In this episode we talk to private investigator Ellis Armistead who has worked on some of the biggest cases in modern US history from the Ramsey case to Timothy McVeigh to the Columbine Massacre. Join the gang for this moving episode where we learn about the grit behind the headlines, and about the humanity behind even the most heinous crimes. Sometimes, you just need a highball!
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
In this episode we talk to private investigator Ellis Armistead who has worked on some of the biggest cases in modern US history from the Ramsey case to Timothy McVeigh to the Columbine Massacre. Join the gang for this moving episode where we learn about the grit behind the headlines, and about the humanity behind even the most heinous crimes. Sometimes, you just need a highball!
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
Ellis Interview
[00:00:00]
Becca: Welcome to CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour. With us is H. Ellis Armistead. He is a private investigator. He has years of law enforcement and private investigation and he specializes in death penalty defense. A couple episodes ago, we did one called “My Brain Made Me Do It,” and it was about functional brain imaging scans and death penalty defense, talking about how recently that's being used to show that in psychopathic brains there's a disconnect between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and something that Ellis specializes in is death penalty, defense investigations. Are there general steps or components to this kind of investigation?
Ellis: Well, as far as the death penalty investigation generally by the time it becomes a death penalty case, typically it's a federal level it's not a question of guilt or innocence or who done it. Generally the bulk of the investigation surrounds mitigating what happened, being able to present evidence to a jury as to why this person committed a crime. Was it something as you mentioned a minute ago, something in their brain, brain function physically, is there a history of mental illness, were they unduly influenced by someone else? Things along those lines, that's kind of a broad overview. There's two different levels which you're approaching death penalty. One at the state level, and very often at the state level is where you find cases of actual innocence. And your federal law as more discriminating which, in my opinion, in that you by the time it's authorized by the department of justice, the question of guilt and innocence is generally not any issue.
Carrie: So it is more of a mitigation, it has more to do with sentencing rather than a verdict.
Ellis: Well, at the federal level a jury returns two verdicts for the guilt and innocence phase, and then the sentencing phase. That's generally the way in most state systems all it sometimes varies. Sometimes the judges can override a jury's recommendation. In some states it used to be up to the judge's discretion. Where holes in the death penalty really began as at the state level and because I've seen death penalty trials that lasted as little as two days, including a sentencing phase. That's not so much the issue anymore, but over the years they were pretty perfunctory.
Carrie: What type of case was that? Was it a serial murder? Was it a mass murder?
Ellis: Yeah, it was, well, over the years they gave literature’s replete with cases where a person was accused executed, I mean killing another person, maybe sexually assaulting them.
Becca: What drew you to death penalty defense from - did you go straight from law enforcement to doing this kind of private investigation work? Or was there an interim period?
Ellis: I did. I spent 17 years in law enforcement, a good many of those years as a homicide investigator. In 1991 I was in the morgue and I was hauling the body of a young child who had a contact wound to the back of his head, contact gunshot wound. And at that time I decided I'd had enough and I'll be gone. I resigned from my office, opened my own private investigation business. One of the first murder cases I had was a killing of a state trooper by two juveniles which is difficult. And shortly thereafter that I became involved in a death penalty case of a young man who at age 19 went into a restaurant and killed four people. The Chuck E Cheese murders.
Krista: What was his motives? Did he ever say why?
Ellis: I never knew why. It came out later that there was a history of mental illness in his family. And I think that's what it's generally attributed to. His name was Nathan Dunlap. He's now 45 years old. I still talk to him.
Krista: How is he doing?
Carrie: Colorado last summer did away with the death penalty.
Ellis: He's now doing the life without parole here in Colorado.
Krista: Wow. Has he been able to acknowledge what he did and understand why? Or is there still that block there as to whatever reason he did what he did?
Ellis: He was nice, and he understands about unwellness. And he understands that it wasn't until he was properly treated and medicated that he was able to understand the gravity of what occurred.
Krista: Do you believe that if given a chance he would be able to be released and be a functioning member of society?
Ellis: No, I don't think he should be released just because of the gravity of what he did. I think if you asked him, he would say he should not be released.
Carrie: He acknowledges he is better off on the inside.
Ellis: I think that's true. You know, after 20-something years migrating out into the world would be tough on anybody, tough on him, Carrie, but I can't speak for him. I just think that he has adjusted to life. And I think there does have to be a penalty. You just don't wipe someone's slate clean just because they have mental illness. There's many people who have experienced mental illness that don't go out and kill.
Krista: Yeah. That’s very, very true. So there is a punity factor.
Becca: One of the things about private investigation versus law enforcement is you get to know the person behind the charge and the family behind the charge and the conviction. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how that shift was for you?
Ellis: In law enforcement, you rarely get to, as I would say, peel back the onion on a case and understand really why something occurred. Your job is to identify the person or persons,
gather information that would underlie probable cause, make an arrest. Then it's pretty much up to the district attorney and the courts to handle the case. See really, it's not often you talk to someone after they've been arrested, after you've had your – aside from the Miranda Rights that they even talk. And if they do talk, it may be all a lie or maybe a fantasy in their mind. Once you're in a - doing defense work, you become an agent of the attorney. So all your communications with the client are confidential. You do learn how that person operates. What, what was there? Do they have a mental illness? What was their thinking? What were the various factors, motivators in their life that or motivation they may have had for doing the killing? You get to know him personally, a lot better.
Krista: Has it ever been hard to not throw your hands up. Like, what is this? You know?
Ellis: Well, I've learned to roll with the punches. There's not much that surprises me. I separate. There's kind of a barrier and I know what my job is, is to help the attorneys give this person the best possible defense. But there's some that have been hard to listen to. Yeah.
Krista: Some of them I'm certain, it's like, absolutely no question. You - you're insane.
Ellis: Realistically, in this business, you don't come upon a lot of truly innocent people. They may be overcharged. What they did, maybe second-degree murder or manslaughter and not first degree murder, and so forth. But occasionally you get a truly innocent person, and those are the most difficult cases to work because there's so much pressure knowing that this person or feeling that a person is truly innocent. I’ve not - over the years, I've not had a case where I felt someone was totally the wrong person. I’ve worked on cases through the Innocence Projects in South Fort Worth where that may have been the case.
Becca: You've worked on some pretty high-profile cases. The Oklahoma City Bombing the JonBenet Ramsey case, the Columbine Shooting cases. Can you tell us what it's like to work on those high-profile cases with the whole perception versus reality? What makes the case high profile and if there were equally gruesome cases that you've worked on that didn't catch the public's attention and how that kind of interaction works.
Ellis: I've worked on many non high-profile cases that were equally as troubling and some of the high profile cases. The - obviously McVeigh is high profile just by the nature of it. At the time the Oklahoma City bombing, he was the most notorious domestic terrorist in our country. So that's naturally going to be high profile. With the Ramsey case, this is a little different. Number one, the Ramseys were [00:10:00] never charged with anything. No one's ever been charged with the killing of that child. What made that case high profile was the fact that it occurred on a Christmas night, which is generally a slow news night. The parents later went on CNN and it became, it just kind of mushroomed from, the publicity took on a life of its own. You don't work the case any different. Tt's difficult because there's a lot of interference in the case. There's a lot of misinformation.
Carrie: Could you give us some examples of misinformation in the JonBenet Ramsey case that drive you nuts?
Ellis: There were accusations being floated out there. There was one old man, they called Santa Claus and there was no evidence to suggest he killed JonBenet Ramsey, but he was in this circle of friends and people decided maybe quote, unquote, maybe he did it. And he died up in Maine and people associated Bill McReynolds and Santa Claus with the death of JonBenet Ramsey. And that's a very sad and difficult thing for a person to go to their grave with. It wasn’t true
Carrie: Did he, did he get flack for it? I mean, were people bothering him? Harassing him?
Ellis: Oh yeah.
Krista: Imagine if this – the JonBenet thing would have happened during this day and age of social media and how many people would have been just wrongfully crucified? He was, it was bad. It was bad. Can you imagine how much magnification of that? It would just be awful.
Ellis: It's still ongoing. If you go online, there's still chat rooms of people.
Krista: I mean, I get it. I understand. But yeah…
Becca: I know we've had like requests where they're like, “Do a JonBenet episode!” And we're like, No!
Krista: No, there's just so much out there that's not right.
Carrie: Okay. I have a question then if something's right or wrong, did the father go to the post office for an hour or 20 minutes or whatever, and come back?
Ellis: I've heard that, I'm unaware of it, but I really can't discuss the details of the case. No, you're free to quote me as classifying that as - we'll see it or whatever.
Carrie: Can we quote you on that?
Becca: It is interesting. Now, after something happens, like the minute details of people's movements become like super suspect, no matter like what they were.
Ellis: Everything they do. They even got into my personal affairs and my ex-wife's personal affairs - our telephone, cell phone records, our bank account records.
Carrie: Who got into all of those records?
Ellis: The media. They hired, they hired somebody to pay somebody off to get them.
Krista: Do you have children? No. Okay. Would you say that your choice of career was one of those reasons?I have three kids and I could not imagine seeing some of the things that you have seen.
Becca: My dad, he is a psychologist who specializes in sexual deviance and he does a lot of research on pedophilia prevention and that sort of thing. And I know me and my sister he's used us as examples, how he's, “I've got two daughters,” and it's definitely affected him. And, you know, visiting dad at work and walking through the waiting room has definitely affected us. I mean he just kept it separate a lot, but it's, it's an interesting interaction.
Krista: Is it ever hard for you to keep it separate? I know that she said you have an ex-wife, is that part of…?
Carrie: What we're talking about here is called compartmentalization.
Krista: Yeah. Compart...
Ellis: You definitely compartmentalize. My wife, when I met her was a ICU trauma nurse and we just didn't talk about work and. No, it’s just been within the past few years, I began talking about it.
Carrie: I've talked to a lot of people that are retired or retiring, and they're now trying to process their careers is what they're doing and the things that they have seen, you know, FBI agents, psychologists, you know, all these people in these fields. They're all talking about it now. They're writing books. They all need to talk about it, dude. How do you feel about that?
Ellis: It's difficult. I understand why people do that. I guess in some form it's a kind of therapy or therapeutic for them. It's difficult. I mean, you think about some of the things you saw and I don't regret it. I don't regret my career. I'm proud of what I did.
Carrie: What prompted you to choose that career?
Ellis: I graduated from college in Nashville, Tennessee, and from Vanderbilt and by parents assumed I was going to either go to law school or be a banker or something along those lines. I took the LSAT. I did fairly well on that. I could have gone someplace, maybe not Vanderbilt. But I was working part time in a sporting goods store and the policemen would come in and one of them said, Hey, there's a job at the police department. I thought I'd do it for a year or two, just for the excitement factor. And it stuck.
Carrie: What was your degree?
Ellis: Political science and history.
Becca: With the Timothy McVeigh - that was a death penalty mitigation?
Ellis: Yeah. I worked on his appeal what they call in the federal system at 2255. It wasn't just me. I had several investigators working for me at the time. Many of them actually, young women who, who did the work. There's always been a lot of travel involved and even more so with McVeigh.
Becca: I was just researching reciprocity with private investigators and how some states have reciprocity agreements where you can follow a case and conduct an investigation for 30 days or less. But there's a very limited number of states that have those reciprocity agreements. Does that ever get in the way of investigation?
Ellis: I've never - as long as I'm not setting up businesses in a state or advertising in a state, I don't worry about it. I’m in and out and you know, I've never, ever had a problem.
Becca: Makes sense. Yeah, it was saying a lot, you can't solicit new business, you can't set up residency, that sort of thing, but you can follow an investigation across state lines so long as it originates in your state of licensure.
Ellis: I've worked cases that were out of state too, but they were federal cases. So the jurisdiction really, but I use - an analogy I use is attorneys. As an attorney I don't have to be licensed in North Carolina to go take a deposition. I can't practice law there, but I can take a deposition and ask questions. That's the analogy I use from.
Becca: Gotcha.
Krista: You can gather information needed for a case in your state.
Ellis: I've been out of the country. I've done cases out of the country for interviews.
Carrie: What countries? What was, what was going on?
Ellis: One of them was, I did a lot of work in Saipan and it was a federal death penalty case where the defendant was from Saipan. Saipan is a part of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is, I forget the word connected to the US through some trade deal, so federal law still applied in the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan. The guy committed a crime there. He was transferred to the Bureau of Prisons here in the United States on a federal sentence, and he killed a cellmate here in the United States. So I'd spent quite a bit of time in Saipan as well as another investigator. Background investigation, mitigation interacting with his family. I did another case - it wasn't a murder case - where I interviewed a member of the Russian mafia. And…
Krista: Is it pretty over there?
Ellis: Well, I'd been there before, right? It was kind of exhausting. I was gone two nights. So,
Krista: Because it's different if you're working than, if you're, you're not looking, you're in a building. Did you learn to speak in your travels? Did you learn any new languages or did you already know these languages before? Or did you just, do you have interpreters and things like that?
Ellis: No, I don't speak any other languages. Although I took him in college I’m not conversant. What has generally worked for me if the adults don't know English then children probably do.
Krista: Okay. That's fair.
Becca: Another question I had to go in back to the – so you worked on the Columbine shooting case on behalf of one of the shooter’s families, correct?
Ellis: Correct.
Carrie: How does the defense for the family function if the defendant's dead?
Ellis: That was another case that immediately made national headlines, if not world headlines. Nowadays, I hate to say this, but it's not that uncommon to have a mass shooting. There were a lot of allegations made against the parents that they knew it was going to happen, that they knew that. In my case, I had the parents of Eric Harris - that they should have foreseen what was going to happen, that they were complicit in some way. It just was not true. The Harris’ were two of the nicest people I've met and not everyone – most of them, let me say most people don't go with a teenager in the crawlspace, in their suburban home, looking for weapons. They knew that Eric suffered from some type of mental illness he was being treated for. There was nothing I could see that they could a foresaw what was going to happen.
Carrie: How well off where the Harris’?
Ellis: Oh, they, they were average suburban. He was an air force pilot, retired air force pilot who worked as a flight trainer. I [00:20:00] forget what she did.
Krista: So they were just normal people.
Ellis: Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like they were absent parents. I mean, Kathy was home every day when the kids came home from school. She just worked part time.
Krista: He was a minor. So is it the parent's responsibility at that age? And, I mean, I don't know, the kids aren't that age yet, but I'm sure…I know when I was at age, there were things that I was doing that my parents would never have fathomed ever. Ever. And like I tell my mom now, and she's like, I don't want to know that. I'm just glad you're not dead. So,sometimes it’s not the parents’ fault. I'm not saying there's great parents out there and sometimes they're a huge factor in what their children do. But sometimes it's not fair to the parents that that situation happened to them. And I couldn't imagine if that happened to me. I don't know what I would do. I'm sure they question themselves every day to this day.
Ellis: Bill McVeigh, Bill McVeigh was one of the nicest people I've known too. I was given the task of going to tell him that his son was going to be executed. I went to Buffalo, New York and he lived in a suburb kind of out in the country. And I walk in and he must must've had, I don't know, he had to guess, why was I here. I mean, he knew I was coming and I said, Bill, you know, I've got, I said something to the effect of, I've got, you know, tough news. Tim has decided to vacate his appeal and he's going to be executed. I think at that time he was going to be executed in May of that year. And he looked at me, he says, You know, Ellis, I love my son, but I believe in the death penalty. Would you like a high ball?
Carrie: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That was Timothy McVeigh's Dad? Offered you a high ball after he, you told him about his son?
Ellis: Yeah, he said, he said, “I love my son, but I believe in the death penalty. Would you like a high ball?”
Becca: Wow, that is a hard pill to swallow.
Krista: Oh, my goodness. You're like making a double
Carrie: Double, Ellis. Yeah, leave the bottle.
Ellis: I think I did, but I think I had a double, but it was back at the hotel.
Carrie: Let me wait until I'm at home and comfortable. Yeah.
Becca: Well, he had an interesting case too, because they said, Timothy McVeigh said his motivation was the Waco attack - seeing the same equipment, like the same tanks that he'd used fighting in the Gulf War used on American civilians that…
Ellis: He was upset about Ruby Ridge and Waco. No, that whole issue.
Becca: It's not like I'm upset. I better blow up a building and kill like a bunch of people, but it does it, the issues that he had were not insignificant or the things that he took issue with were not insignificant.
Ellis: If you go online there's a video about a guy named Bud Welch and his daughter was killed in Oklahoma City Bombing. He interacted with Bill McVeigh, and it's called “Just Forgiveness.” It's pretty moving.
Becca: Do you get to experience a lot of that working as a defense investigator, a lot of really profound, radical forgiveness?
Ellis: Yeah. I have worked cases where their families could not want the person executed. Part of it is when new criminal justice system in our system, as it exists today, it takes probably a minimum of 20 years before a person, if they're actually executed – McVeigh was an exception because he waived his appeals, but there's no closure for the families. What I read and hear from families, even after an execution, there's still no closure, but they're certainly not as long as there's court proceeding after court proceeding at every level. It's, it's, there's no closure.
Carrie: That’s tough, sir. You're being honest. You're being honest. And I have respect that. I got to respect that.
Becca: When you do a death penalty defense investigation what components do you in particularly look for? Have you seen any I guess commonalities is there any themes or things like that?
Ellis: In a high, high percentage of the cases there is a mental illness component. It often runs through the family or there's a history of sexual assault in the family.
Becca: We recently talked about functional brain imaging scans in a death penalty defense mitigation, and that sort of thing, the whole, like my brain made me do it. And yeah, it has that played into any of your work at all? Or does that come up?
Ellis: I mean, I’ve interacted…there's a psychologist named Rubin Gur, G U R who he and his wife had done some of the groundbreaking work in that area. Now there have been people subsequent to Rubin, that becomes a factor.
Becca: And yeah, I guess what's your stance on that in terms of do you think psychopathy is…is…I guess in terms of what you've encountered, like what kinds of mental illnesses have I don't know if innocence is the word, but made it not - and permissibility isn't the word word, but I guess made the perp like less culpable.
Ellis: I did work particularly one case, yes, where we actually went to trial and the jury chose that in federal court the jury chose not to sentence the defendant to death primarily because of his mental health issues. That was a case called United States v. Sablan – S A B L A N. You can look it up. This is the client who came from Saipan.
Becca: I guess, hearkening back to the first time we got in touch with you, we were learning about crime scene cleaners and that sort of thing. And I had some questions for you about that. But I thought it was really interesting what you were talking about, the difference between what does it suicides versus homicides and how what you see in obituaries are different from what you saw. And I guess it's kind of the whole perception versus reality kind of thing that so much of this, it kind of echoes in high profile cases and echoes in you know, how much of what's behind the scenes that we don't actually see. What's it like being on those scenes? What are the first questions you ask? How do you determine the difference between like a suicide and a homicide?
Ellis: Well, when you're in law enforcement, like I was for so long you probably worked 15 suicides for every homicide. Near-death investigations. You also worked natural deaths. If someone just dies in her home and they've not been seen by a doctor here in Colorado – used to be within 72 hours. I'm not sure what it is now. So you go out to a lot of death scenes that are not homicides. Lot of suicides. Suicides can be very bad. And then you read in the newspaper a couple, few days later died peacefully in his home for what he had done painted his brains, his brains were all over the room, you know?
Carrie: So Is that a four-waller? Is that a four-waller?
Ellis: Yeah. The ultimate, the ultimate is the four walls and the ceiling.
Carrie: Oh! They do a score sheet?
Ellis: Not literally.
Krista: When you work at Surf Pro or a place that does have to come clean those up, they do have a score sheet because that determines the level of what they're cleaning, what they're throwing away, how much has hazard waste, how much then they have to talk to the people. Like, what are you wanting to keep? This woman was telling me about it. And she'd be like, yeah, this woman wanted to keep a pillow the person used to muffled a gun sound. We can't clean that. She wanted to keep it. There's there, there is four sheets.
Ellis: I was long, I was long gone after, before those conversations took place. I didn't clean things up. I mean, I just. We gather the evidence. You look at the scene as a piece of evidence, the human remains as evidence. Maybe that part of that's a defense mechanism, you want to personally, but you don't look at it as a real part of who you look at as a human as a piece of evidence. That said, early in my career, when I started in homicide, I had a pathologist at an autopsy tell me, he says, “You know Ellis before every autopsy I always remember that this person was at one time some mother’s newborn baby.” I don't know if that was a original analysis from him or he picked it up someplace else, it's something I've always carried with me. No matter how horrific they died, horrifically they died one day, that was some mother’s newborn baby. And that kind of helps you keep things in perspective.
Carrie: That's heavy, Ellis. Seriously. That was a good rule to have to go with, to start with, honestly, if you look at it from that point of view and you go into it at the beginning with that attitude.
Ellis: Well, I, you know, even though it was people like Tim McVeigh, I always remember that. I was there. I picked him up off the execution table.
Becca: Oh, wow.
Ellis: And I’ll always remember that.
Carrie: Why were you there? Why did they allow that?
Ellis: It was an agreement between the courts and the Bureau of Prisons because people were calling around wanting pieces of his body.
Krista: Money.
Ellis: People get so weird. And so I took custody of his body and had arranged for him to be cremated and I was there on with one of my people to take him away when we get there.
Becca: How much of your job is to keep it humanized? Especially with these high profile cases, it gets like fetishized really quick. It gets - people [00:30:00] just kind of swoop in and impose their own, I guess whatever on it. And it's, it's really interesting that so much of your job has been to, keep it humanized where it's no, this was someone's kid. This person has a family. No, this is a body that needs to be processed for burial or cremation or whatever. And just kind of bringing it back to reality.
Ellis: Well, what a little story you can use it or not, but after McVeigh was cremated I gave him to my other investigator and she put him in her backpack and on the flight back the next morning from Terra Haute, Indiana to Denver she sat next to a journalist and a journalist told her that he had been - asked her why she been in Indianapolis and she made up some story. I don't know where it was. And he said, well, he'd been there Indianapolis, because he'd gone out to Terra Haute for Tim McVeigh’s execution but there were rumors that McVeigh wasn’t really executed, that he was flown out of the country by the government or, you know, and what he didn't know is that under his feet in her backpack under her seat was Tim McVeigh's ashes.
Becca: Oh shit.
Ellis: She said it was hard to keep a straight face.
Krista: Yeah. Yup. Yup. That's wild.
Becca: Have you ever thought about like writing a memoir or a book or just kind of…
Ellis: People have asked me about it, but I don't know. I'm still working, so yeah.
Krista: That makes sense.
Carrie: What are you doing right now?
Ellis: I don’t have any death penalty cases. I have one case where a young man was sentenced to death at age 16 in a Southern state, and because of the recent court rulings on a juvenile - I think it's the Miller Decision, or another – he’s back up for resentence. So we're working on keeping him being from resentenced, from the judge just saying, Okay, now you get life without parole. Hoping to get less than that because he's been in prison – he’s in his late thirties now, since she was 16, spent a lot, most of those years on death row in this state, which is not good. And so that's the closest I'm working on now. And Colorado has abolished the death penalty.
Krista: So you have worked in law enforcement and or law, practicing law in other states?
Ellis: I've never practiced law, if that’s what you're saying. No, I'm not a lawyer. Never have been, don't want to be, but I have worked on cases in other states. Yeah.
Becca: Yeah. What do you think makes a case high profile? Like what blows something up?
Ellis: Well, like I said, in the Ramsey case, it was the fact it was Christmas night, her parents went on CNN. And then later the beauty pageant stuff really fired people up. Being from the South, but I didn't find that unusual. They have the little beauty pageants and all these Southern towns, you know. They did in my day or I don't know, I don’t keep up with it now. But they’re a business, they’re a franchise. You can buy the franchise for Little Miss-whatever, and then you have a contest and people pay to put their kids in it. I didn't find it unusual.
Becca: We were talking before about how working high profile cases is frustrating because you're getting tips from all over the place and I guess I'm curious about how do you sort through tips that come in to figure out which ones to follow? Which ones not to?
Carrie: Do you still get tips on JonBenet? Do you? What kind of – what - are any of them, anything that you think are credible recently have any help? There's nothing good?
Ellis: A lot of them are divorced women who want to blind their ex-husband or soon to be ex-husband to take him off the map, you know? I used to get a lot from nursing homes, where the residents sat around and I guess dissected the crime in some way. I got recordings from one old boy in a nursing home down in Florida. He sang it himself. It was called the Ode to JonBenet and he wanted, he wanted us to pay to have it published. I mean, you'd get- it brings out some - cases like this could bring out the best in humanity and they can bring out the worst.
Carrie: What's the best? What is, what has been the best tip you've ever gotten.
Ellis: Well, I think Bill McVeigh and his attitude, that's the best of humanity. The Harris' some of the victim's families rose above the tragedy, rose above all the other garbage that was going on. I’ll always remember that. That's what I focus on. I try to.
Carrie: That's beautiful. That is beautiful Ellis. You put a lot of positivity around these cases, you know that?
Ellis: Well, I tried to I mean, some of it's on purpose. Some of it's just you learn, but you have to, out of every tragedy you have to learn. I think in every tragedy, there's some good to be had, something to be learned that may be tough. That's kind of my attitude.
Krista: I think, especially a career path that you can't see everything is dark and dismal. And with what your job is like, how would you survive? I wouldn't expect anybody to survive seeing the world that way all the time.
Becca: I think piggybacking off of that one question I did have was you know, talking about JonBenet - the JonBenet case and cold cases, how you've still got tips coming in. What advice would you have for everyone listening with cases that don't have closure with cases that don't get solved. What's your take on - I guess move it on or living with, or finding your own closure in situations that remain a mystery?
Ellis: I think, you know, you're always going to have tragedies in life. It's just part of life. At some point you'll never, if you say you're a victim's relative, you're never going to bring them back. I can't bring them back. The courts can't bring them back. Executing the suspected offender is not going to bring them back. But you have to take that next step forward in life andthere’ll always be a piece of you missing because of them. In our country today, there's always, there's a piece of our country as a whole that's going to be missing because of what's gone on recently, but you have to look forward. You have to try to take a positive attitude.
Becca: Right. Even if we don't know what it is now, we've got to live our way to it.
Krista: No because wallowing just leads to more wallowing.
Becca: Yeah, we, we we asked a question recently on our Facebook page, “What have true crime podcasts taught you?” And the thing, something that didn't get mentioned that I think is very true is optimism in like a weird twisted way. There's this whole being able to see you the worst shit that people could possibly do to each other, but still having, I dunno, some sort of optimism that some good will come of this, some lesson will be learned of this, that sort of thing. And then like tragedy does bring out the best in people.
Ellis: I always try to impart that. One of my sayings to family members of suicide victims was don't try to impose rational thought on an irrational act. There's some suicides - granted I could see being rational when you’re ninety years old and are terminally ill and suffering. I can understand that, you know. To shoot yourself or kill yourself over a boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever you can't – in my armchair psychology - and your father may think different but you can’t, you can't impose rational thought. In other words, you can't assume that that person was thinking rationally where two plus two equals four at the time they pulled the trigger.
Becca: You can't put rational explanations to irrational situation.
Ellis: You drive yourself crazy and you'll do it too.
Becca: Yeah. Got a crazy flow chart on the wall. This doesn't make sense.
Ellis: There's been families. There's been cases where other family members would do the same thing. They'd kill themselves.
Krista: I call that losing the battle. Once you get to that point, you just lost the battle and people will never understand that if they've never been there, but it's a battle and I lost.
Ellis: Right.
Carrie: Ellis, who do you think killed JonBenet? Where they from - I, I know you can't give details so I’m just going to do one question. Was it someone inside or outside the house? That's, that's not, that's not a detail if I say inside or outside the house, sir.
Ellis: I happened, I don't know who killed JonBenet, if I did, I couldn't say, but I don't. I think it had to be someone in the community, someone familiar with their routine.
Carrie: So someone from outside the house?
Ellis: Yeah. Wasn't a secure scene. I don't think, I don't think personally it was some random person running around the country who just happened to zero in on their house. It had to be someone within their circle within the community, or, you know.
Krista: I'm sure you've heard one of the crazy theories of - they were part of one of those secret political sex rings that are involved in the pageant rings and something went wrong
Ellis: To me…
Becca: Qanon - That was my first thought.
Ellis: I think, I think Hillary was running around doing that.
Becca: It was Hillary!
Krista: Yeah, it was that Hillary that was, you know, killing people.
Carrie: I heard that Ghislaine Maxwell was there somehow with, with JonBenet. I don't know.
Ellis: I hadn't thought about her. Maybe we should look at her.
Carrie: Ghislaine Maxwell, Ellis! Maybe we'll get funding.
Ellis: [00:40:00] I guess I missed, well if you guys can prove it, I’ll apologize to everybody.
Becca: Actually I do have another question about that. The whole inside of the house, outside of the house, what's the most common mistake that gets made that messes up a crime scene before y'all can investigate it?
Ellis: Patrol officers get there, which they variably are the first people, unless it's just, you know, is not securing the scene, letting people wander around. It doesn't mean the people who wandered around did it, but they're just, you know, you're losing evidence, trace evidence.
Carrie: La la la. I have no idea where I'm walking. Oh, I can't stand it.
Krista: I’ll touch that. Possibly touch the body and move things.
Carrie: Just walking, just walking, ruins it just, just dumb. You don't even have anything.
Ellis: Look how transient DNA is. Yeah. Yeah.
Krista: Just breathing in a space leaves your DNA.
Ellis: I mean, I've had scenes screwed up by the patrol officers.
Krista: Frustrating. So are you ever just like, okay, well, you guys were here first and I can tell that you walked around. Can we just have your DNA sample now?
Ellis: Well, now, nowadays they generally do have. Back in my day, but when I was doing the seventies and eighties and nineties, wasn’t so common.
Carrie: But now we just keep your DNA on file if you're in law enforcement and we…
Ellis: I don’t know if they do or not.
Carrie: I heard that was what was going on.
Krista: Maybe it depends on the state, that’s why police officers are being charged with rape.
Carrie: If they've got funding if it's like, you know, a state with funding.
Becca: They got my shit on file for being a massage therapist. So.
Ellis: I've had a bunch of those for clients.
Krista: DNA tests are fun. DNA tests are interesting in different states in the way that they work.
Becca: Oh, like DNA evidence that’s come to light later on because like the tech behind DNA evidence has gotten better.
Ellis: Familial DNA. DNA from a relative point. Eventually the point, a lot of these cold cases it’s where they pointed in the right direction. Yeah.
Krista: Well by then if the person is dead, it's like, Oh, okay, cool. Now we know. And sometimes it's like, well, we knew this the entire time, but nobody did anything about it. That would be even more frustrating. You've lived a very interesting life, sir. I envy and I don't envy. Me personally, when I was younger, I wanted to become a criminologist. I know that my mental state might not be able to handle the actual ins and outs of that profession.
Becca: How have you been able to stay grounded through all of it or just, not lose your shit?
Krista: Depends who you talk to?
Carrie: She says I kept my shit together.
Krista: If somebody who is even mentally strong enough to handle some of those things that happen in this world that are not meant to be fandom by people who didn't commit those crimes. I can only imagine. I can only imagine I would cry all the time. I would cry a lot.
Becca: Well on this show, I mean, we joke about a lot of fucked up shit and we're like, we're joking because if we weren't joking, we would be having a group cry.
Ellis: Exactly. I mean, that's, that was an adage in my career. You have to laugh to keep from crying.
Krista: Yeah. I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? Do you really not want to kind of laugh?
Becca: The universe has a sense of humor and I think there is a punchline to every situation. And - what did they say? Humor is betrayed expectations? That totally applies to everything we were talking about, how it's Oh, didn't see that coming. Or did see that coming and that's also a punchline in and of itself.
Carrie: I have never heard that before. Becca, I've got to like, take that in and process that. Have you ever heard that before, Ellis? Is humor betrayed expectation?
Becca: I forget who said that, but it's like here betrayal of expectations. It's like, isn't it like…
Carrie: I love it!
Becca: Cause you're like – ha!
Carrie: That's my whole life.
Krista: We all say that at some point.
Carrie: Well, you're right, Ellis. Do you guys have any other questions? That’s all.
Becca: We really appreciate it.
Carrie: If we need to have you as an expert backup, if there's a case breaking or something, would you be willing to do that?
Ellis: Sure. Just let me know.
Becca: Thank you so much Ellis.
Carrie: Take care.
Krista: Thanks Ellis.
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