exception. Our
1:40
country is in the midst of a
1:42
great national trial, unlike
1:45
any we have ever faced before. You
1:48
all see it. You see it probably better
1:50
than most. We're at war
1:52
with a deadly virus.
1:55
About a year later, as the media
1:57
started getting back to covering other things,
1:59
I came... changed jobs. I was finally
2:02
able to shift back to this project in 2022.
2:04
And as I went through
2:06
my old files,
2:08
I realized there were some things
2:10
I hadn't had a chance to follow up on.
2:12
In the early stages of my
2:14
reporting three years ago, I
2:16
was following a thread about a woman
2:19
named Lisa in Ohio whose
2:21
ex-husband Josh thought she
2:23
might be Alexis Patterson.
2:25
Not only did Lisa resemble
2:27
the age-progressed image of Alexis,
2:30
she didn't have a birth certificate or any
2:33
mementos of her past.
2:35
Nothing. No infant pictures, no
2:38
first steps, no pictures in the diaper, no
2:40
kindergarten, no first grade, no nothing.
2:44
Back then, I had talked with Josh's
2:46
new fiancé, Sasha, but
2:48
I hadn't done enough reporting to figure
2:50
out how significant some of the things
2:53
she said might be.
2:55
I uncovered the recording of the conversation
2:57
not long after Ashley and I returned
3:00
from Ohio last summer.
3:02
First, Sasha and I talked
3:04
about the at-home DNA test
3:06
that Ayana, Josh, and Josh's
3:09
son did to determine whether
3:11
Ayana was the boy's grandmother.
3:13
In episode six, I told you
3:15
the results were inconclusive,
3:17
but it turns out
3:19
there's a larger explanation,
3:21
and it's important.
3:22
Sasha and I used the boy's name
3:24
when we talked, but we're going to beep it
3:27
here to protect his privacy.
3:29
We knew it was going to come back inconclusive
3:32
because we didn't have the biological mom. Does
3:35
that make sense? Because
3:37
Ayana would be Alexis, at least as AKA
3:39
Alexis' mom. So to get
3:42
the conclusive results, we
3:44
would have needed Lisa to beep in Ayana,
3:47
but we didn't have Lisa because she's refusing
3:49
to come forward,
3:51
so we used Josh to beep in
3:54
Ayana. And what it did is
3:56
it came back inconclusive because we didn't
3:59
have the biological mom.
3:59
didn't have WISA, but has
4:02
like 17
4:02
matching genetic
4:04
markers as IANA.
4:09
Sasha sent me the results of that test
4:11
from a company called IdentiGene. It
4:15
does show that Josh's son and
4:17
IANA share several genetic
4:19
markers. And it does
4:21
characterize the results as inconclusive
4:24
as to whether or not she's his grandmother. Sasha
4:27
seemed to think that meant the two of them
4:30
were most likely related, but I wasn't
4:32
so sure. To me, inconclusive
4:35
means you can't tell one way or another.
4:37
I also thought Sasha could be mistaken
4:40
about why the test was inconclusive.
4:43
It seems to me that DNA should
4:45
be able to show whether IANA
4:47
was the grandmother without having
4:49
DNA
4:50
directly from LISA. I
4:52
sent the results to Alison Peacock, a
4:54
genetic genealogist we've been working
4:56
with for our larger project on missing
4:59
children of color.
5:00
I found Alison through
5:02
the work she had done on a case known
5:05
as the Baby Holly case. Holly
5:07
Marie Klaus was less than a year
5:10
old when her parents were murdered in 1981. When
5:12
the police found their bodies,
5:16
the baby was nowhere to be found.
5:19
In June 2022, through Alison's work and that
5:23
of other experts, Holly was found
5:25
alive and well and living in Oklahoma.
5:28
When
5:29
I told Alison about Alexis's case,
5:32
she said it reminded her of Holly's.
5:34
Alison shared
5:36
the DNA report Sasha gave me with
5:38
her team. Then she
5:41
called me back with their interpretation. They're
5:43
just saying basically on that
5:45
report that, you know, it's
5:48
infinitesimally small that
5:51
a daughter of hers is the
5:53
mother of this child. And so, but
5:55
because it's not as low as it
5:57
could possibly go, they're saying
5:59
they're
5:59
and inconclusive. But the difference
6:02
between what they say conclusive and inconclusive
6:04
is, it's just noise.
6:08
It's just static. It's not enough to
6:10
be significant. And I would
6:12
never suggest that
6:14
somebody go use a drugstore test
6:16
to determine it. But I mean, when you're a desperate
6:19
grandmother, I mean, your mother, you do what you got to
6:20
do. I understand what she did,
6:23
but I would love to be able to give her
6:25
some more concrete results based on better
6:27
testing.
6:30
One key element of the better testing
6:32
she's referring to is, of
6:35
course, a swab from Lisa,
6:37
which after the encounter with the police
6:40
in Ohio, I
6:41
can pretty much guarantee we
6:43
won't be getting. So there was
6:45
still this sliver of doubt. And
6:48
as it turns out,
6:50
we did have some better testing.
6:52
Sort of. When Josh
6:54
and Lisa got divorced, both of them
6:56
submitted their DNA to a
6:59
family court for paternity testing. Josh's
7:02
second wife, Sasha, had forgotten
7:04
all about it until after the Milwaukee
7:07
police announced in July 2016 that
7:10
Lisa's DNA didn't match Alexis.
7:14
It was quite some time after the
7:17
July DNA test had came back that it
7:19
wasn't her that I
7:21
was just praying
7:22
and
7:23
asking for anything something to prove
7:26
that this is not right. Like something isn't
7:29
right. And I woke up at like 4 45 in
7:31
the morning. And I was
7:33
like, Oh, my gosh, the DNA test with Lisa and
7:35
Josh, that has her DNA
7:37
on it. So I actually
7:40
got up and I flipped on the light and I
7:42
was going through our closet
7:44
because that's where our safe is. And that's where
7:47
I had everything in there. So I got
7:49
it out, I sent it to Ayanna, and it kind
7:51
of went from there. And that's how she was like,
7:54
it's her. I
7:56
asked Sasha how they came to that conclusion.
7:59
they get a lot of the research into
8:02
like
8:02
DNAs and all
8:04
of that. And then I just asked myself,
8:06
well, can't we just take all the genetic
8:09
markers, write them down and compare
8:11
yours from your DNA test with Alexis
8:14
and then match and we says
8:17
to
8:18
the genetic markers. And that's
8:20
how we actually we realize
8:22
that while her DNA is practically identical.
8:25
Do
8:26
you still have
8:27
like the paternity test results
8:29
that have Lisa's
8:32
DNA profile on it? Yeah. Would
8:35
you please send me that? Yeah.
8:39
She emailed me right away and she
8:41
was right. When I compared Lisa's
8:43
results from the paternity test with
8:45
Iona's results from the grandparent test,
8:48
it really did look like the two of them had
8:50
a lot of matching markers.
8:52
But because they were two different types of analysis,
8:55
I couldn't do an apples to apples comparison.
8:58
I needed help from a scientist
9:00
who could tell me how this all worked and
9:03
whether Iona and Sasha had reached
9:05
the right conclusion. So I sent
9:07
the grandparent report and the paternity
9:09
report to Dr. Michael Cox, a
9:12
biochemistry professor at the University
9:14
of Wisconsin who studies DNA.
9:17
First, I asked him about the
9:19
science behind DNA analysis.
9:22
He told me that in Britain in
9:25
the 1990s,
9:26
scientists figured out there are tiny
9:29
pieces of chromosomes that repeat
9:31
in certain places.
9:33
If you could have chromosome seven,
9:35
for example, there'll be one spot on
9:37
that chromosome where one of these repeats will occur.
9:40
And they found examples
9:42
where they only repeated between 10
9:46
and 30 times in whole human population.
9:50
So there wasn't too much variation, but there
9:52
was a fair amount of variation in the size
9:54
that repeat.
9:57
Genes come in pairs called
9:59
alleles.
10:01
You inherit alleles
10:03
from your father and mother, so you get
10:05
one from dad and one from mom.
10:07
So on chromosome 7 at this one locus,
10:11
you might get, on one of your chromosomes,
10:13
you might get a repeat that repeats 12 times.
10:16
And from your dad, you get
10:18
another chromosome 7 and you might get one
10:20
that repeats 17 times from your dad.
10:25
As I listened to this explanation, I finally
10:28
understood what Sasha and I had been
10:30
missing. Simply having
10:32
a lot of matching markers doesn't
10:34
mean two people are related. The
10:37
important thing is where
10:39
those matches occur.
10:41
Two women would need to have the
10:43
same marker on the same chromosomes,
10:46
including chromosome 7, in order
10:48
to be mother and daughter.
10:50
My heart pounded as I waited
10:53
for Dr. Cox to tell me whether
10:55
Iana was Lisa's mother.
10:58
The answer to that is no. She's
11:00
very definitely not her mother. We'll
11:03
have more after the break. Let
11:21
alone do it.
11:23
It may seem noble to put yourself last,
11:26
but it will always catch up with you in the end. When
11:28
we spend all of our time giving, we're sure
11:30
to end up burned out and exhausted. Therapy
11:33
can give you the tools to find balance, so
11:36
you can keep helping others without leaving
11:38
yourself behind. A
11:39
lot of people think therapy is only for times
11:42
of transition or crisis, but it can
11:44
also help improve your everyday life. A
11:47
qualified therapist can help you figure out your
11:49
priorities, set healthy boundaries,
11:51
and stop being so hard on yourself. If
11:54
you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp
11:56
a try. It's entirely online, convenient,
11:59
flexible, and easy to do. and designed to fit into your
12:01
busy schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire
12:03
about yourself and your goals to be matched with
12:05
a licensed therapist. You can switch therapists
12:08
anytime at no additional charge. Find
12:11
more balance with BetterHelp. Visit
12:13
betterhelp.com slash UN
12:15
today to get 10% off your first month.
12:18
That's betterhelp,
12:19
H-E-L-P dot com
12:21
slash UN.
12:28
I had absolutely no idea how
12:32
I was going to break this news to Ayanna.
12:35
For a few fleeting moments, I
12:37
thought about how much easier it would be not
12:40
to. I could just hope she never listened
12:42
to this show and never found out. I
12:44
could ask Ashley to tell her so I
12:47
wouldn't have to. I could scrap this
12:49
whole project and avoid the entire
12:51
issue.
12:54
Obviously, none of those things were
12:56
realistic. I would have to
12:58
talk with Ayanna about this eventually. But
13:00
I decided to take some time to think about
13:02
the best approach, about how to break
13:05
it to her in a way that wouldn't destroy
13:07
her trust yet again.
13:10
In the meantime, I had another
13:12
issue to deal with. From
13:14
the beginning, I knew it would
13:16
be important to talk to Laurent
13:18
Bourgeois, who was married to Ayanna
13:21
at the time of Alexis's disappearance.
13:24
He had told the police and the public
13:26
repeatedly that he walked
13:28
Alexis to the corner on the
13:30
morning of May 3rd, 2002, and
13:33
watched the crossing guard take her across the street
13:37
to the school playground. But the police could
13:40
never get 100% confirmation of that story.
13:44
Some students and teachers said they had seen Alexis
13:47
on the corner with Laurent, or
13:49
at the playground, or even in school
13:52
the morning she disappeared.
13:55
But I was equally convinced she
13:57
hadn't been in any of those places. guard
14:00
was a fifth grader, who said
14:02
she wasn't sure if she had helped Alexis
14:05
cross the street that morning.
14:09
And then there were all the theories and
14:11
pieces of neighborhood gossip that Laurent's
14:13
history as a snitch, or the fact that
14:15
he was a drug dealer, may have led to
14:17
Alexis being kidnapped as some sort
14:20
of revenge.
14:21
In the immediate aftermath of Alexis's
14:24
disappearance, Ayanna backed him up.
14:27
After they split up, the police questioned her
14:29
again, hoping she had been covering up for
14:31
her husband and would finally rat him out.
14:33
She didn't. The
14:35
police kept the pressure on Laurent, too.
14:38
Mark Williams was the prosecutor
14:40
assigned to Alexis's case. He already
14:43
knew Laurent from the bank robbery you
14:45
heard about back in episode two, the one
14:47
where Laurent was the getaway driver and
14:50
testified against a guy who shot a cop.
14:52
So Mark Williams knew Laurent
14:54
might talk if he was offered a deal.
14:58
I certainly told the detectives that
15:01
if he would gather and give any information
15:03
as long as he wasn't the one that killed her, that
15:06
we certainly would be willing to do
15:08
something for him.
15:11
Kathy Spano, one of the cold case
15:13
detectives who worked the case, said
15:15
she and her partner, Eric Villarreal,
15:18
brought up that offer with Laurent.
15:21
He was offered that, and Eric and
15:23
I had spoken
15:23
to him about that while he was
15:25
in custody for a serious offense. I
15:28
don't know if it was a gross
15:31
offense or what it was when he interviewed him
15:33
at the jail, but he was
15:36
certainly told about that, like you say. He knows.
15:39
He knows how one hand washes the other. He
15:41
knew that probably more than anybody.
15:45
But Laurent didn't tell them anything.
15:48
Maybe he didn't agree to that because he was the
15:50
killer. I don't know. I
15:52
don't see that.
16:00
if she believed LaRon really
16:02
had walked Alexis to the corner that morning.
16:05
I don't know. I don't
16:07
trust his soul. By
16:10
then,
16:11
LaRon had a serious drug problem,
16:14
and the two of them were no longer in touch.
16:16
They share a daughter, but she didn't know where
16:18
to find him either.
16:20
I put LaRon on my list of people
16:22
to try and track down,
16:24
but I never got the chance.
16:26
LaRon Bourgeois found dead today.
16:29
The medical examiner says it's being investigated
16:32
as a possible drug overdose, but an official
16:34
autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow.
16:37
That news was reported on January 19, 2021.
16:47
LaRon's death was a huge setback
16:50
for the investigation into Alexis's
16:52
disappearance. It was a problem
16:54
for Ayana, too, and not just
16:56
because he was the father of one of
16:59
her daughters. Without a confession
17:01
from LaRon, or a lead about whether
17:04
a rival drug dealer had actually kidnapped
17:06
Alexis, it seemed that law enforcement
17:08
would never stop considering
17:11
Ayana a
17:11
suspect. I've
17:13
come across several indications of
17:15
this while reporting this story. For
17:18
example, when Ashley and I were trying
17:21
to get the Milwaukee Police to talk to us
17:23
about Alexis's case and to release
17:25
at least some of the records of their investigation,
17:28
they said they wouldn't, unless Ayana
17:31
said it was okay. They wouldn't take our
17:33
word for it that she was on board. They
17:35
wanted her to tell the new cold case detective
17:38
directly. So even though Ayana
17:40
was wary of the police, she agreed
17:42
to speak with the detective, Tim Keller,
17:45
when I asked her to. She told him
17:47
it was okay if he spoke with us about
17:50
Alexis's case. She also
17:52
told him she did not trust the
17:54
DNA sample that showed Lisa
17:56
in Ohio wasn't Alexis,
17:58
and she asked him... to go there and
18:01
get another one.
18:25
You
18:30
record it, if I see you record
18:32
it and I see you take it up and everything, I
18:34
see everything being left. But
18:36
the thing is... Now, if I do that
18:39
and I bring it back here and it's not
18:41
a match, okay, and it's not,
18:43
then you tell me what really happened.
18:48
Are you serious? I'm asking,
18:50
I just argue through all of that. You're telling
18:52
me it's going to be a match so it should be more private.
18:55
Wait, wait,
18:55
wait, what you mean, what you mean tell you what really
18:57
happened? Let's get to that. What you mean tell you what really
18:59
happened? Well, if that's not her, if it
19:02
comes back that it's not her, then there's something
19:04
else going on.
19:07
I also got the impression that the
19:09
FBI never stopped thinking of
19:11
IANA as a suspect. Back
19:14
in 2016, after the jurisdictional problems
19:16
arose with collecting DNA from Lisa in Ohio,
19:19
and IANA started to question whether it had been
19:22
faked,
19:23
she called the FBI to see if they would help.
19:26
Instead of listening to what she had to say, the
19:28
agent, whose name is Amy Metzel,
19:31
spent almost the whole conversation
19:33
trying to get IANA to take another polygraph. IANA
19:36
recorded that call too. She
19:38
didn't tell Agent Metzel she was recording,
19:41
but she didn't have to under Wisconsin law.
19:43
So if you called Nick McRae now, and you went
19:45
to Nick McRae, I'm sure you felt it, but the National
19:47
Center for Missing and Exploited Children, if you
19:50
called them, they would tell you, in
19:52
today's environment, this is one of the
19:54
things that's automatically done, polygraph.
19:58
and
20:00
used a handheld recorder, which is
20:02
why Agent Metzl is so hard to hear.
20:05
She's saying, if Ayanna were to call
20:07
the National Center for Missing and Exploited
20:09
Children, they would tell her,
20:11
new polygraphs are automatically
20:13
done on the parents of long-term
20:16
missing children.
20:18
After I heard that tape, I called the National
20:20
Center for myself.
20:22
Rebecca Steinbach, who helps lead
20:24
the Media Relations team, told me,
20:26
she spoke with several people there, and
20:29
they don't believe they recommended that Ayanna
20:31
be given another polygraph.
20:34
Rebecca also sent me the
20:36
National Center's Law Enforcement
20:38
Guide for Investigating Long-Term
20:41
Missing Children,
20:42
which says nothing about automatically
20:45
doing new polygraphs.
20:47
It says, cold case investigators
20:50
should review the suspect information,
20:53
which may include polygraph
20:55
results. It goes on to
20:57
say that a polygraph result,
20:59
quote, can be a
21:02
helpful tool for investigators,
21:04
but it should not be used by itself
21:07
to conclusively identify or
21:09
eliminate a suspect,
21:11
end quote.
21:12
And I think it's worth repeating that in
21:14
Wisconsin, polygraphs are considered
21:17
so unreliable
21:19
that they cannot be used in court.
21:21
Agent Metzl also wouldn't tell
21:23
Ayanna why they wanted her to take
21:26
the test again,
21:27
or what they hoped to gain from it.
21:29
Here's another clip from their conversation.
21:52
Okay, we can relax and
21:52
we don't have to worry about any issues
21:54
coming up with you. Now that there
21:56
would be so many years now, even if
21:59
I would to the moment, police department and
22:01
we said she's the only polygraph, what
22:03
are they going to do with that?
22:06
The FBI agent is telling IANA
22:08
that basically a new polygraph
22:10
was just a formality. If
22:12
she passed, she could breathe easy.
22:15
But if she failed, the
22:16
police couldn't use the results against her because
22:19
too much time had gone by.
22:21
After I listened to this recording, I had
22:24
some questions.
22:25
Why would Agent Metzl tell
22:27
IANA that the National Center for
22:30
Missing and Exploited Children wants
22:32
to check a box when they told me
22:34
they don't?
22:35
If the Milwaukee police really couldn't do
22:38
anything with the results of a new polygraph
22:40
test, what was the point of asking
22:43
IANA to take one in the first place?
22:46
I left a message for Agent Metzl hoping
22:48
to ask her those questions,
22:50
but she didn't call me back.
22:52
Instead, my call was referred
22:55
to Leonard Peace, the PR guy
22:57
in the FBI's Milwaukee office. He
23:00
told me he couldn't answer any questions.
23:03
Number one, we have
23:06
a very strong policy about privacy
23:09
rights and we would
23:11
never be in a position to
23:15
make any kind of acknowledgment,
23:18
you know, positive
23:21
or negative, just to confirm or deny
23:23
contact with a private
23:26
citizen.
23:27
I told him I had a recording, so
23:30
it wasn't about confirming whether
23:32
the conversation had happened,
23:34
but I still got nowhere. We had
23:36
almost a half hour conversation where
23:38
I pushed back and he gave me all
23:40
kinds of examples and reasons and
23:43
said it didn't matter whether IANA was okay
23:45
with him talking to me.
23:46
He also wouldn't address what Agent
23:49
Metzl said on the tape at all.
23:51
When I asked the Milwaukee police chief,
23:54
Jeffrey Norman, for his reaction
23:56
to what Detective Keller said, he was a little
23:59
bit of a bitch. bit more forthcoming,
24:01
but still didn't directly answer
24:03
the question. I always
24:05
hope that we as a department
24:07
be as professional and as honest
24:10
and forthright as possible,
24:13
but we have
24:15
a lot of work to do. More
24:19
after the break.
24:26
It did not make sense that Ayana
24:28
would still be talking to me and
24:30
trying to get publicity on the 20th anniversary
24:32
of Alexis' disappearance if she
24:35
had been involved.
24:37
I asked Gaetan Borders for her thoughts
24:39
about that. Gaetan is
24:41
the president and CEO of Pease
24:44
in Their Pods,
24:45
a nonprofit that aims to give voice
24:47
to missing children of color and their
24:49
families. And I mean,
24:52
to me, like, for 20 years
24:55
she's been like engaging in the media
24:57
and nagging the police
25:00
and even like has called
25:02
the FBI in several different states and gotten
25:04
meetings with them. Like, if you did something
25:07
to your own kid, why
25:08
would you do that? You wouldn't. You
25:11
wouldn't do that. You absolutely
25:13
would not do that. As a matter of fact,
25:16
you wanted to go away. Right. Yeah.
25:19
You live quietly. You don't engage
25:22
like the heads of departments,
25:25
law enforcement departments by any means.
25:27
So it's harsh. It's harsh.
25:32
Kathy Spano, the cold case
25:34
detective, implied that there
25:36
might be something more going
25:39
on.
25:39
Are people like that, even some of the other
25:41
South killers that I've dealt with,
25:43
and they're in denial, because they did such
25:46
a horrible thing, are they able to
25:48
like totally forget what they did? Are
25:50
they able to push that out of their mind because it was
25:52
such an awful tragic thing so
25:55
traumatic that they don't even remember
25:57
the facts anymore? You know, I got
25:59
a feeling that.
25:59
is something that could be going on with the
26:02
young adult that maybe she either just doesn't really
26:04
remember because she was pretty
26:06
screwed up back then, but I don't know, just
26:08
something to think about, I guess.
26:11
Kathy went on to say that she'd
26:13
never gotten around to consulting an expert
26:16
about that possibility before she retired.
26:19
I knew the perfect person to ask, Elizabeth
26:22
Loftus, the expert on repressed
26:24
memories.
26:26
She's the one who did studies where
26:28
her team planted memories in test
26:30
subjects, convincing them they had
26:32
gotten lost in a mall or been saved
26:34
from drowning when those things never happened.
26:38
Is it possible that you could kill
26:40
your daughter and then convince yourself you didn't?
26:43
Can you erase
26:46
a memory? And we've
26:49
tried to erase memories, it's a little bit
26:51
harder to do. We can substitute
26:53
one memory for another and that can
26:56
weaken
26:57
the original memory, weaken
26:59
it. And that maybe
27:01
is a kind of erasure,
27:03
but it's
27:06
a little harder to take a memory away
27:08
than to plant one in somebody's mind.
27:12
By way of example, she said,
27:14
someone could probably convince themselves
27:17
that they'd crashed after driving through
27:19
a green light when the light was actually red.
27:21
But that was a far cry from forgetting
27:24
an accident had happened at all.
27:26
I think it'd be kind of hard to kill
27:28
someone and then convince yourself that you
27:30
didn't. Unless you did it when
27:33
you were
27:34
incredibly inebriated.
27:36
I know alcohol and even
27:39
marijuana can affect the formation
27:41
of new memories.
27:43
The other option of course, would be
27:46
that Iona really did know something
27:48
and she was lying to the police and
27:51
to Crocker and to me and to
27:53
everyone. But in my
27:55
heart of hearts, I just didn't believe
27:58
that was possible. I
28:00
have never been the least bit uneasy
28:02
around Ayanna. She's
28:05
always come across as genuinely
28:07
sad and angry about the fact
28:09
that Alexis disappeared.
28:11
She's never tried to evade any
28:13
question I asked.
28:16
She's always expressed gratitude
28:18
for all the time I've spent with her and
28:21
all the efforts I've made to tell her daughter's
28:23
story.
28:24
I mentioned that to Dr. Loftus.
28:28
And then I guess the other option is that she
28:30
did do it and she did remember
28:32
and she's just been conning
28:34
me for three years. I
28:39
really feel like I'm a pretty good judge of
28:42
when people are telling the truth, but if
28:44
she's actually been lying to me all this time, I
28:47
feel kind of stupid.
28:49
Well, I'll tell you, people
28:52
are not that great at detecting
28:55
deception. They
28:57
use cues that are not diagnostic.
29:00
They think if somebody won't
29:03
make eye contact, that's a sign of,
29:05
they think if somebody is fidgety that
29:08
they're probably deceptive.
29:11
So you may be responding
29:14
to cues that lots
29:16
of people use, but are
29:18
not particularly good cues to whether
29:20
somebody's lying to you.
29:23
Just when I started thinking I would never
29:25
figure any of these things out,
29:27
I got a call from Ashley Lutheran, my
29:29
reporting partner on this project.
29:32
After more than 20 years,
29:34
the police department was finally ready
29:37
to hand over their files from Alexis's
29:39
case. And Ashley was on her way
29:41
over
29:42
with the first batch.
29:44
But instead of providing the answers I've
29:46
been looking for,
29:47
the police reports would just raise more
29:49
questions
29:51
and they would make me doubt
29:53
almost everything I thought
29:55
I knew about this case.
29:58
That's next time on... unsolved.
30:04
This detective then spoke with Ayanna,
30:06
who at this time became very upset and
30:08
accused the Milwaukee Police Department of not
30:11
trying to find her daughter and said
30:13
that she was sick and tired of what was going on.
30:16
This detective then explained to Ayanna
30:18
that we were still actively following
30:21
up on all leads. Ayanna
30:23
then got up in a violent manner and with
30:25
her fists clenched, began knocking
30:28
over candy throughout the store and then threw
30:30
a fan into the wall.
30:33
Unsolved is written and produced
30:36
by me, Gina Barton.
30:38
Ashley Lutheran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
30:41
assisted with reporting this season. Our
30:44
sound engineer is Bill Schultz. Editors
30:46
are Amy Pyle and Greg
30:49
Borowski. Our theme music
30:51
was composed by Evan Johnson.
30:54
The news clip you heard in this episode
30:56
came from WISN 12 News
31:00
in Milwaukee.
31:00
For more on Alexis's
31:03
case or to sign up for our newsletter,
31:06
visit usatoday.com
31:09
slash unsolved.
31:11
My team's investigation on
31:13
disparities in missing children's cases
31:16
can be found at missing.usatoday.com.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More