Erin and Jon Corwin - Part 2

0:00 Hi, I'm Rich and I'm Tina. And if there's one thing we've learned in over twenty years of marriage, some days you'll feel like killing your husband, and some days you'll feel like killing your wife. Welcome to love, Mary, kill, Hey, Tina, Hey Rich, Hey listeners, welcome back. Thank you. I don't think I had a choice. Nope, you sure didn't. Did you just get that burp that you made? Did you get that in the Blooper realm? Oh? You know I missed it. I'm so sorry, but if you want to let out a burp, I'll try to get that. No. Thanks, So same day, Part two, Part two, it's still rainy and thunderstormy here. Yeah, I'm glad our power hasn't gone out. Yeah you said that like a Canadian.

0:57 By the way, we have a lot of people in Canada listening to our little podcast, a lot of international listeners, a lot of people in Australia. I have a kind of an Australian case coming up. I'm working hard on exciting. Are you going to do the accent? I am not an accent person. If I try to do an accent, it sounds like I'm making something up, you know, it's not a real accent. Although someone said one time, you have a cute accent. I'm like, I didn't know I had an accent. Everyone has an accent to someone that's from a different place. Yeah, I'm from Chicago. I'm not really from Chapelle, you know. I was born in Chicago, not from Chicago. Yeah, more or less. So something really embarrassing happened to me the other day.

1:38 Yeah, I remember a few like this was a few months ago. We had a giveaway for the little Birdie personal safety devices. Yeah, and I think it's a great little thing to, you know, just clip on your purse or whatever. And I tried to give one to our daughter and she didn't want it, so I was like, I'll just put it on my purse. I was in the grocery store the other day and I had my purse is like a crossbody, and I think I went to like grab, like to put my phone back in my purse, and I accidentally grabbed the Birdie alarm and in the middle of the grocery store. It's like it's like a hand grenade. Pulled the pin out, and I pulled the pin out in the middle of the grocery store. It's going off, and it's like, if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's just like this little alarm. Yeah. And it has like a strobe light too that like flashes.

2:29 Yeah. And it's pretty loud, like a siren type noise. And I'm like, it's just funny. Because I'm so old. Yeah, and I've embarrassed myself for many, many years, I just don't really get embarrassed anymore. I was just like, oh, yeah, it happened. It. Did anyone come rushing over like they thought you were in need of aid? No, But I think it was pretty clear I wasn't really in any danger other than mortifying myself. Produce guy came over and he was just like just kind of laughed at me, and I was like, yeah, yeah, it's yeah, I'm fine, thank you. I'm glad that you can get too embarrassed. But if you have the little birdie alarm, it is a good idea to practice taking the pin out of it and putting it back in. Yeah, because it took me longer than I thought. Then I'm like, oh God, what an idiot I am, so but yeah, I think that's one of the great things about getting older. Is just like, you know, I'm not really embarrassed. I still feel like I get embarrassed, but I don't know, Well, you don't do as many embarrassing, cringey things as I do. I don't know about that. I guess I, well, I don't go out in public that often, but we are. We're a little bit on the shut inside. I think from after well, you've worked at home for years. Yeah, yeah, but I do travel. You I hear one of the most embarrassing things that has ever happened to me when I was traveling. Okay, go ahead, I'm sure I've told it, but our listeners haven't heard it. But I was at a hotel, and I was at the breakfast at the hotel. So I don't think this is that embarrassing. This is a super embarrassing. So I had a little bottle of orange juice, you know, a little plastic bottle with a lid on it, and I opened the lid and I took a drink of it that I thought I closed the lid. I was reading a

4:01 newspaper. I was probably like reading USA Today at the time, and I was like not paying attention, and I went to shake the orange juice and the lid wasn't on it, and I was in a room full of like a bunch of people at this hotel breakfast thing, and I went and shook the orange juice, and orange juice went everywhere. It was Did you hit anyone with the orange juice? Thankfully, No, I didn't. That's just an average tuesday for me. It was embarrassing, though. Yeah, well at least you had the newspaper. You could just stop it up with a newspaper, right, Yeah, yeah, anyway, we all do embarrassing things. Okay, So you brought us like a plethora of snacks for the last episode, which you know was only like an hour and a half ago, and we didn't really you didn't have anything for the second episode. But her daughter was just walking by and she was like it was so fortuitous. It really was. She was like, hey, do you guys want to try this? Yeah, and so we're going to try this a snack. And so for her birthday, she likes Asian things, so we got her this box of Korean snacks from Amazon. She loves that kind of thing. It was she it was like, she's still going through them. This was two months ago that we bought her this thing. But I had, like, I don't know, fifty different packets of Korean snacks and some of them are really yummy, and so anyway, I haven't tried this one yet. So it's called Slim and it is a potato biscuit cracker apparently, and you can get them on Amazon. Yeah, it's super thin. It looks like you mentioned, it looks like a communion not that I have a lot of experience

5:31 with a communion wafer something look like that. It looks like a flat pringle. Right, that's a pretty good analysis. And it smells like a potato chip. But there's a little like a sabi or something, I don't know, chalapeno maybe. Why don't we take a break and taste it. We'll let you know. That was delicious. That was really good. Yeah, like a potato chip but like a cookie. Almo reminded me a little of a ritz cracker, but just thinner and crispier. But the flavor it's like kind of that I don't know, potatoy buttery flavor. Yeah, it was really I really I would if that was like available at the Meyer down the road, I would definitely buy a box of them. Yeah, for sure.

6:14 Yeah, I loved it. Thank Emma, Yeah, thanks Sma. We're not supposed to say her name. Hopefuitely we caught that. She said, you're welcome if you didn't hear. She's adorable, she's kids, were very we're very lucky. We're not ragging. There's just really good people. It's just so nice to be able to say, you know what, we like her. There she is. Do you want to come say high to the people. She's shy everyone, No, she's not, she's not. But we do have great kids, we're very we're very fortunate. Yeah, and our cat is still here. Yeah. Cat likes hanging out while we record rifting content. All right. You know I was stalling, I know, because you don't want to do the recap. I know you're gonna ask me to recap, but I took notes and everything. I have a lot of notes. Well I took him in a sharpie, so it's just kind of like large print. Actually, I bet you can do it. I bet you can do a recap here. It's really after even after like an hour of content. I think it's pretty straightforward. But why don't you give it a go and I'll fill in any blanks. Okay, well interrupt me.

7:17 Aaron Corwin e ri I N. Corwin. She's about twenty. She is twenty or about twenty almost twenty. She was like disappeared about two weeks before her twentieth birthday. Okay, Aaron is four weeks pregnant. She's from Tennessee. She went missing on June twenty eighth of twenty fourteen. She woke up her husband at seven thirty am and she said, I'm gonna have a me day. So far, so good. Right, it's a Saturday. Her husband is John Corwin, who's twenty one. They live in on a military base in twenty nine Palms, California. She was homeschooled. She came from a foster family that later adopted her. Had six children, but one of them sadly died. Is this right so far? Yeah? They had seven. Yeah, they had seven and one died, so it's kind of hard to keep shack of. Aaron sounds like just a sweetheart. Loves animals.

8:18 She's called the animal Whisper. She really loves horses. She did four h growing up. Her best friend is Jesse. Whenever I hear the name Jesse, I pictured Jesse from Toy Story. Oh, I thought you were gonna say the Rick Springfield song. I mean, that's a good song, but I just pictured Jesse from Toy Story. Aaron was shy but warm. John was a country boy. They started dat dating when they were sixteen. They got engaged when Aaron was seventeen and a senior in high school. He asked her parents for permission. They were hesitant, but they were like, well, there's nothing we could do to stop you. John his had always wanted to be a marine, so after he was done with high school, he entered the Marines. He meant to Japan for a spell. He was a sniper. Yep. Aaron worked at the tractor supply company, but currently hadn't been working because they lived kind of like forty five minutes was the nearest tractor supply company, so they were in debt. She owed owned a blue Toyota Corolla. They had two dogs and a cat. She was homesick for Tennessee, but her mom was coming to visit very soon. They were really good friends with two other couples that lived in the same military housing unit that they did, Chris and Nicole, who were a little older, maybe like five years older than Aaron and John. They had a daughter named Liberty,

9:52 who was like or five and six. In the time, there was another couple, Ashley and co I alway should say Chris liked weapons. He'd been in Afghanistan. He was kind of struggling with some anxiety and depression upon his return. Chris really liked to go into the desert and shoot things and blew things up. What else do we have? So in January twenty fourteen, Aaron had a miscarriage. I already said this, but they had a lot of debt. February twenty fourteen, a little affair started between Aaron and Chris, and it was kind of like these couples were super tight. They did everything together. They had cookouts during the weekend, they got together and had a lot of movie nights. So this affair, of course, wasn't good for their friendships. Do you want to elaborate on that anymore? No?

10:50 I mean, it just it blew up eventually, right people found out and it got very awkward. John knew about the affair, and so did Nicole. The other the opposite spouses knew about the fair, but both couples had decided to work on their marriage. On June twenty second of twenty fourteen, Chris went into the desert and he found a mine shaft, which I took note of. I think that's about all I have other than you know, she went missing on the twenty eighth, and that's it. Good recap, John, John, No, Chris. He had gone out to the desert and Connor was going to meet him up in the desert, but he put his phone on airplane airplane mode. Yeah, and that was the same day that Aaron si today and Connor couldn't find Chris in the desert and he drove around looking for him for like three hours. Yeah. So really Chris was out in the desert by himself apparently, and Aaron was out by herself apparently.

11:52 And yeah, either nobody could verify any of that, and Aaron didn't come back. That was a very good recap. Yeah, that was I look forward to listening to this episode where I can just focus on your handsome face and not have to take notes. All right, Well, let let us continue the story. So where we left off is that John had called the police on Sunday morning to report her missing. So the two officers and that was twenty four hours later, not quite twenty it was twenty four hours after she left. Yes. Yes. The two officers that showed up to take the report, they noted that John seemed very composed. They treated the reports seriously. About a dozen people die in the Mojave Desert every year from the hydration or exposure, and given that Aaron was pregnant, it was a super high priority right out of the gate. After taking the initial report from John, the officers knocked on a few of the neighbors doors. Chris answered when they knocked on his and Nicole's door. He said he didn't really know Aaron very well and that he hadn't really talked to her in two months.

12:56 They just kind of would wave to each other in the hallway, and that was about the extent of his relationship with Aaron. Next, they talked to Ashling, and when they told her that Aaron was missing, Ashling got an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. She knew that Connor, her husband, had gone to meet Chris in the desert that day and had never found him, and so she immediately thought that maybe Chris was involved in this, and she knew the whole background. We talked about it last episode. But Ashling was like in the middle of this whole thing, Like she was the first one that found out that Aaron and Chris were having an affair. She just ended up being in the middle of a lot of these conversations. So she just right away thought that Chris might have had something to do with this. So she told the officers about Aaron's affair with Chris, so they knew right away that he had lied to them just a minute earlier when they had been up talking to him. They went back upstairs to talk to him, but no one answered the door this time, so he had probably gone out. Ashling called Nicole and told her that Aaron was missing. Ashley was taken aback by Nicole's reply. According to her, Nicole snapped at her and said, I don't care what happens to that little bitch. Mind your own business. Yeah, not quite the reaction you would expect when you know one of your neighbors has gone missing in the desert. In her defense, though, yeah, you know, she'd been through a lot and true true, I'm sure her later reaction was kinder. Maybe we'll see. Nicole also had

14:26 some really unkind things about Aaron to say. When she was at the horse Ranch with Isabel, she said some things about Aaron that were really Isabel is the owner of this horse ranch that was out near the marine base. And yeah, both Aaron and Nicole would spend time at the horse ranch, so Isabel knew them, She knew Chris, she knew a lot of the people pretty well. Here here's a really short clip of Isabel and what she said that Nicole said to her. Nicole was telling me that Aaron is probably hiding out somewhere to make Chris's life miserable, that she setting us up, She's trying to hurt our family. She's Aaron's doing this just to get even, She's trying to get sympathy. So that was yeah. So again that was Isabel who owned the horse Ranch, And basically, you know, after Aaron disappeared, Nicole's first reaction was she's out to get us, right, She's trying to make Chris look bad. Yeah, yeah, for sure. John spent Sunday morning calling Aaron's friends to see if anyone had heard from her.

15:31 He called Jesse, who told John that she had talked to Aaron Saturday morning before she left for Joshua Tree, but she hadn't heard from her since. In the afternoon, John rounded up about thirty Marines who drove around Joshua Tree all afternoon searching, but with no luck. The police hung out waiting for Chris to come home, which he did around noon on Sunday. They knew that he had lied, but they also knew it could have been innocent, like maybe he just didn't want to admit that he and Aaron had had an affair because he was worried that it would look bad. When they talked to him a second time, he admitted the affair, but he said that after Nicole found out that he really hadn't spoken to Aaron much after that. He said that after they broke it off, he realized that Aaron had lied to him. He told the police that Aaron had said that John had abused her, but now he no longer believed that. The police asked if he knew that Aaron was pregnant, and he said no. He also said that they had never had sex and so the baby couldn't be his. He said that he had been at Joshua Tree that day coyote hunting by himself, but only because his two buddies had bailed out on him. Coyote hunting people hunt coyotes.

16:42 Yeah, he liked to go out hunting coyotes and rattlesnakes. That was his that was his thing. It seems kind of unfair to go to the desert and hunt coyotes and or rattlesnakes, Yeah, because that's where they live. I know, I know, but that's what he liked to do. After the police he left, Connor pulled Chris aside. So Connor is Ashling's husband. He pulled Chris aside and said, did you do what I think you did? Chris said, what are you even talking about? You know me better than that, and Connor replied, I swear to God, Chris, you'd better not have done anything to that girl. And so Connor was also obviously suspicious right out of the gate about Chris. Investigators definitely started zero in on Chris at this point, but they also weren't ruling out John.

17:27 I was just going to ask, Yeah, I mean, there wasn't anyone who could verify John's alibi that he stayed in the apartment playing video games most of the day. And as we talked about last episode, why did he wait until Sunday morning to report her missing, and as we talked about, John's explanation was that he thought that you couldn't report someone missing until twenty four hours. He also seemed way too calm and withdrawn, which made the police suspicious you under the circumstances. The media also started circling around John. His commanding officer ordered him not to speak to the media, and the police told him he couldn't participate in the search because of the possibility of contaminating evidence.

18:10 The media didn't know anything about Chris or his affair with Aaron, so of course they put the spotlight on the spouse. Over time, a lot of John's marine friends also started avoiding him, and some of Aaron's friends openly questioned whether he was involved. So John didn't tell the police about the affair, not that I know of. I know they heard about it from Ashley, but I don't know if he said anything about it or not. Doesn't think it was important, or was he trying to be kind to his wife not wanting that to get out. I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, I kind of get the feeling that at this point, at least he thought maybe she got lost in the desert, or maybe she, you know, because they had been having problems, maybe she decided to leave and go stay at a friend's house. So I'm not sure why he didn't, you know, kind of bring up the Chris angle. But but yeah, I don't. I don't think he did. But the one thing I was going to say to round out the conversation about John and the suspicion around him is that Aaron's mom and dad never doubted John's innocence, so they actually never thought that John was involved in this. On Sunday afternoon, the police called some of Aaron's friends, including her best friend back in Tennessee, Jesse, who again we talked about in Part one. Aaron confided everything in Jesse, so Jesse knew about the affair. She knew a lot of things that were going on in Aaron's life that she hadn't necessarily shared with other people.

19:38 When Jesse talked to the police, she said, well, maybe you should talk to Chris, and the police said, well, actually, we just got done talking to him. And at this point Jesse freaked out because she now knew that Chris was back at the base. But Aaron was not, and so she told the police everything At that point, we're going to talk about now what actually happened over the last couple of months. That when we thought the affair ended, it didn't actually end, is the bottom line. I'm shocked, I know. So when Nicole found out about Chris and Aaron, so the relationship did get put on hold for a couple of weeks.

20:18 But then Chris wrote a poem and secretly handed it to Aaron. The poem read, like it or not, you still hold a part of my heart. Ready or not, we were going to get caught. Don't give up and I won't too hopefully like me, you still think I love you? Beautiful poem. I'm sorry, I'll be right back. Throw up. It's a little nauseating, Okay, poetry doesn't have to always rhyme people, good point. So regardless of how bad the poem might have been, Aaron was touched by this, and she and Chris started seeing each other again, but this time they were a lot more careful. They used the messaging app that was more private, and in early May they had sex for the first time.

21:04 Aaron was falling in love with Chris. She told Jesse that she was going to leave John and moved to Alaska with Chris. She was even looking for apartments in Anchorage. So it's not like Chris is a great catch. John sounds like a pretty good, solid guy. Yeah, I think so, I think. But you know, John was also a little bit reserved and didn't share his emotions and things like that, which I can understand that, you know, that might be hard. But yeah, Chris doesn't seem like a great catch to me either. I guess we're just older and I know that I've never really been tempted. But the grass isn't greener on the other side, you know. Yeah, falling in love is a lot of hormones and it's not really real and I don't know, I know, well, and they were so young too. I mean, I just think anybody that gets married when they're eighteen with really they're the first boyfriend they've ever had.

21:59 It's just it's probably not going to end well, you know, although sometimes it does sometimes I think, you know, there's plenty of people in high school that are together forever and happy together surever. So Aaron had found out that she was pregnant before the day that she and John had gone to the ear. So you remember I did that math. Yeah, so, yeah, she had gone to the ear with John on June twenty second, but she actually found out she was pregnant like a week before that, and she knew that the baby was Chris's. Wait, so you said that she was three weeks pregnant, so she found it when she was two weeks. Yeah, that doesn't Maybe she wasn't she must have been. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you I had. I had the same exact questions. That was clearly stated in the book that I read. But I think that must have been wrong. I just gave it a quick google and for people with regular menstrual cycles and at home pregnancy test can generally detect pregnancy about four weeks from the first day of your last period, okay, and a doctor test can detected a few days earlier than that. Yeah, so I'm guessing that was that was a little bit off, a little early. It's probably further along than we thought. But she did know that it was Chris's, and so she actually told Chris about a week before John had found out on the twenty second. She wasn't sure how Chris would react to the news, but he seemed excited about it. He asked Aaron not to tell anyone for a bit

23:29 so that he could figure out how to break the news to Nicole. A few days before Aaron disappeared, Chris told Aaron that he wanted to take her somewhere special to celebrate her pregnancy and that he had a quote special surprise unquote for Aaron. Aaron texted Jesse saying, quote, so apparently this surprise trip is super important and I finally got to got him to tell me it's by the National Park unquote. So I'm guessing Chris didn't know that Jesse was part of the equation, right, Yeah. I think he thought Aaron was keeping everything super secret to herself. So they decided on the twenty eighth that would be the day that they would go out to the desert and Chris would share his secret surprise with Aaron. And that's why she told John that she needed some me time that day. My blood pressure is starting to rise here.

24:22 Aaron was giddy leading up to the twenty eighth. She was thinking that Chris was going to tell her that he was leaving the coal and that he was going to propose to her that day. She texted Jesse, saying, this day cannot come quick enough. Oh, oh, poor Aaron. I know, it's horrible thinking she went out there with these expectations, and she had confided everything in Jesse. Jesse had tried to keep her friend's secret for her, but when she realized that Aaron was missing and that Chris had come back from the desert alone that day, she knew that something was terribly wrong. Well, how dumb is Chris, Well, yeah, he's pretty dumb. That was a rhetorical Chris. So after Jesse spilled the beans to the police, she talked to John and she told him everything as well. And as you can imagine, John was devastated because he really thought the affair had ended.

25:14 You know, a couple months before, Jesse also called Aaron's mom, Lare and told her everything. Lare, of course, was also heartbroken and you know, overcome with worry. She and John's mom both flew in from Tennessee the next morning, and then the dads flew in a couple of days later. On Monday, June thirtieth, Aaron's car was found parked in a remote spot a few miles from the military base. There was a set of footprints in the dirt leading from her blue Corolla to another set of tire tracks, and then they ended, so it was like she got out of the car walked to somebody else's car. By now, there were a lot of agencies involved in the search for Aaron, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, the FBI, the Border Patrol, and officials from nearby La County and Kern County. In the meantime, police brought Chris in for a formal interrogation and also got search warrants for John and Aaron's apartment, Chris and Nicole's apartment, and both Aaron's and Chris's vehicles. In Aaron's apartment, they found the poem that Chris had written. When they searched Nicole's and Chris's apartment, they only found one of Chris's guns, even though they knew that he also had a hunting rifle registered in his name and a potato gun. Yeah, and the potato gun. They actually, I didn't go into this in my script, but they actually arrested him later about the potato gun because they wanted they wanted an excuse to arrest him, and so the potato gun was what they had at the time. Potato guns are illegal, illegal in California. Okay,

26:47 can you explain that to me? No, I can't. I can't explain it. You could buy an R fifteen, but a potato gun can't have that. You're lying. I'm not lied. Our nerve guns illegal. I don't think so. We actually had a potato gun growing up, did you. We built one at home. I remember once you know it was, well, it was a tennis ball cannon. I guess that's different than a potato gun. A potato gun isn't a whole potato unless I'm wrong. Oh, I don't know. I thought you could put a whole potato in there. Oh maybe that maybe, maybe there's different versions. The one that we had was like you literally just stuck the tip of the gun into a potato and it just had like a a smidge of potato. Oh. I thought it was like a tube that you've stuck the potato down in. So when I was young, I had two older brothers and they, you guys, were just a just a bunch of clowns. We were. So my brothers built a tennis ball cannon, which is basically a long tube that you would put a tennis ball down in and then you would put like I don't know, like some kind of like gasoline or something in the bottom that would like cause an explosion. And they built it, yeah, and the tennis ball would shoot out of the cannon at like really really high speeds. And so my one brother aimed it at my other brother who stood at the at the end of the yard. Okay, wait, let me guess Tom aimed it at Mike. No, it was the other way around. So Tom interesting, Tom got a baseball glove and I think he put some pads on to be for safety, the safety first, and he stood at the other end of the yard and Mike fired the tennis ball cannon at so he was willing.

28:19 Yeah, he tried to catch it, and I don't I don't remember if he caught or not. But this but the tennis ball came out like, you know, one hundred miles an hour. It was like a rocket. That's really funny. Actually, you have never heard this story before. Your poor mom, she rest in people. So I did a quick google a potato gun and literally the one that we had growing up is like you stuck, you know, just the tiny it was just you know, like a ner razer sized potato. But I can understand why a potato launcher would be illegal because it's again I think mostly a DIY type project. But yeah, it's like a cannon. Right. Yeah, did you know you can send a potato in the mail? No? Yeah, you can. Well, I mean, of course you can send a potato in a mail, but you can just take a potato and you can write yeah, and they will they will know it, and it would be really funny if a listener potato, our listeners potatoes. Oh we've gone down quite the rabbit hole here, but let's go back to the story. So, so, yeah, they only found one of Chris's guns they knew he had. He had a hunting rifle that was registered in his name that they didn't find in the apartment.

29:33 During Chris's interrogation, he stuck to his story that he and Aaron had broken it off a couple months earlier and that they had never had sex. Investigators acted dumb. They didn't want to reveal yet that Jesse had told them otherwise. Here's one short clip of an interesting moment in the interrogation when they asked Chris if he had made any phone calls calls out because are they in a tunnel. Yeah, the audio is not the best on that, but you might not have picked up. So they asked if he made any I just put the other biscuit in your mouth. I was about to ask you a question. Let's take a quick break so Tina can chew her biscuit.

30:26 Okay, how is your sorry? I think you were going to want me to talk for am it? And I'm really hungry? Okay, I mean like two bites of an apple, half a bee. Anyway, I agree, I'm sorry, it's okay. I know that clip was a little hard to hear, but the police were asking him about using his phone, and I don't know if he picked up on his answer, but he said, quote that area we were in we plural. See That's why I'm not a criminal, because that's the exact mistake I would make. Yeah. Well, detectives took note of it. They didn't say anything, but they quietly noted that he had used the earl we at that point when he was supposed to be by himself. They told Chris that they had found Aaron's car, and he seemed surprised about that, and they told him that the tire tracks matched his jeep, even though they didn't actually know that at the time. It was kind of a bluff, but it worked because now Chris changed his story again. He still maintained that he didn't see Aaron that day, but now he said he saw her car and he drove over to see if she was in it, but she wasn't. At this point, the cops stopped playing dumb and they turned to bad cop mode. They told him that Jesse had revealed everything to them about the affair and the pregnancy and his plans for a special surprise that day, and they had a copy of all of Jesse's text messages that she had sent them to back this all up. They asked Chris if he would take a polygraph, but he said no because he was quote emotionally unstable unquote and he was worried that it would give a false reading.

31:56 They asked if they would find any suspicious searches on his computer. He said, well, I did look up ways to dispose a body a few weeks ago. You know, I was just hanging out with one of my marine buddies and the subject came up randomly, so I searched for it, but he couldn't actually remember who the buddy was that he was with. They also asked about the rifle that they didn't find during the search, and Chris admitted that he had asked Nicole to take the rifle to the horse ranch and stash it there, which she did without Isabel's permission. Isabel the owner of the horse ranch. So Nicole took this rifle to the horse ranch and put it in Isabel's closet in her house. Oh my god, I know. Do you believe that. Isabel was like, please find it. But Chris told them, I mean, he told them that he gave it to Nicole.

32:45 So Nicole just took the gun and no questions asked, or probably some questions asked. Nicole's role in this whole thing is very questionable to me because of the way that she acted toward Aaron, that some of the things she said to people. I don't think I put it in my script, but at one point she was talking to Aaron or to Isabel, sorry, and she said something like, well nobody, no crime, like if they don't find the body. Yeah, So I don't know. I don't know about Nicole. Well, we'll talk it's possible. I think it's certainly possible. I'm not going to be any part of your getting rid of your mistress, just so you know. Okay, fair enough to be clear, though, I do not have a mistress. Okay, good, good to know I didn't.

33:28 I did not really think you did. I know. When the five hour interrogation ended, Chris seemed surprised that they were letting him go without arresting him. But without a body, they still didn't have proof that he had committed a crime. Another story. Again, I didn't put this in my original script, but I thought it was interesting. When the police drove Chris back to his apartment complex, he was like asking them questions about like, well, when a body is lost in the desert, do you guys always find it? And oh my gosh, and the police were like, yet, we've never not found a body. So it was really kind of yeah, just he's dumb. He's dumb. Apparently he's dominant, horrible person and evil. Yeah. While the search for Aaron was going on, Chris's active duty service officially ended on July eighth, ten days after Aaron's disappearance, Chris, Nicole, and Liberty got into a U haul and they started their trek back to Alaska. Did the police know this, Yeah, they did, and that was actually why they arrested him for the potato gun thing, so they could basically tell him, you have to if you know, when it comes to trial, you have to come back to the state, but you can go to Alaska if you if you need to. Once they got to Alaska, Chris told his parents about the whole situation, including his affair with Aaron. They didn't believe that he could have killed her, but they pulled their funds together to hire a top rated criminal attorney from California just to be safe. As the police questioned various friends, they found out that Chris had made comments weak for Errand's disappearance about finding some abandoned minds that were so remote

35:04 that no one would ever find them, and so they started focusing their search on the abandoned mines. That may make it sound like they could narrow the search down, but we're talking about two thousand square miles of desert and more than twelve thousand abandoned mind shafts. Yeah, and there's no there's no like database of minds or a map showing all of them. It's just the twelve thousand. Yeah, they're all over in the state of California or you know, in the Mojave Desert. These are like kidding, Yeah, these are like old gold mines that people would dig. Some of them were like you know, vertical vertical that would go down in the ground. Some were going into the side of cliffs. But they were like everywhere. Well, you hear so many stories of people disappearing and potentially being in a mind shaft.

35:46 I really had no idea there were that many abandoned minds. Yeah, it's crazy. And like I mentioned, there's no there's no map of them all. They're just you know, they're just everywhere. Well, how is that safe to I'm just I guess this is not another rabbit hole, but like a mine in the desert, a hole in the ground, right, it just seems very vulnerable to have a mine and then sand on top of it. And yeah, yeah, it's definitely h I mean, there's not like their whole. It's a hole in the ground, right, so you can see it if you're walking up to it, but it's definitely a but just the area around the hole would be vulnerable and it could be yeah. So because of like how many of these mine shafts there were and how big of an area we were talking about, the police started preparing for the possibility of charging Chris without a body, which we actually talked about that in the last episode. It's definitely harder to you know, get a conviction that way, but it's becoming more common with you know, DNA and other things. But a break came in the case when they talked to Chris's friend, Joseph Hollifield.

36:51 If you remember, Hollifield went out into the desert with Chris less than a week before Aaron's disappearance, and that was the trip where Chris Setti found some mine shaft that were really cool and really remote. Hallafield couldn't tell them exactly where they were, but he had a bunch of photos on his phone from that day. The bad news was that the photos didn't have a lot of recognizable landmarks. They were just a bunch of pictures of you know, abandoned mines in the desert. But they got their second break in the case when they brought in a guy named Doug Billings to help. So Billings was a local guy who helped run his family's hardware store, but his real passion was caving. He traveled all over the world exploring and mapping caves, and he happened to be the world's biggest expert on the abandoned mine shafts in and around Joshua Tree National Park. They brought Hollafield's photos to Doug Billings and he immediately knew where everyone was taken. I know, this is just amazing to me. He knew the area so well that even if there was like a minor landmark like a little, you know, building, or a weird looking tree or whatever, he knew exactly where it was. That's bananas, because you would think they would all look very similar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

38:06 So with his knowledge of the locations, combined with the time stamps of the photos and the angle of the sun, they were able to map out Chris and Joseph's route that day almost exactly. So on Saturday, July second, they drove around to the area where the photos were taken. That day, they searched on foot as best they could, and they took cadaver dogs around, but they had no luck. Even narrowing down the search as they did, they were still over six hundred mines that the team decided were possibilities. So for the next seven weeks, groups of volunteers and teams of two or three searched every mine on the list, starting most days at three am to avoid the desert heat goodness, but they had no luck. After eight weeks searched six hundred mines. Holy moly, after eight weeks, everyone involved in the search was exhausted and they were getting hopeless. All of these people they had risked their lives like going down into these mines, like you know, you pointed out a lot of them were unstable, you know, definitely dangerous, and investigators decided that Saturday, August sixteenth would be the official final day of the search. As that day was drawing to a close, a group of volunteers led by a software engineer named Luca Cherbini, a native of Italy and a big time adventurer, they approached the last mine on the list, a ten foot by ten foot one hundred and forty foot deep pit.

39:35 As they got close to it, they smelled gasoline and the awful smell of decay. They radioed another team that was nearby and asked them to bring the bucket cam, which was basically a GoPro camera and a light rigged up in a bucket with a long rope that they could lower down into the caves. But this particular mind had it had a slope to it, and so someone had to go down in the mine about thirty to forty feet and then lower the bucket the rest of the way from there. So they set up like a tripod over the mine so that Luca could start repelling down into the mine. He had a gas mask on, but his gas detector went off about twenty feet down, indicating that the air was toxic. His eyes were stinging.

40:17 He got to thirty or forty feet down and then he was able to lower the bucket down. He could only stay down there for a couple more minutes because it was so unbearable, and so then they brought him back up and they looked at the GoPro footage. It wasn't clear, but it looked like there might be a body. So what was the gas that was causing his detector to go off? Well, do you remember the propane tank I talked about earlier, So there was propane and there was also gasoline. Apparently what Chris had done was through the propane tank down, opened it up, put gasoline down there. I think his intent was to like blow the mine up or to start a fire that would incinerate everything. So I'm guessing this mine was pretty remote. Yeah, super sup remote and super deep to like one hundred and forty feet down if you can imagine. So with the footage from the GoPro, in addition to what they thought might be a body, they could clearly see a propane tank also on the floor of the mine, and so that was basically the point when the detectives were like, yeah, this is this is probably Aaron's body. Another caver went down, this time with a full respirator so that he was able to go nearly all the way to the bottom. He verified that it was indeed a body at the bottom, wearing the same clothes that Aaron had on when she went missing. Getting her body out of the mine was incredibly challenging, both because of how deep and precarious the mind was, but also because her body was in an advanced stage of decomposition. How much time had passed eight weeks okay, yeah,

41:49 and you know the desert heat and everything. But they were able to get her body out the next day. Her body also was on like a there was like a false bottom to the mine, like there was a wooden like a wooden plank that lay across and she was on top of that, and so they were worried about this, you know, this wooden plank might have collapsed, and they had no idea how deep the mine was. He didn't go into the mine, He just threw her body down there. Yeah, so they were they were actually actually able to get her body out the next day. During the recovery, they found that there was a garat around Aaron's neck. The autopsy revealed fractures to Aaron's clavical to one of her ribs, and the back of her skull was also fractured. The medical examiner believed that the clavical and the rib fractures were due to the fall down the mine shaft, but the skull fractures appeared to be the result of being hit with a blunt object. It was hard to tell for sure, but the examiner believed the manner of death was strangling by the garrot found around her neck. They weren't able to determine in the autopsy whether Aaron was pregnant and if so, whose baby it was just because her body was just too badly composed. If they could have verified that, Chris might have been charged with a second murder.

43:05 Oh it's horrible, you know, it's really Yeah, the whole thing is just really sad. Just can never wrap my head around like he's she's you allegedly love her and she's pregnant with your baby. I know, it's horrible. And he thinks he's going to get away with his mistress disappearing and disgusting, and she's going out to the desert thinking like he's going to propose to her, so she's all, you know, excited, and it just makes me sick. Baby, yeah twenty years old. Yeah, not even twenty And just so sad. I know, like you get emotional in a lot of your cases, and I tend not to get as emotional, but this one, as I was researching it, there were many times that I just can't. I remember you were tearing up one day when I went to visit you. Yeah, this was just a hard one. So that night, Chris was arrested in Anchorage for first degree murder. They impounded his car and when they searched it, They were surprised to find under the passenger seat a homemade garat very similar to the one that had been found with Aaron's body.

44:07 Fast forward two years, September twenty first, twenty sixteen, jury selection begins in the trial of Chris Lee. The prosecutor felt confident as they had a lot of evidence linking Chris to the crime scene. They found Chris's DNA on a number of items found near Aaron's body, including a T shirt that he had apparently tried unsuccessfully to use as a torch. So he had created this homemade torch with a T shirt and he had put the propane tank down there. He had poured a bunch of gas, leaned down and he tried to light it, and apparently it didn't light. They also found a sprite bottle at the bottom of the mine that had Chris's DNA on it, and there was a shell casing found at the scene that matched Chris's rifle. The DA decided not to seek the death penalty, partly because Aaron's parents didn't want that. I'm not sure if that was for moral reasons or just because they knew that anyone convicted in a death penalty case would automatically get multiple appeals that could go on for decades, and they just didn't want to have to relive this nightmare. The prosecution's case was simple. On finding out that Aaron was pregnant with his child, Chris realized that this would complicate his life, possibly destroy his marriage and his relationship with his daughter Liberty, and so he decided that the best thing to do would be to remove Aaron from the equation by killing her. Aaron's mom, Lore was the first witness for the prosecution.

45:31 She testified about talking to Aaron the last time over the phone when the two of them were planning Laura's visit. When the defense cross examined Lor, they oddly seemed to focus on the other daughter that Lor had lost, her daughter, Tricia, who had died when she was three from an infection when Aaron was six or seven. They asked how Aaron had reacted to Tricia's passing and if she had behaved strangely after. When they questioned John, the defense also spent time asking about Tricia, but John said that Aaron didn't talk much about the death of her little sister, so it was very odd. On the fifth day, of the trial, Nicole showed up for a witness readiness hearing. Both the prosecution and the defense were considering calling Nicole to the stand, but neither had decided yet. During a break, when Nicole left the courtroom, the jurors were all sitting out in the hall. As Nicole passed the jurors, one of them said, I like your shoes. Where did you get them? Nicole stopped and chatted briefly with a juror, which is a really big no no and could result in a mistrial. The bailiff saw what was happening, and she told Nicole not to talk to the jurors. Do you think it's was Nicole's intent? I mean, the juror was the one who initiated the conversation, so I don't think so. And Nicole got really snippy about it and said, well, she was talking to me. So there was kind of a commotion as she argued with the bailiff, and the bays kept very very separate. Yeah, it seemed kept in a separate room, not in the hallway. Yeah. I think they were just out there for like a short period of time, and they probably didn't know who Nicole

47:05 was, so it was probably an innocent thing. Anyway, the judge decided that it wasn't this wasn't a serious enough thing to impact the trial, and they went on. But again, I just thought Nicole's role in this is to me very interesting. And ultimately Nicole was not called as a witness by either the prosecution or the defense. Anyway, Chris would actually end up being the only witness called by the defense. If you didn't yeah, and if you didn't already hate him enough, his testimony will make you hate him even more because Chris actually admitted on the stand for the first time that he actually did kill Aaron, but he said that it wasn't premeditated and that it was because of something horrible that Aaron did. Oh God. According to Chris, at some point weeks earlier, Nicole, his wife, had noticed that their daughter, Liberty's crotch was read and irritated when giving her a bath, and Nicole thought that maybe had molested her. Chris said that he had dismissed it at the time, but while they were out in the desert, Aaron kept talking about how much she loved Liberty and wanted to be part of their family.

48:09 Here's how Chris said on the stand. Things unfolded from there. When Aaron told me she loved Liberty and she wanted to be with her, you know something thick. It turned a gear in my head and I said, why do you care about Liberty so much? Why do you want to be part of her life? And Aaron, Aaron told me, you know, I just love her. And I stood up and I stopped her. I said, did you touch Liberty? And she reeled back a little bit and started starting on her words, and she was saying, you know. I stopped her again, and I yelled her. This time, I said, did you molest my daughter? And she said yes, but and that was the last thing I heard say. I stumbled back and I sat on the edge of my jeep and caught myself with my hands, and in my right hand I felt the medal from the grow. It set me off. I just felt so much hate, so much brage, and I grabbed it and I stood up and I came up behind her and I put it around her neck. Training took over there, and I turned around and I started pulling.

49:27 Nothing would have stopped me from doing what I was doing. I told myself while I was doing this, never again, I wasn't gonna let anybody hurt my daughter. Again, I had let her into my daughter's life. It was my fault that my daughter was hurt. He's disgusting, I know, isn't that like horrible? So now it was it was clear like now why Chris's lawyers were asking about the little sister who had died, Tricia, because they were basically trying to imply that Aaron had maybe molested her when she was younger. I know, the whole that it's so disgusting, pathetic, like just horrible that that that was going to be the angle that they would take to defend Chris when there was absolutely no evidence, no exactly no evidence at all. And it was liberty ever taken to a doctor or anything.

50:15 That was just that was you know, when the prosecutor cross examined Chris, they were like, okay, so when you noticed your daughter, like, you know, she had this irritation on her cross did you call the police, did you call anyone? Did you take her to the doctor? No? No, no? Oh? And you kept having an affair with the woman that you thought was responsible for this. Yes, I mean it was just a desperate attempt and like but it was shocking. I think no one in the courtroom expected it. But I think he knew he was going to be found guilty, and so this was his attempt at trying to at least get it reduced to a manslaughter charge. But luckily the jury saw through it. They were only out for an hour and a half. Actually, deliberations only took fifteen minutes because but they decided to wait until they had lunch.

51:00 I'm sorry I need to laugh about this, but we've seen a lot of things lightly about lunch juries that like they come to a decision, but then they're like, well, but we already ordered lunch, so let's just wait a while. So they waited until after lunch, and then they announced their verdict, which was guilty of first degree murder life without parole. Without knowing what the verdict would be, Aaron's mom, Laura, had handwritten twelve thank you cards to the jury. Oh I know that that's good to tear up, so she wrote, and the thank you cards quote, no matter what the verdict is, I want to thank you for giving up so much of your time for this unquote after the nice gesture. I've never heard of anyone doing that before I know she's Laura is just such a nice woman. Thing.

51:44 That's part of what why I get emotional about this case. I know it's those because we're parents and when you hear you know just you know what that suffering would feel like where and also all the volunteers too that helped out the search and everything. But so after the vert was announced, Lore waited outside the courthouse to give the cards to the jurors. Nicole and her brother were also outside the courthouse, and Nicole's brother came rushing over to Lare, holding his phone up with a picture of Liberty, saying, she remembers everything that was done to her, and then Nicole charged over and chimed in. She remembered every she remembers every touch, every tickle, she remembers everything. Nicole was screaming, and a guard escorted both her and her brother out.

52:27 The jurors then came out and Lower gave them her cards. Several of the jurors had tears in their eyes and they hugged Lore and Aaron's other family members. All right, we're almost done. Just a few a few notes about the aftermath. First, Nicole has never been charged with anything, but there was definitely suspicion about whether she knew about Chris's plan and whether she helped him plan or helped him covered it up. Prosecutors haven't ruled out the possibility that she would be charged in the future, but I'd say it seems unlikely at this point. Doug Billing, the caver who was able to identify the location of all the photos and helped organize the search, He built a small desert garden on a hill twenty miles south of twenty nine Palms that he called Aaron's Garden Get the motionally good too. During the trial, he took Lore and some of Aaron's friends who were in town for the trial to visit. He stops SPI regularly to help maintain it and send pictures to Lore. Yeah, is lovely. What a nice gesture. You know. There's there's a registry book at the park which many have signed, including a lot of the detectives and the volunteers who searched tirelessly for Aaron for eight weeks. Sadly, Luca Cherubini, the caver who was the first one down into the cave where Aaron's body was found, died in twenty seventeen, at age forty seven, he was hiking with a couple of friends in central California and trying to cross a rapid river when he slipped and he got swept downstream and drowned. After John's

53:57 service in the Marines ended, he moved back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and enrolled in a trade school to become a welder. A few months after returning, he met someone, fell in love, and ended up getting married again. About Aaron, he said, quote, I sure wish I could have been there for her more. I tried my artist, but it wasn't wasn't enough. Unquote well, the shoe is on the other but no, isn't it mister mister, I always make fun of my I know, I know, it's good. It's good, you're you're a human. It's gonna get worse here too, so okay, you can do it. After losing one daughter to illness more than ten years earlier, and now another to murder, Laura went through a serious bout of depression and anxiety. For a while.

54:39 She went on medication to help, but she didn't like the way that it made her feel, and so she weaned herself off of it. Over time, she got tattoos, one on each wrist representing the two girls that she had lost. For Aaron, an image of a horse with a purple mane. As I mentioned at the top of the first episode, purple had come to represent Aaron during the search because that was the color of the dress she wore at the day she got married. And then for Tricia, she got tattooed a pink heart with angel wings. While Bill preferred to mourn privately and never really spoke publicly about his daughter's loss, Lor spoke at a memorial service that was held in Tennessee after the trial. She expressed her appreciation for all the detectives and volunteers who worked so hard to find Aaron. About Aaron, she said, quote, she was sweet, kind, very naive.

55:30 Anyone that knew her loved her. Unquote. In lieu of flowers, Aaron's family asked for donations to be made to the search and rescue teams that helped find Aaron. Laura still keeps in contact with many of the detectives, along with many of the rescuers, jurors, several of Aaron's friends, and she still regularly sees John, who lives nearby she and Bill are retired and they spend their time visiting their grand at their children and their grandchildren. Deep breath, one more sad thing to share. So I'll include a list of all my sources in the description for this episode, but I wanted to give a shout out to the main source, which was a book by Shanna Hogan called Secrets of a Marine's Wife. You said that was a really good book.

56:15 It's an excellent book, really well researched and well written, so I highly recommend it. But if the case didn't have enough sadness to it, I found out that the author, Shannah Hogan, died in twenty twenty at age thirty eight from a freak accident. She drowned in her own swimming pool. Yeah. So Secrets of a Marine's Wife that book, that was the final book that she published before her death. Has she written other books. She has written a few other books, including one about Jodi Arias. That is pretty well. Yeah, so that's it. That's the sad story of Aaron, Aaron and John Corwin. Well you did. You did a fabulous job, as always, But yeah, that's it's so hard, it is.

57:01 I mean, she had a lot of life. She had her whole life, literally, her whole life out of her what. Oh it makes me. It makes me really mad, it does. I would be scarbage, I know. Yeah. One thing I was thinking of, like I wanted to ask you your opinion about as a parent, Like what do you do when like when she you know, basically told her parents she's leaving, you know, to go live in California and get married when she's eighteen years old. Like, you know, they knew that this was probably a bad decision, but you know, they kind of supported her. But it's such a tough situation as a parent to know, Like, I think you know how to be supportive, but at the same time trying to steer your child in the right direction. I mean, once you're a child's eighteen, you really have to you have to support them and let them make their own decisions.

57:51 You can't make decisions for your child after they're eighteen, you know. That's why. You know, as your child ages, you have to let them make age appropriate decisions on your own and if you don't, then, yeah, you're not doing your job. Yeah, for sure. I think I think Lore and Billy John John didn't kill Aaron, right, Yeah, yeah, but the situation was, you know, a tough situation to be in when you're eighteen years old and you're in a marriage, you're in a remote location where you don't you know, have your family around and things like that, so it wasn't ideal. It's heartbreaking. They're all heartbreaking, but when they're so young, and yeah, we'll rest in peace, Aaron, Yeah, rest in peace. So what are you gonna do with the rest of your day? I'm going to bake a cake. You are someone very important birthday. Oh, who's Keith Morrison's birthday? Oh, Keith Morrison. Keith Morrison. Happy Birthday, Keith Morrison by Keith Morrison. We wouldn't be here without you, so it's at not. It's also the forty anniversary of the movie Airplane. Well, of course we celebrate that every year too. You're supposed say, surely you're joking, Sure, surely you're joking. No, I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley. Well, as always, thanks everybody for listening. We appreciate each and every one of you, and we're grateful for all of our listeners. Follow us on Instagram or Facebook at

59:24 Love Mary Kill or on Twitter at LMK pod and we love to hear from all of you, so please, you know, get in touch with us on social media, send us your feedback, your questions, your snack suggestions, yeah, case suggestions or snacks. Email us at Love Mary Kill at gmail dot com or via the feedback early Tree. And if you like what we're doing, give us a rating, a review, subscribe. It really helps us a lot. Until next time, don't kill your husband, don't kill your wife. Hey Tina, Hey Rich, how are you