No Body Murder Cases Explained: Ex-AUSA Tad DiBiase on Prosecuting Without a Victim

How do you prove a murder when there’s no body, no crime scene, and sometimes no clear cause of death?

In this gripping episode of True Crime with the Sarge, retired NYPD Sergeant Joseph Giacalone sits down with former Assistant U.S. Attorney Tad DiBiase, author of No Body Cases, to break down one of the most challenging aspects of the criminal justice system: investigating and prosecuting homicide cases without a victim’s remains.

DiBiase shares insider knowledge from decades of federal prosecution, revealing how circumstantial evidence, behavioral patterns, forensic science, and digital footprints come together to build a case beyond a reasonable doubt. From missing persons to covert homicides, this episode explores how law enforcement and prosecutors overcome the absence of a body to secure convictions.

We also examine real-world no-body murder cases, jury psychology, legal strategy, and the critical mistakes that can make or break a prosecution.

If you’re interested in true crime investigations, courtroom strategy, or the evolving science behind solving murders, this is a must-listen episode.

Key Topics Covered:

• What defines a “no body” homicide case
• How prosecutors prove murder without physical remains
• The role of circumstantial and forensic evidence
• Behavioral analysis and suspect patterns
• Challenges in convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt
• Real case insights from former AUSA Tad DiBiase

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This podcast contains adult language, adult topics. Listener discretion is advised. TrueCrime with Assarge, the Audio Files, is owned and operated by Sarge Media LLC. Please consider liking and subscribing to the channel. So, how difficult is it to get a conviction in a nobody homicide investigation? Our guest today not only wrote the book on it called Nobody Homicide Cases, but he also prosecuted the second nobody case in Washington, D.C. history. Ted Deviasin is a former assistant United States Attorney, or AUSA for short. Welcome back to the show, Ted. Good to see you. Great, Sarge. Thanks for having me on again. So I was looking at your website, which people could find it at nobodycases.com, and you have a list of cases that were right up until basically January 1st of 2026. And on the list are 620 trials in the United States, DC, and its territories. But the thing that really stands out the most out of this time, 87% conviction rate in those cases.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Yeah, it seems crazy, doesn't it? Like that seems counterintuitive because you and I know how hard it can be to get a nobody case to trial. And as you correctly pointed out, my chart is just of cases that went to trial. It's not, it doesn't include pleas. It doesn't include missing persons cases that we suspect might be homicides. And the reason I did that was because being a former prosecutor, I wanted to help investigators and prosecutors bring the cases to trial because that is the challenge in doing that. Oddly, though, once you get the case enough facts and are able to make an arrest, bring an indictment, and bring it to trial, it is a very high conviction rate, much higher than a sort of run-of-the-mill murder case, which is about 71%. And murder trials have the highest conviction rate, really, of any trials, although I'd suspect bank robberies are also probably very high. And I think the reason that the conviction rate in nobody murders is so high is really kind of twofold. One, any prosecutor is only going to bring a strong nobody murder case to trial because the defense is so obvious. We don't even know if she's dead. We don't know where she is or where he is, although most of our victims are female. And then two, over 50% of nobody murder trials are what we would call domestic cases. They might be husband and wife, ex-husband, ex-wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, parent, child. And so often the victim, I'm sorry, often the suspect in these cases is very obvious. And it doesn't mean that the husband always did it or the parent always did it, but those are typically what you see in those cases. And so you start off with a more obvious suspect, and it makes it a lot easier to kind of gather evidence against that person. And then of course, when you're presenting it to a jury, it's it's very common. I think people understand that people in a love relationship sometimes becomes love-hate. And so it's very common to say, oh yeah, the ex-boyfriend did it or the husband did it. And I think that's a those two factors are a big part of why that conviction rate is surprisingly high.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Right. And what maybe a lot of people don't know this, right? Unless you get delve into the numbers. And I I encourage everybody to go to the website and take a look at this list. More than half of these trials happened in the last like 25 years.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Yes. Yep. Uh, that's exactly right. And that always surprised me, although it surprises me less now. And I think the biggest reason for that is because, you know, in 1950, if you said your wife ran off to Mexico or ran off to Europe, there wasn't really any way to disprove that. It was much harder to track people, it was much harder to figure out where someone might be in real time. That, as we know, has completely changed. And it started changing really with the advent of cell phones in the late 1990s. Now everyone, right, all of us have a cell phone. And it's much more easy to track someone with a cell phone to tell where they've been. It's much easier for that person to communicate in almost, you know, immediate time if they're okay, if they're not okay, why haven't they communicated in a long time? All of those become factors that make it much easier to say, not only do we think this person is dead, not just missing, but we can tell much faster than we used to be able to tell. It used to be, you know, you had to wait seven years or 10 years or 15 years to be able to say this person is actually dead, not missing. Now, if you know that you get a text from the victim every day and you don't get one for two days, that's going to cause you serious concerns, and you're going to go ahead and report that to the police. And then the police can track the phone. Where is the phone? Who the last text messages they sent, who the last phone calls that they received, all of that information is just so much more prevalent today than it was 25 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

And we can add the wearables to this, right, too. So, like we're seeing right now with the with like the Apple watches, yeah, all those other things. So the technological advances, ironically, could be helping people not to commit homicide, I guess, or if they're going, or if they're not going to be able to do it. Well, they shouldn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

They shouldn't be doing it, but it makes it easier for those of us on the law enforcement end um to catch them. And you point out a good uh a good point, Joe, about um the wearables. You know, Fitbits, Fitbits are often keeping track of people's pulses. So if the victim is wearing one and there's no pulse, you're getting very valuable information. When did that pulse stop? What was the pulse? Did the pulse suddenly elevate for a few minutes? Those are all giving you very valuable information. As they're also giving valuable information, potentially about your suspect. Did the suspect's pulse suddenly elevate? Where was that um Fitbit? Where was that Garmin? Um, where was that Apple Watch at the time when we think the murder may have happened? Because that's a huge disadvantage in a no-body murder case if you don't know when the murder happened. And by being able to look at cell tower records, wearables, these fitness tracking devices, you have a greater chance of narrowing down that time frame. You know, doing a geofense, looking at every phone that was in the area to figure out who was there, you have a greater chance of narrowing down the time frame. In the past, the time frame could be a day, a week, a month, because you just couldn't track exactly who was the last person to see that person when they were seen, when they were known to be alive. That is much less rare now. You can really tell almost down to the minute where someone was and when they were alive. Were they still texting? Um, were they still scrolling on their phone? Were they still looking at websites? That's a huge advantage. And one of the changes I've noticed recently is there's a real decrease in the time between person goes missing, suspect arrested, go to trial. We've had a handful of cases that that time span, which in the past could be years, is now down to a year or less, which to me is incredible to think about the ability of law enforcement to say you went from you went missing to you had your trial for the person who murdered you within a year. That's incredible to me, but it's all a result of this ability to figure out where people are and what happened to them much more quickly.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Now, as we get further into this with the technological advances, I mean, I think we've seen a couple of cases recently where this has been used as a forensic countermeasure, right? So just to pivot quickly to the Nancy Guthrie case case, right? The the cell phone was left, the Apple Watch was left behind, or we saw uh situations where people like the Brian Koberger case where the phone went dead for so long, right? And you know, he shut it off and all these other things that go on. How much of a concern is that as bad guys start catching on to this?

SPEAKER_01 8:53

I I think it is a concern because your typical nobody defendant is not your typical criminal. You will often have people um who commit these crimes who may have committed no other crime. And the the um portrait of them is very different than someone who is a you know a drug dealer or a carjacker or a robber or a burglar. They are people who are often thrown into these circumstances because of their anger about a relationship. Um it's not, you don't have people other than serial killers, which are pretty rare nobody murderers. You don't have people committing nobody murder after nobody murder. It's a situational thing. And that as a result means you have people who are smarter, who think more about, well, if I'm going to do this, how would I do it? Many of these crimes are, of course, crimes of passion because they erupt out of arguments between two people. But by the same token, it gives them an opportunity to say, well, wait a second, I don't want to bring my cell phone. I'm gonna leave my cell phone here so it looks like I'm here. Because of course, we assume when we find a cell phone and find a signal, that means Tad or Joe are with their cell phone, but that's not necessarily true, as we know. It just means the phone is there. And I do think as more nobody cases happen, there's more publicity about them, which is generally a good thing, it does lead to some people saying, hmm, I need to be a little bit smarter about how I do this. And the difficult part, of course, is we're not gonna know about the people who are smart enough to figure it out and to get away with it. And that does concern me that as there is more publicity and information about how to track these people by the same token, it makes it easier for the next person to say, well, I'm not gonna make that mistake. Right. But they generally make mistakes anyway. They do because because of the nature of criminal ventures, um, you are doing it under extreme pressure, usually under a time crunch. And so people do tend to slip up, which is good for those of us in the law enforcement community. Um, but like I said, we'll never know the people who got away with it and how they got away with it. That's the difficult part, is you sit there and you think, well, if I was going to do this, how would I get away with it? And you think, is there someone out there who has successfully done that? Now, the flip side is I think to your point, it's better to train investigators and prosecutors what evidence to use, what to seek, what to find, what to look for, because you're gonna catch a lot more people with using that evidence against the criminals than criminals are going to get away with it by having that evidence.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Right. Now, I mean, most people are victimized by someone we know. Is this the same thing? You know, in these cases, basically you're laying it out like it's generally like a significant other boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, that kind of situation that we're dealing with in these nobody cases?

SPEAKER_01 12:04

It absolutely is. Are there exceptions to that? Yes. Um, you know, generally just to use parent child, generally when something bad happens to a child, it's often the parent. Is it always the parent? No. Are there significant number of cases where there are stranger on stranger cases? Absolutely. And so one of the things I talked to the um police about is you have to follow the evidence, not follow a theory. A theory might lead you to evidence, a theory might be a good way to start. But if you get locked in on following a theory or a statistical percentage, that may lead you astray and you don't want to do that. You've got to constantly say, what evidence do I have here? If it leads me down the path of this is a domestic case, great. But if it doesn't, you've certainly got to eliminate that. And even if the evidence leads you to conclude that this is some type of domestic case, it's a parent or it's a uh an ex-loved one, you still, because of the way nobody murders are, you still have to eliminate everybody else from having committed that crime. Because the challenge of a nobody murder case, one of the many that make it unique, is your pool of suspects is everybody, right? If they find a dead body in my house, the pool of suspects is pretty limited. It's probably me, it's maybe people I know, but it's certainly not. I live in DC, it's not some guy living in Chicago. That's just not realistic. And in a nobody where I don't know where the murder happened, I don't know when it happened, I don't know how it happened, your pool of suspects is the world. And you have to try and eliminate as many other people, even if you think, okay, I know it's Tad, it's probably he's probably the one who did it. I still have to work to eliminate other people to make sure that the evidence pointing at Tad is really tight. That is a big challenge of a no-body murder case. You have so many more suspects than you do ordinarily.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Yeah, I mean, there's there were three cases that kind of stood out in my mind over the last, I guess, 12 months or so. You had the Harmony Montgomery, which was a small uh child that was missing from, I believe it was New Hampshire. Yes. Then you had the Jennifer Dulos in Canadian. And then the the yep, Canadian, and then the Anna Walsh case from Massachusetts, right? Which is Brian Walsh. I mean, the video surveillance in that one played a huge role in that case, even though they didn't find Anna, they pretty much was able to prove that he he did, in fact, kill his wife. I mean, of course, the internet searches didn't help.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Yeah, the internet searches absolutely crushed him. And I did a couple of interviews about that case, and and and I obviously I didn't work with the police on any of those three cases, or I wouldn't talk about them, as you know. But the internet searches in the Walsh case were just so damning. It was as if he read a book about how not to commit a nobody murder, um, because it was just so dumb. Like, why would you search these things on something, you know, on a device, like a computer that is completely and I think what he did, I think he used his kid's computer or something like that. His iPad, yeah. Okay, let me get out of this. I'll use my son's iPad. Like, no way, dude.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Um, and his son, I'm sure the 10-year-old is going to be searching for how long does it take for a body to stop flying?

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah. It's just, it just, it just, I think one thing I think I've encountered a lot of in these cases is because, as I said earlier, these are not your typical criminals. They're not out committing other crimes. Now, Brian Walsh had actually committed other crimes, but most of them don't. And the type of crimes he committed were interesting because they were fraud type crimes. Yeah, art fraud. Art fraud, yeah. You often find that people who do that type of crime tend to think they're smarter than the police, right? I'm gonna, the police aren't gonna catch me, they're not gonna figure this out. I'll use my son's iPad and do it that way. Whereas you know, like we know, there's no way a police officer would be doing a search warrant in a house and not seize every electronic device in there. I don't care if it's the dog's iPad, I'm gonna seize it. And I need to, you know, I need to get that. And that's of course, is exactly what happened. So you definitely have ranges of how clever people think they are and how clever they actually are.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Which is generally not the same. That's that's for sure. There's usually a wide gap. Yeah, there's usually a wide gap, is right. I mean, and thank God, because it makes you know a law enforcement's job a lot easier when you're doing this stuff. Absolutely. But uh it's still, I mean, you get to a point where you you kind of say, are there certain things that we should be looking for in the initial stages of these investigations to help build a prosecutable case? Like what are some of those things that we should be looking at?

SPEAKER_01 17:05

So the things I talk about are one, surprisingly, continue to look for the body, right? That seems weird coming from me who has spent the last 20 plus years talking about cases with no body. It is always better to have a body. And because we are arriving on these conclusions that this is a murder, not a missing person case, much quick more quickly than we used to, it also means it increases your chances of finding a body are much greater. You know, if you're talking about um looking for a body within a year or two years, your chances are way better than back in you know years past when you're looking for a body seven years later. If I'm looking for a body seven years later in Florida, I would tell the detectives, don't waste your time. You're not gonna find it. Maybe if you're in Minnesota or Alaska, you might. Um, but I think that's the initial thing is continue to look for a body. The other thing you have to do is we spend as uh investigators a lot of time looking at people around the victim. We talk to the victim's friends, we talk to the victim's family, which is easy, right? Because they're cooperative. They want to find the person. And I think initially we spend less time on talking to people who know our suspect. And that's what you want to do. You want to try and talk to the suspect, but you also want to try and talk to the suspect's friends, the suspect's co-workers, who does he hang out with in his, you know, beer softball league, all of those things. I think because that can be more difficult to do, it can be more difficult to find these people, it can be more difficult to get them to cooperate and talk with you. We don't spend as much time. And then, of course, the obvious things of get search warrants. That is critical. You know, I am sure when the detectives got this 10-year-old's iPad in the in the Walsh case, they were like, boom, case over, right? Because they look at those searches, and like you said, they know a 10-year-old is not doing that search. 10-year-sear on dinosaurs or something like that. And to get this information was so hugely critical. And any electronic information, be it the location of a cell phone, the searches, all of that stuff is going to be hugely, hugely helpful. And those are the things you concentrate on early in the game.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

One of the things that I do when I talk to detectives and stuff like that on some of these cases, I always try to avoid when you're talking about search warrants, I tell them, get the warrant, right? When in doubt, fill it out. I mean, sometimes I hear about the consent stuff, and I'm like, you know, in a homicide investigation, just get the warrant. Forget about the consent because it's always going to be a problem for you, right? The defense is gonna say, Oh, he was under the risk, you coerced them, you did this, that, and the other thing.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

I agree a hundred percent. I do believe it helps to ask for consent, but get a warrant, like you said, because as you and I know from having done search warrants, warrants are bulletproof, right? It is really hard, even if the judge who granted the warrant did it on an erroneous basis, if the judge really didn't have probable cause, all of those reasons that conceivably could knock out a warrant, never knock out a warrant, because what the court says is well, the police had a judge sign a warrant, they had a prosecutor sign off on a warrant, look good to them. They have a good faith basis for doing what they did. It is virtually impossible to overturn a judicially signed warrant when the prosecutor also, the prosecutor doesn't have to always sign off in some jurisdictions, but it's virtually impossible to turn that over. And what I worry about, because I see it, um, is when you have officers get a phone and they say, Oh, I clicked it, it was still live, so I could still look at it, and I started scrolling through. You do not want that, right? That's the worst case. Like, oh, go get a warrant. Um, because you could very easily lose all of that evidence if you haven't taken the time to get a warrant and make sure that you're going into a phone in a proper way.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Yeah, I think there's actually been two Supreme Court cases recently. I think one might have been Carpenterse United States. I'll have to double check on that one. But you know, when it comes to phones, specifically when it comes to the phones, get the warrant. I mean, don't even don't even look at it.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Yep, absolutely. Don't even look at it. Whether it's open, whether you get consent or whatever, put it in a Faraday bag so that your suspect can't mess with it, and then just go get a warrant. There's nothing, you know, there's very few jurisdictions where it's difficult to get a warrant on off hours and all that. Every jurisdiction has, you know, a night prosecutor, a 24 hour duty prosecutor, a duty judge. You hear all these stories. About we went to the judge's house, they came down their bathrobe and they signed it. That that's what you want to do. It's always, always safer because it's so bulletproof as opposed to, like you said, proving consent. The defendant says, Well, I was drunk, I was high. They forced me to do it. And you can have a million detectives say, No, we didn't force them, but some judge may say, uh, well, I think he did force them or an appeals court, whereas a warrant is bulletproof.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Right. I mean, listen, I I worked in what I effectually call the People's Republic of the Bronx, and I can't tell you of a case that I heard, you know, somebody was denied a warrant. I mean, as simple as that. If you were you approved probable cause, they gave it to you. Yeah, which which brings me to a point. I always try to look to see how we can better these investigations. And one of the things is nobody cases, a lot of them start off as like missing persons cases. Yes. Do you think bringing in a homicide detective in the very beginning of the case? I mean, like we're talking immediately, once you realize that there's something afoot here, you know, that that uniformed cop is, you know, they're trained, but they also get that tingling, like something's going on here. But bringing in a homicide detective to try to bring all the all their experience to bear, do you think that might help in these kinds of cases?

SPEAKER_01 23:13

A hundred percent. Because what I talk to officers about is if you think it's a homicide case and it turns out to be a missing person's case, there's no harm, no foul, right? We thought it was a homicide. Oh, we found her. Yay, she's back. That's great. But the opposite is a bad situation. You think it's a missing person's case, you think it's a runaway case, you treat it like that until six months later, when you're like, oh, that person's not back, then you're screwed. You've lost out on a lot of evidence because a homicide investigation is very different than a missing person's investigation. A homicide detective, for the most part, is different from a missing person's detective. And no, no disrespect meant to missing persons detective, but for the most part, on most departments, your best detectives should be the homicide detectives. And there's no harm to doing that. Now we know the vast, vast majority of missing persons cases are simply that missing persons cases. They return. Um, but there's a statistic that says 12% of missing female, missing adult females or not missing persons cases, are homicide cases. And that's a telling stat because your typical missing person who's a runaway, excuse me, tends to be a female, tends to be um a teenager or a young woman. It does not tend to be a 35-year-old mother of two who works a job as a nurse. That is not your typical missing person. So, like you said, when an officer gets a gets a feeling that, hmm, this doesn't feel right. This doesn't feel like a missing person, this feels like something else. That is exactly when you should be calling in a homicide detective.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Right. And then with that, you would be maybe calling in the assistant district attorney, too, right? I mean, in certain cases, to have them on board as fast as you can, too. Specifically, since if you might be going homicide or you think it's a homicide, then having that district attorney on board too to help you get the warrants and the subpoenas and all the other things would be quite easy to do so, and you're not really waiting, like uh, you know, the days or weeks or months while this stuff goes on. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

That's the power of having a team of detectives and prosecutors. And I know, you know, there are some detectives who say, I don't want to take it to the prosecutor until I got it wrapped up with a pretty bow, and here it is. That was not the way we worked in DC, and I don't think that's the way to work because you want to, as a detective, if you can get that subpoena power, it's incredibly powerful. It can mean subpoenaing cell phone records, cell tower records. It can mean a grand jury subpoena to bring somebody down to the grand jury who where they have to talk to you. They have to talk to the prosecutor in the grand jury, but you're telling the prosecutor these are the questions to ask. They really have to work together as a team because they each have different strengths that they can bring to this investigation. And that is critical. I think we did a good job of that when I was a prosecutor in DC. I had detectives I worked with all the time, and they knew how I worked, I knew how they worked, and we were just able to start off a case right away, knowing, okay, we're both going to be working this case from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Right. And not only that, the prosecutor is the one that's got to prosecute this case. So building a prosecutable case is pretty much what they're asking you or telling you what to do. So this is something that we did, uh, you know, especially when I was in Cole case, we sat with the DAs all the time. I mean, listen, I'd like to have you know the DA say yes all the time, but sometimes, you know, they say, hey, we we need this or we need that, you know, so you have to go out and get it. But but this thing comes down to this.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Let me add one thing on that, Sarge. I think too, prosecutors need to understand when they're going to trial and prepping for trial and are in trial, they need to continue to use their detectives because the detectives are gonna help them pick a jury, right? They're gonna know that neighborhood, that area. If I'm picking a jury in the Bronx, I want someone who works in the Bronx who can say, oh yeah, that apartment house, you don't want someone from there. But that one, oh no, that's that's nice. That's a nice part of town. You know, you want to you want to use them. That is critical that prosecutors don't ignore what investigators bring to their realm, which is the getting ready for trial, picking a jury, helping them get witnesses, helping them work with witnesses. I think prosecutors are very quick to say, oh, I want to be involved on the investigative end. They're not so quick to say, well, I need my investigators to be involved on the trial end as well. And that was something that for me as a prosecutor was something I had to learn, particularly when I was picking a jury. And, you know, DC is a relatively small jurisdiction. There's about 700,000 people. And to have a detective who grew up in DC and knew, oh yeah, I know that person or that type of person, you don't want them on your jury. Or you absolutely metro bus driver, yeah, you want that guy in your jury. It's an invaluable resource that someone like me who didn't grow up in DC but has lived here a long time, you can't replace. So it goes both ways. You have to have their assistance as well as them calling on you as a prosecutor when they're doing their investigation.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Yeah, it's funny because when you said that, uh two addresses popped into my mind even now that I've been retired for over 14 years, or I said, Yeah, don't ever take anybody from that place from that building.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah, absolutely. You just you just know there's certain buildings that you're like, no, we're not taking anyone from there. I know what that building is about because even the good people there, they don't want to be involved in any of this. They they know you keep your mouth shut, you don't you don't talk about this, and they're not gonna be good jurors because they're gonna be afraid to convict someone, and you can't you can't have that.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

I want to finish up with from your book, you talk about two prongs of a nobody case. Can you explain those to the audience?

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Oh, only two prongs? Oh, I I know what you mean. Okay, now I got you. Um, so the difficulty of a nobody murder case is one proving there was a murder. You don't have to do that in a regular murder case. You know, I had 20 uh jury trials for murder trials when I was a prosecutor. I didn't have to prove there was anyone dead in 19 of them, right? Because you got a body, you got autopsy pictures, your medical examiner comes and testifies. So that's step number one. And sometimes that's the hardest step to prove that someone is actually dead. And then you move to what happens in every other murder case, which is I got a dead person, and that guy sitting over there is the one who did it. So those two prongs are so different from every other type of criminal trial that you do. Because in all the other cases, you typically don't have to prove there's a crime. I don't have to prove there's a bank robbery, I don't have to prove there's an armed robbery or a burglary, because I have a victim who can say it. Now, obviously, in a murder case, you don't have a victim who can articulate it, but you have a victim who can demonstrate it because, yeah, that's dead guy right there. And here are the pictures of dead guy, and here's the autopsy of dead guy. That is the difficulty. And if you falter on the first one, you're never gonna make the case and you're never gonna get to the second question because you have to prove there is an actual homicide in the first one. And as a result, a lot of defendants and their lawyers spend a lot of time proving we don't even know if she's dead, we don't know where she is. They haven't they haven't produced anything, and it can be an effective defense, but I think for the most part, it doesn't work, as shown by the 87% conviction rate, because the prosecutor gets to turn around and paint such a sympathetic portrait of the missing person that everybody by the end of that has to believe, or you're never gonna get a conviction, has to believe that this person isn't just missing, that they're actually dead. They didn't contact their child, they didn't show up for their birthday, they didn't show up for Christmas, they didn't show up at work, they've never gotten any uh uh money, they've never earned a salary because their social security number was never used to get. They left behind a case I'm investigating now that took place in the early 2000s. The woman left $2,000 in the bank. And everybody knows there's no way this woman left $2,000 behind. She didn't have a lot of money, but she certainly would not have left $2,000 behind. So you get to paint such a positive portrayal of the person, that tends to cut against the defendant in a very bad way because it makes him look very bad because you're bolstering um the victim's uh bona fides.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

There you go, and there you have it, folks. So nobodycases.com. And if you get a chance, make sure you pick up a copy of Ted's book. The link will be in the description. Ted, thank you very much. This was uh very uh enlightening. I like uh enjoy speaking with you about this, and I hope that we don't have any more of these cases, but we know we will.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

We probably will. But thanks for having me on, Sarge. I always appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

For more shows like this, check out True Crime with the Sarge on YouTube or on my official website, josephjackalone.com. This podcast is owned and operated by Sarge Media LLC. All rights reserved. Thank you for listening.