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Well, it really really really... Mini mini mini mini mini mini mini more bad. Mini more bad. Mini more bad. So this is kind of an interesting mini morbid because it is very time sensitive. We decided to jump on this case today because it's time is of the essence in it, really.
Today we're going to be talking about the Rodney Reed case. So we actually originally had a different topic for this more mini morbid today, but we switched gears at the last second to cover this Rodney Reed case pretty generally, but try to give you all the facts and all the information because this is really important, guys. So it's going to be a little shorter than it normally would be, but that's because we kind of just put it together as quickly as possible to get it out there to you guys. So yeah, I feel like a real live reporter. It was like Ash on the scene with news morbid. So let's crack into this. I meant to say let's dive into this.
Where the divin? Oh my god, you did it. I did it. I've never been more proud of anybody in my life. I felt it and I had to go with it.
I am alive and I just blew through the speakers. Three. I'm trying to get to it. Wow. There you go.
Okay, so everybody, this is a real bummer of the case just so everybody knows. Sure is. Here's a warning for you. It's a bummer, but let's get it. Yeah. And just so everybody's aware this does contain a lot of discussion of rape and sexual assault. Yes, so trigger warning. Yes, thank you. I was, I couldn't think of the word trigger warning.
I'm here for you. Okay. So on April 23rd, 1996, 19 year old Stacy Stites never showed up for her shift at the grocery store where she worked in Bastrop, Texas. That's never a good start to a story. Never is. Stacey usually took her boyfriend's truck to work, but around 530am, the truck was found in the Bastrop High School parking lot.
At this point, Stacy hadn't been reported missing and the truck had not been reported stolen. So the officer who discovered it didn't really think much of it and just went about his business, but he did call it into report it just in case. Back at the grocery store, Stacy at this point was running about three hours late and the woman who she was supposed to be working with her coworker was getting really worried and decided to call her mom who was Carol Stites. So Carol receives this call and she's like, what the fuck like I heard Stacy leave for work this morning. I know she left for work this morning. That's a nightmare as a parent. I can't imagine that. I literally can't even imagine that.
Because someone from the work calling and being like, yeah, your daughter didn't show up to work today. That's a nightmare. Because you know those stories that start with your daughter didn't show up to work. It's always like she always was on time to work and like she oh and I heard her leave and exactly it's like it's never like oh yeah she does this. Like it's always like no she's literally never done this. Right. So Carol calls Jimmy Fennell Stacey's fiance who was a getting police officer.
He actually lived upstairs from Stacey's mom. So yeah Stacey's mom lived downstairs and Jimmy and Stacey lived upstairs. Okay. So I was there being reported missing. Unfortunately, Stacey's body was found around 3pm the same day on the side of a rural road in a pretty like wooded area.
I was going to make the rural juror joke, but this is kind of a very solemn case. So I did it, but I didn't do it. Okay. I just can never say the word rural. Rural juror. I have to stop and think about it. It's hard. It is. So unfortunately again Stacey had been raped, sodomized and strangled to death.
Oh my God. She was actually strangled with her own belt that she had been wearing. Wow. That to me is someone who knows you. Yep. Like that kind of brutality.
There was DNA from an unknown male found in her body. And strangely enough, her fingernails had been it seemed as though they had just been cut. Oh, that's weird. Yeah. Not at all suspicious. And they weren't like it wasn't like how like a typical girl would like cut their fingernails and file them. Like they were like jagged. Yeah.
Like it seemed as though she didn't do this herself. Yeah. Like somebody did it in a hurry perhaps. In a hurry and somebody else did it to maybe eliminate some evidence. Exactly. Without any care. Except just to get the fingernails off. Which is a weird thought to have unless you work in a criminal background.
Weird. Anyways, no weird. Jimmy Fennell became the prime suspect because obviously he was a little bit of a criminal. He was the last person to see her live and he was the fiancee. So that's just how it goes. Yeah.
He just I mean this doesn't necessarily mean anything because lie detector tests we know are like about as useful as a hot dog in a trench coat. Exactly. I was waiting for that. So but just know that Jimmy did fail to lie detector tests. Oh Jimmy.
But the DNA found on Stacy's body did not belong to him. So he was ruled out as a suspect pretty quickly. And the case goes cold for about a year. They have no idea who did this. Oh damn.
So then Rodney Reed who was a suspect in a few other sexual assault cases which he was never found guilty of. He was just a suspect in them. Yeah. To be clear. Became the main focus in the case. Rodney denied having any involvement in the murder. He denied even knowing Stacy at first.
It's a bad move. Yep. Especially because his DNA matched what was found on Stacy's body. Well come on Rodney. So we definitely knew where at least.
Sure. When the investigators kind of obviously confronted him about the DNA. Obviously he changed his story and told them that he and Stacy had been having an affair and that they had had sex about two days before her murder. And you can understand why he would initially be like I don't even know her because there was a lot more to this. There was a lot to this case. I mean I just has to be said it's 1996 in Texas in a small town where a lot of people may have been racist.
Yeah. It's just reality. It's just what was going on. This is the fiance of a police officer. He's probably that's probably why he was like I don't know her. Yeah.
Because he was like what's gonna happen here. Right. I admit that I'm having an affair because again Stacy was a Caucasian woman. Yes. And Rodney Reed is an African American male. Right. Just to in case everybody doesn't know. Yeah.
So they were like yeah your DNA was found on her and he was like yeah well we've been having an affair. We had sex two days ago. He said that they had been keeping their affairs secret because like I said or like Alina said he was a black man. Is that okay to say can I say black? And Stacy was a white woman and they were afraid to go public with their relationship because they didn't know what people were gonna do say or think because the town and especially the town that they lived in was considered pretty racist at the time.
That's so sad. He had imagined even this was like a while ago but it wasn't that long ago and it's like it was this moment 23 years ago. Yeah it bumps me out that people think this way. Yeah it's horrible. Rodney Reed apparently had multiple witnesses to confirm his alibi for that night and a test of the fact that he was in fact in a relationship with Stacy.
But pretty much none of them were called to testify. Oh weird. At the trial. What I will say is a lot of them did have criminal convictions so that could have been why they were not. Yeah. It's called testify.
But just know that they didn't. During a trial women who had accused Rodney of sexual assault were called to testify. And remember he hadn't been found guilty in any of these cases. Yeah. But they were used to they were used to testify against him. That doesn't seem right. No.
So on May 29th 1998 Reed was found guilty by an all white jury and sentenced to the death penalty. Oh a jury of his peers you say. Yeah exactly. All white jury. Is that legal? Like could that alone be something to get him exonerated? Not exonerated but I'm not sure actually because that's not a jury of your peers. I'm going to look it up real quick.
So we just took a quick break to look this up for you and according to law.com. Peer means an equal. This has been interpreted by courts to mean that the available jurors include a broad spectrum of the population particularly of race national origin and gender. So this doesn't seem right. Supposed to be a broad spectrum not a bunch of white dudes. Yeah. It's like Lizzie Gordon Oliver again. Exactly. Not a jury of your peers. Not at all.
So yeah he was found guilty but a lot of people including even members of Stacy's family think Rodney Reed is innocent and was wrongly convicted. That should tell you something right there. Yeah. If the victims family members are like I don't think that man did it. Yeah. That definitely says something.
The people that don't believe Rodney did it do believe Jimmy Fennell Stacy's fiance is the one who killed her. I'm not shocked at all. But other people including the lead investigator on the case who is Lynn Rocky Wardlow. Don't agree. Lynn says that Jimmy wouldn't have had enough time to kill his fiance drop the body, park the truck at the high school then walk home 30 miles to be home and answer a 645 call about where Stacy was.
But do we have like medical examiner stuff to back that up? Nope because that was super fucking botched. Oh again shocked. Yeah. Most of this investigation was hella botched.
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I must say that's a bit fishy. It gets fishier gets more tradition here. Yes. It's very stanky. Very stanky. Rodney Reed's cousin Chris Aldridge actually said he was with Rodney the night that Stacey that he was allegedly murdering Stacey. Like at that time he was with his cousin.
So he was like I'm pretty sure I would know if he was murdering someone. Yes. He says they hung out at a lot near his house until about 5 a.m. and then they walked to work together. The same cousin says Jimmy knew that Stacey had been having an affair with Rodney and had even pulled Rodney into his cruiser one time to tell him that he was going to pay for what he was doing.
I mean come on. Come on. The story was also confirmed by another witness. So it's not just the cousin that says this like this happened. There's way too much here in Rodney's favor. Yeah. Like this doesn't happen to a guilty person. Yeah.
At the time of the murder the medical examiner said that the semen left on Stacey's body couldn't have been from two days prior. But a few years after the trial he'd changed his mind and came out and said since he only found very few sperm that they could have actually been from an earlier time. And he also said that the injury Stacey sustained were more consistent with penetration by a rod like instrument such as a police baton. That's horrific. That just literally ruined my psyche thinking about that because if this thing about it, if this is her fiance.
The amount of just nightmare, this is off the charts, especially like that when you introduce like a police baton as the answer. It's like, I can't even put myself in that. Well, I mean, Jimmy Fennell personally, I think he did it. But same either way, if you don't think he did it, you still should think that he's a really shitty human being. So I'll continue now. Exactly.
Also, a weird thing is that, like I said, a lot of this investigation is botched. So they took pictures at the crime scene. And then when they got her back to the morgue, all these injuries that weren't photographed at the scene, the medical examiner saw all these burns and stuff like that. That hadn't been photographed at the scene. And it's like, what the fuck? What are you doing? Why are you even there if you're not doing your job?
And they literally started examining her on the side of the road, started undressing her and checking into things as she was placed on the side of the road. No, that's not okay. Which probably destroyed crucial evidence. 100%. Yeah.
Exactly. It's crude. That's exactly it. So another interesting thing that was left out of the trial is that DNA was found on a few beer cans that were close by to Stacy's body. That DNA belonged to Jimmy's best friend, neighbor, and fellow cop, David Hall.
What the fuck? Yeah. Jimmy was known to be controlling violent, and he had had a few run-ins during his time as a police officer that had to be taken care of. Let's talk about a few of those. Let's do that.
He stalked a woman named Wendy Wallace so badly that she filed a complaint against him. He assaulted a man named Mario Murillo along with two other police officers. Jimmy held a gun to Murillo's head while the other two police officers basically beat the shit out of him. Oh, that sounds like a nice guy. After Stacy's murder, Jimmy started dating this woman named Pam Duncan pretty quickly after Stacy's murder.
But when she ended things with Jimmy because she claims that he was possessive and jealous, after she broke up with him, he stalked her to the point where she also filed a complaint. And an officer came to her house to sharing her that Jimmy would be leaving her alone. Oh my God. This guy's a fucking monster. But when she went to go get a copy of the police report, it didn't exist.
Are you kidding me right now? Yeah. And he was like literally like driving to her house, like calling her on the phone, shining his fucking police flashlight in her windows. That's horrifying. He was like fucking torturing this woman.
He was like monster. And then apparently the other police people on the force were like, you can't be doing that. But they fucking got rid of the police report 100%. So they just covered it up and they were like, dude, you got to stop, but we're not going to do anything about this. Yeah.
So do you get getting away with all this fucking bullshit, like torturing people? Of course. Like who, these are just reports that came out. Who knows all the shit he did that didn't come out. I'm sure there's much more.
Yeah. So in the year 2000, it came out that Jimmy had previously talked about murdering Stacy if she ever cheated on him. And he even said that he would do it with a belt so that no fingerprints would be left behind. Guys, come on. He literally said exactly how she was murdered before he fucking murdered.
He laid out the plan that actually was put into motion. I mean, come on. And also, if you're talking, first of all, if you're talking about murdering your significant other in any like realistic scenario at all, you're fucked up. And two, if you're police officer and you're doing that, come on. So finally, Jimmy's luck runs out.
Oh. That's awful. Jimmy was convicted of the rape and kidnapping her. She was named Connie Lear and he was supposed to be bringing her to the police station. That's disgusting.
And he fucking raped her. That's disgusting. Yeah. He told her that he would kill her if she ever told anybody, but she went forward anyways because she's a bad bitch. Good for you, girlfriend.
And at Jimmy's trial, multiple women came forward with similar stories of what Jimmy had done to them. And they were just too scared to report it before. That's awful. It's horrible. Jimmy was convicted of the rape and kidnapping and sentenced to prison.
He was sentenced to 10 years. So this happened in 2007. He stayed in prison until 2017, but he's out now. That doesn't seem like enough. No, 10 years for fucking rape and kidnapping and getting.
Like, come on, dude. Like, this guy's obviously dangerous. 100%. While Jimmy was incarcerated, it seems like a lot of people were more comfortable letting out details, but they might have been not so comfortable letting out. Well, he was just Roman for re-fucking torturing people.
His former best friend did a CNN interview where he said that Jimmy hadn't been home with Stacey the night before. She was murdered, like he had originally said, because that was asked at some point, like, where were you? And he was like, oh, like, we were at home. I had a little league game and then we watched TV together and it was like a fine night. So he's lying?
Yeah, but he had actually been out drinking with his friends, including David Hall, beer can man. I was just going to say the beer can guy. And to the early morning hours. So there's a lot of gray area when it comes to this case, I guess. And it seems as though a lot of the investigation was botched, like I said.
And the evidence that was left out of the trial was really damning to Jimmy. Yeah. All the evidence that they left out points the finger at Jimmy. That does not shock me at all. No.
And remember the home that Jimmy shared with Stacey was never searched. Jimmy's truck was returned to him before the investigators could carry out a full forensic investigation. That's crazy to me. Yeah. The only fingerprints that were found in that truck were it belonged to Jimmy and belonged to Stacey.
But the story that the investigator or that the prosecutors were trying to paint was that Stacey was driving to work and then Rodney like flagged her down somehow like and overtook the car and then blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. His fingerprints weren't found in the car. So and even better Jimmy sold to fucking truck a few days after they returned it to him. We've heard that story before.
Sure have. So now that all this is coming to light, people who have long questioned Jimmy's role in this and it felt all along that Rodney Reed was innocent and framed are rushing to get to the Texas Governor Greg Abbott about ordering a new investigation that could possibly shed new light on new DNA DNA evidence to prove Rodney's innocent. If you want to look more into the case, this was like a brief overview pretty much because we wanted to get it out in time. There are tons and tons of articles. There's a Daily Mail article on this.
I can post, I'll have a link to put in the show notes, all the articles that I use. Yeah, I'll put all the sources that you can find to see all the, especially the new evidence that has come forward. And there's actually a really good documentary that you can watch as well. It's about like an hour long. It's called the state versus Reed.
So really guys, just look into this case. This is kind of obviously like a brief overview, but this is super time sensitive. Like we said before, we just wanted to get it out because Rodney is supposed to be executed on November 20th. That is not far away guys. No.
So after sitting through all the evidence and all the articles, if you feel like he's innocent, which I feel like he's innocent, I also feel like he's innocent. You can call the Texas governor at 512-463-2000 or you can sign the petition at freerodney-read.com. That's free. R-O-D-N-E-Y-R-E-D.com. And you can stop the execution of Rodney-read, which is scheduled for November 20th.
This is honestly going to be such a travesty if this happens. This is going to be the murder of an innocent man as far as I'm concerned. 100%. We can't let it happen guys. So what do what you need to do?
Call who you need to call, but make the right decision. Exactly. I mean, take a look at all the evidence that we've put forth, all the stuff that you can find online about this, the documentaries. Make your own decision, but I think you're going to come to the same decision that we did because, I mean, the evidence just, we're not saying who did it because, I mean, evidence points to somebody, but we're not saying who did it. We're saying who didn't do it. And Rodney-read didn't do it.
Now I don't think he did it. I just don't think it's possible. No, I don't either. There's too many coincidences. There's too many things that take him out of this suspect pool.
Definitely. So we'll post on the Instagram, some of the links that you can just click right on our Instagram to go and check some stuff out. And you can follow us on Instagram if you haven't already at Morbid Podcast. You can hit us up on Twitter at a Morbid podcast. You can send us a Gmail about Rodney-read-dinnocents.
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We hope you keep listening and we hope you keep it weird. I'm not going to do one for this. Not so weird that you don't think Rodney-read-dinnocents. Perfect. Bye guys.
Bye.