Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Georgia Leah Moses

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

A 12-year-old girl slips through the cracks…and exposes them in every system that should have protected her. Now her sister is fighting for justice, hoping to find out who murdered her sister nearly 25 years ago.If you have any information about Georgia’s murder, please call 707-565-2185 or submit a tip at www.sonomasheriff.org/silent-witness. You can also email the family directly at [e-mail] Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-georgia-leah-moses/

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is as furiating as it is heartbreaking. When a 12-year-old girl is murdered in Northern California, everyone is quick to say she just fell through the cracks. But her story is so much bigger than that. And her case exposed the cracks in every system that failed her repeatedly, both while she was alive and after her death.

Now, her sister is fighting for long overdue justice and trying to solve her murder. This is the story of Georgia Leah Moses. It's Friday, August 22nd, 1997 in Santa Rosa, California, and police officers and child protective services knock on the door of Edward Pope. They're there to conduct a welfare check because they've heard that Edward is living with his girlfriend, Ida Moses, and Ida's seven-year-old daughter, Angel.

And that's a big problem because Edward, or Eddie, as everyone calls him, is a convicted child molester. Having Angel living in his apartment is a huge violation of his parole. Uh, yeah. So when they get there, it's Angel that the police want to speak with. She is the one who can tell them if Eddie has been abusing her. So they take her outside the apartment away from Eddie and her mom to ask her some questions. But Angel has something else that she wants to tell them,

something that, to her, is more important than anything they originally came there for. She tells them it's been over a week since she's seen her older sister, 12-year-old Georgia Moses, who is really more like a mom to her than a big sister. You see, their mom, Ida, had a rare condition called bipolar schizoaffective disorder, which is a combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia symptoms. And so she's not able to properly care for the girls. By the time she had turned 12, Georgia had taken on more responsibility than honestly many adults. She'd been raising her sister and literally running the household, shopping for groceries,

doing laundry, making sure that bills were paid with Ida social security checks like you name it. And even though she'd been staying with various family friends for the last few months, Georgia still took it upon herself to make sure that her family was doing all right. So her not being by at all worried Angel. So why wasn't she living with Ida and Angel? Well, because of Eddie. Once Ida and Eddie started dating, he kind of unofficially like moved in with her and her daughters, even though he had his own place.

Georgia didn't like him and honestly tried to stay away from him. But one day in the spring of 1997, Eddie like followed her into her room. Here's Georgia's sister, Angel Turner, who spoke with our reporter Nina about this. She got into an argument with him because he was trying to do something to her. And so he basically gave her the ultimatum of if you're not going to do what I want, then you got to move out. Now, shortly before this story started where the cops are like coming by to check on Angel, Ida had gotten evicted from her apartment. So she and Angel had moved into Eddie's place, the one that he still had in Santa Rosa.

But even though Georgia didn't go with them, she still kept some of her stuff there. And she stopped by every single day to check on her sister and her mom. She would never just abandon them, but she hasn't been by in a while now. So Angel knows something is wrong. But the police talking to her are still so focused on Eddie and Angel. They keep pressing Angel about him. But as police try and question her, she keeps steering the conversation right back to Georgia. All she wants is to see her sister.

But unfortunately, it's too late. That very same afternoon in a city about 15 miles south of Santa Rosa called Petaluma, a California Department of Transportation worker named Glenn Hayes is out fixing a broken guardrail off Highway 101. According to the Petaluma Argus Courier, Glenn is putting up a work sign next to this pine tree near an on ramp when he sees something horrifying. Under the pine tree is the body of a girl. She is naked and badly decomposed. Georgia Moses has been found before authorities even knew that she was missing. So she hadn't been reported missing by anyone?

No, I mean, this whole time that she wasn't coming around, Ida kind of figured that Georgia was with the family friends that she had been living with. The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office says that since Georgia hadn't been reported missing yet, there were no reports to match to that body they found. So Georgia isn't identified right away. Even after the autopsy is conducted on Monday, August 25th, police say that they still don't know who she is or even how she died. And actually, they think that she's a grown woman rather than a child. They tell the media that the person that was found was between the ages of 18 and 40. What? Yeah, I'm not 100% sure how that happens.

I mean, I guess it can be a lot harder to tell the age of someone, again, when that decomposition is severe. But to me, that's like a huge difference from a 12 year old girl and a huge range in general. Based on a decomposition, the coroner estimates that this person had been dead for at least a week and possibly as long as a month before she was found. Now, as to how and when Georgia does officially get reported missing, there are a couple of conflicting stories. Now, we know that Angel told authorities on August 22nd that she hadn't seen her sister in ages, because that was when Child Protective Services confirmed that she was living with Eddie, who, again, wasn't allowed to live with children. That same day, CPS took her away from Ida and placed her in a children's group home. So one possibility is that Angel was the one who actually reported her sister missing, that maybe after she talked to police that day,

they confirmed with Ida that Georgia hadn't been around for a while, and that prompted filing a missing persons report. Another story comes from a statement the Sheriff's Office posted on Facebook in 2021. They say that Georgia was only reported missing on August 25th after an anonymous tipster contacted a different police department, Santa Rosa Police, and told them that she had been missing for two weeks. That department took a report and issued a flyer to other local law enforcement agencies, and that's when a connection was made between Georgia and the body found three days earlier, and people were able to connect the dots. There's also a third scenario. In the coroner's report, it says that CPS made the missing persons report about Georgia to Santa Rosa Police,

and then Santa Rosa Police spoke with Ida, Eddie, and Angel regarding possible child abuse at Eddie's apartment. But it doesn't say when those things happened. All it says is that police re-contacted Ida and Eddie on August 25th, and Eddie told them Georgia had been missing since August 13th, and that they hadn't reported her missing to police. Okay, so two of those scenarios sound like they didn't even acknowledge what Angel had said. I mean, that's what it sounds like to me too, and I don't get it. Honestly, my head is spinning already. We'll get used to it, honestly, because the conflicting details, the gaps in information, the multiple versions of what did and did not happen,

these are running themes with this case, and it's hard to lay out one set timeline. But based on the sheriff's post, Georgia is identified on August 26th. This is four days after her body was found. According to Dateline NBC reporter Andrea Cavalier, her body is so badly decomposed that she had to be identified through dental records. But even with the decomposition where it was, the coroner was able to determine that Georgia's death was a homicide. She had been strangled. According to Petaluma Argus Courier reporter Susan Lauer, Georgia had also been sexually assaulted. But unless I'm missing something, I actually can't find anything to corroborate that.

And it's not a direct quote from the police, so I'm not sure where that information is coming from. It may have been an assumption based on the fact that Georgia was nude when she was found. And when we asked Angel about this, she told us that police have never officially said that Georgia was sexually assaulted. But there's apparently nothing in the autopsy about that, although her genitals were examined for DNA evidence. We also don't know exactly when Georgia was killed. But police say that it was sometime between the night of August 13 and the early morning of August 14. So ultimately, the coroner lists her date of death as August 13, 1997, which is the last confirmed day that anyone saw her alive. Angel remembers getting the news of her sister's death.

She was in that group home that she'd been placed in. She was outside playing with her friends when one of the adults came outside and told her that they needed to speak with her. She didn't want to go inside. She was having fun. But the woman told her that it was serious. Police had found Georgia. So I'm looking around like, okay, where is she? And she said, well, she's dead. They found her body. They had to use her dental records because her body was so decomposed. And I didn't know what that meant.

Now that it was clear to police that Angel's worries were completely founded, they got to work trying to retrace her last movements. They found that August 13 was like any other summer day for Georgia. She spent most of it hanging out with a friend who we're going to call Jessica. And they were hanging out at Jessica's family's house in Santa Rosa. According to the press Democrat, they did normal preteen stuff. You know, they talked on the phone, they listened to music, they drank lots of soda. And at some point, Georgia left Jessica's house and went to Eddie's apartment to check on Angel, just like usual. After that, the two of them, being Angel and Georgia, went out for a bit to a store, which was right around the corner.

And then they headed back to Eddie's. We were coming back to the house. It was already nighttime. There was a guy that approached us as we were walking. My sister stopped, talked to him. It was somebody we knew. I knew that much because it was familiar. Now this guy was a big guy, muscular and tall, and he was wearing a white shirt. He called Angel to run ahead, which she did. But you know, typical little sister all about what her big sister was doing.

She looked over to see what was going on. Angel says Georgia handed the man her pager for a minute. It looked like he was trying to bind her pager number, like looking through the info stored on it. And after that, Georgia rejoined Angel and they went back to the apartment. Georgia did Angel's hair. She got her settled in for the night. And Angel even begged her sister to stay. She said, I can't stay here, but I'll be back. And I was like, well, take me with you. She's like, I can't.

And then she kissed me the night and she left. Georgia went back to Jessica's house and the police learned that someone paged her just before 10 p.m. She used Jessica's phone to return that call and arranged to meet a man at a nearby gas station at the intersection of Sebastopol Road and Dutton Avenue. Now, some of what we learned next actually wasn't known back in 1997. It's stuff that Angel has pieced together after years of her own investigations. But Georgia told Jessica that she was going to a party in Petaluma and invited her along. But Jessica's mom had told her she wasn't allowed to go and Jessica didn't want to get in trouble.

So she decided to stay behind. Jessica said that Georgia seemed apprehensive about going by herself. But Georgia also told her that there would be people there that she knew. So she wasn't going to see like a bunch of strangers. Jessica walked to the gas station with Georgia and she says that she tried to talk Georgia actually out of going. But Georgia told her that she had to because she wanted to take care of her family. Okay, what does that mean? Well, Angel believes that Georgia was actually being sex trafficked by a group of older friends.

Like this wasn't just like a hang out, you know, party 12 year olds or even teenagers. She thinks that, again, she was being trafficked. Angel says that Georgia had began to change once she started hanging out with this group right around her 12th birthday in January of 1997. She said she started acting and even dressing different. She was smoking cigarettes. She was smoking weed. And she even lost interest in dancing, which was like her favorite thing in the world to do before that. My sister's mood had like shifted completely from being this, you know, happy person to being now sad and depressed.

She had a lot of red flags that people just overlooked. Some of these so-called friends would apparently make regular trips to San Francisco to perform sex work, which they referred to as parties and they would bring Georgia with them. And listen, we call it sex work for young women who were of age or are of age, but we know that a child can't be a sex worker like they cannot consent. Right. So maybe the party Georgia was talking about was basically one of these sex parties. So that's definitely the implication.

So what we know is that night Georgia got into a white four-door sedan. Jessica described the driver to police as a black man with a medium complexion who was maybe 25 to 30 years old, anywhere from 6'2 to 6'4 and about 200 pounds. She said he had very short, closely cropped black hair and a slight mustache. And based on this description of the driver, police work up a facial composite sketch. We've actually have a copy of that on our blog post for this episode, but here I'm going to have you take a look. I mean, yeah, based on what you said, Jessica said, it's pretty on point.

His eyes are kind of closely set together, maybe a little bit of a receding hairline. And I can't tell if it's the way his hair is drawn and the receding hairline, but his head almost looks a bit bulbous is the only word I can kind of think of. And yeah, a slight wispy little mustache. So was the driver the same guy that she and Angel ran into earlier that night? Angel really isn't sure. All she remembers is that there was this like familiar energy about the guy that she saw with her sister. Like she said she was even kind of like excited to see him, but she can't remember who he was.

So it's impossible to say if it's the same person. But she also doesn't think that the timing of their interaction and that pager exchange and the meetup that night is just a coincidence. Now, I do know that Jessica expected to see Georgia later that night because she was supposed to come back. And at some point she might have called Jessica to say that she wouldn't be returning after all. I mean, honestly, it's not even clear if Georgia ever even made it to the party. We don't know where she went, who she was with, what she did. All we know is she got into that car and then her body was found nine days later, nude under a tree by the highway.

So when trying to find out what could have happened to Georgia, learning more about her background became necessary. Angel says that over the years, the girls were taken away from Ida on at least three different occasions that she can remember. Ida had even reached out to CPS herself a couple of times like, listen, I'm not able to care for these children. She wanted her daughters to have a chance at a better life. And at the time she just wasn't in a position to give that to them. But CPS would always end up returning Georgia and Angel to their mother. And if there ever was a need and a time for CPS to intervene, it was 1997. Not only was Ida dating Eddie Pope, but like Georgia, Ida was also hanging out with a new crowd.

She was spending more and more time with this new group of people, some local families who all knew each other. There's actually some overlap in the group. Some of Georgia's new older friends were also connected to the people that Ida socialized with. And all of these people had a bad effect on both mother and daughter. Throughout 1997, Ida's mental health got progressively worse. In fact, she deteriorated so rapidly that Angel is convinced that her mother was being drugged. And I guess it would be one thing if like no one outside of the family knew that something was wrong. But Angel says that the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office learned about Eddie's involvement with the family as early as April of that year.

So she doesn't know why they didn't take action then. All she knows is that they didn't knock on Eddie's door until August 22nd. So instead of getting help, basically all that happened was Georgia got kicked out and was staying with various people. She stayed a lot with this one woman, one of the people that Ida had been spending time with. The woman was Ida's home health care aide and Angel says that the house she lived in was basically a crack house where adults did drugs and the kids were pretty much on their own. And even when she bounced around, every house that Georgia stayed at had one thing in common, a lack of parental supervision. So by late spring of 1997, Georgia's grades had dropped a lot because she was barely going to school. Angel says that by the end of that school year, administrators told Georgia that she would have to repeat the sixth grade.

But Georgia had other concerns on her mind. She told them that she wasn't coming back because she had to take care of her family. Did the school do some sort of intervention of any kind? Well, you would think that when a 12 year old just like stops going to school, maybe that would prompt some sort of action on the school's part? Yeah. Mandated reporters are required to, you know, report suspected neglect and abuse to law enforcement or social services. But once again, Angel says that there was no indication that anything was ever done. No intervention, no reports to the agency of any kind and no record that the school officials ever even discussed any of this with Georgia's mother.

What the actual f***? Trent Taylor, who was director principal at the Mountain Shadow Middle School, told the press Democrat reporter Peter Blumberg that Georgia abruptly stopped coming to school in early May of 1997. And he also said, quote, we had heard she was living with a cousin, but we couldn't track these things. Her grades were unfortunately reflective of a student who had a lot of needs, end quote. Okay, unfortunately, she may have had a lot of needs and no one in the school system was like, hey, we should help this girl. Yeah, it seems like it seems like he's like using that as an excuse of like, yeah, she just had a lot of needs. And so we couldn't help her. Like, you're a school.

Yeah, like all the more reason. Yes. Okay, you're going to have to go on because I will just rage spiral on this. Now, even with all this going on by July of 1997, so just a month before Georgia's murder, things actually were looking up for the Moses family. Ida was making plans to move back to her hometown of Buffalo, New York with the girls. Georgia and Angel were actually both born there and their two older brothers still lived there. They actually hadn't moved out west with Ida and the girls. So everyone was looking forward to reuniting, but Georgia was especially excited.

She couldn't wait to spend more time with her brothers to see her nieces and nephews. This would actually be a chance for a fresh start for all of them and she was ready to go. But then Ida's purse got stolen. And I mean, you know how it is when your whole life is in your purse. Everything Ida had was in there, her ID, her social security card, money, everything. And Angel doesn't think that this was a coincidence or just a simple theft. She thinks it was a calculated move to keep her family, mainly Georgia, from leaving the area. Even in her state of, you know, deterioration, like she was not careless about her purse.

If she didn't have anything else, she had her purse. So for us to be so close to leaving and then out of all the time for my mom's purse to get stolen, you know, somebody wanted us to stay. If the stolen purse was part of a plan to stop them from leaving, it worked. The move to New York was put on hold and then Georgia went missing. Now in the weeks that follow the discovery of Georgia's body, the case goes a little differently than you'd expect. With no leads, you'd kind of expect the police to lean on the media, get people talking. But the majority of the local news coverage is not what you'd expect.

What do you mean? Well, from the beginning, there was a narrative built around Georgia that she was a troubled kid with a bleak future. And honestly, she was pretty much blamed for her own death. Like one article says that she was, quote, playing with fire. And in another article, Ida's boyfriend Eddie is quoted describing Georgia as a troublemaker. So just to be clear, they're letting this guy, who I assume they already know was a convicted child molester, create the narrative and story about who Georgia was. Yeah, and by the way, this isn't like something that just looks bad today just because we know better.

Even while this was unfolding, some community members are vocally critical about how the media is portraying Georgia and about how little coverage her case is getting compared to others. And Petaluma of all communities knows exactly what the coverage for Georgia should look like, because they've seen it firsthand. Just a few years before in 93, a 12-year-old girl in the same area named Polly Class was abducted from her bedroom during a slumber party and murdered. And the media coverage for her case is like night and day compared to Georgia's. Right, but we see that all the time, the way some victims get attention and others don't.

Yeah, again, it's truly like the most stark comparison. You can't even say that Polly Class came after and they learned better. This is truly the best example of how someone's class plays into how people treat their disappearance or murder or whatever. Now, Georgia's family can't afford a funeral, so members of the local community come together to hold a memorial service. According to San Francisco Chronicle reporter George Snyder, mourners packed the Santa Rosa Community Baptist Church in October of 1997 to say goodbye to Georgia. Her friends and classmates cry as they share stories and talk about how much they loved her. Now, what most people don't realize is that the casket in the church is empty. Investigators haven't released Georgia's body yet because they're still doing forensic testing.

Even though she had been identified because of that level of decomposition, it's taking them longer to do a more detailed analysis of her body parts to confirm things like height and age and race, which I mean, again, we know who she is. I don't fully understand this part, but they're keeping it for whatever reason. So it's not until June of 1998 that Georgia is actually buried. Her family isn't at the second funeral because by the time it takes place, Angel and Ida had moved to the state of Georgia and they're living with Angel's aunt. Fast forward to November of 1998, police think that they have a decent lead when a truck driver named Wayne Adam Ford, who has ties to Petaluma, confesses to murdering four women. According to the Petaluma Argus Courier, Sonoma County officials had also linked Wayne to the brutal assault of a sex worker in Santa Rosa earlier that year. But after police interview him, they're convinced that he didn't have anything to do with Georgia's murder.

On the two-year anniversary of the day that Georgia was last seen, the press Democrat interviews Sheriff's Detective Russ Davidson, who's leading the investigation. Detective Davidson says, quote, this case is still active and very much open. There's $15,000 in rewards offered. We'd still very much like to talk to the man in the white car, end quote. But in the coming months, there are no updates about additional tips that come in and the case stalls again. A couple of years later, another potential suspect emerges, a former Petaluma substitute teacher named Carr. According to the Los Angeles Times, they were obsessed with the kidnapping and murder of Polly class, and their conversations about Polly were suspicious enough that police actually searched their home in 2001 in connection with Georgia's murder. During the search, they find sexually explicit photos of children on the household computer, which results in Carr getting charged for, quote, child pornography possession.

But before police can make an arrest, they flee to Thailand. But a few years later in 2006, this person pops back up in connection with a whole nother high-profile child murder case. They were the one who was actually arrested for confessing to kill Jean Benet Ramsey. But by then, they actually had been cleared in Georgia's case, and their confession about Jean Benet turns out to be false. Eventually, even those charges that they were facing regarding the child sex abuse material were dismissed because according to the San Francisco Chronicle, prosecutors can't show when the computer was actually used. And in case that wasn't complicated enough for you, the computer was actually lost when the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office moved its headquarters. Apparently it was the only item among 175,000 pieces of evidence that went missing. Okay, I have a lot of questions, but obviously that was kind of a rabbit hole in this case.

So what about someone like Eddie Pope? To me, he seems like the obvious choice for a potential suspect based on his history. Totally, but angels says that police told her that Eddie had an alibi and he was cleared. So again, people pop up, they get cleared, years pass, and the case is ice cold. In the time since her sister's murder, Angel, grows up, she joined the military, she has a family and settles down in Texas. She reaches out to police a couple of times to see if they're making any progress on her sister's case, but those conversations really don't go anywhere. Angel says that she's basically told by the police that they don't have any new information, that when they get new information, they'll let her know, and that honestly her calling them isn't going to create new information. That's what I get, but it's so frustrating to imagine hearing.

Yeah, like the least you can do is take my call twice a year. Yeah, like I'm doing everything I can and all I can do is call, let me have this one thing. And also again, I call BS because it's the cases where like the families don't give up where you're making the calls over and over that once you have resources and you're deciding what cases get attention. I promise you, those are the ones that do. Right, the squeaky wheel cases. And I also think about how many times that we've seen cases where there has been progress in the case, there have been updates and no one is told and no one is notified. Oh, yeah, and like the family finds out on the news. Exactly.

Like, I'm sorry guys, keep making the calls. That's my unofficial endorsement. 100%. Well, listen, even with this statement, even though like, hey, don't call us, we'll call you. Honestly, at this point, Angel was trusting that the police are hard at work. She figures that if the case is unsolved, it's because it can't be solved, not because nothing is being done to solve it. Now, she also Googles the case from time to time, trying to find out if there are any new developments. But she honestly can't stand to read the news stories about her sister because most of the articles she sees and again, they're few and far between, they all have the same victim blaming tone.

Although Angel is happy to learn that a woman named Leah Rowley founded a home for neglected and abused children in George's memory. Even though it lost funding and had to be shut down, Angel was touched to know that people are thinking of her sister because she herself never stops thinking about her. And by 2019, her thoughts are really going into overdrive. Every missing person or child murder case that she hears about is a major trigger. She starts to poke around more online. She enjoys a Facebook group that had been created for Georgia. And that's when she realizes that people back in Petaluma and Northern California had made efforts over the years to bring attention to the case, but they just weren't having much luck. So Angel does what no family member should have to do, but what we see all too often is necessary.

She starts her own investigation, finding out what she can about the people that she, Georgia, and her family were close with back around the time of the murder. And she also starts pushing police to be more active. And we're not exactly sure when police stopped considering Georgia's case active, but by the time Angel starts reaching out, there's no detective assigned to the case. That actually changes though in the fall of 2020. At the time, Angel thinks that this means she's going to start getting some answers, but she's still met with a lot of the same resistance she dealt with over the years. They did some footwork, but it was like whatever was easy for them to do. It's right around this time, and totally out of the blue, that Angel gets an email from a woman named Maria Martin. Maria grew up in Sonoma County and Georgia's case had been on her mind for years.

She didn't know Georgia, but they actually went to the same school. And her dad was actually a deputy with the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office at the time of Georgia's murder, although he retired soon after. After she and Angel connect, Maria starts helping Angel with her investigation, and the two of them decide to launch a podcast. They called her Georgia Lee, which you guys should definitely check out for a super deep dive on the case. The podcast is their chance to tell Georgia's real story, the way Angel felt like it should have always been told. And the more they find out, the more they start thinking that Georgia's case was never a top priority for law enforcement. Maria says police made a mistake in the very beginning that set the stage for everything that followed. Here is the first and most significant injustice that just paves the way for the rest of it.

The thing that sort of shaped this entire investigation, they didn't even get her f***ing name right. That was the defining moment that emphasized how little care was taken throughout the entire investigation. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, for years, Georgia Leah Moses was called Georgia Lee Moses. And this wasn't just in the media, but police records, her death certificate, even her gravestone. Even Angel didn't know that Georgia's middle name was Leah until recently. How does this even happen? I mean, there's not a simple answer, and I mean, we can get into some more detail later, but for now, I'll tell you how it at least started.

Police apparently got the information from a relative who wasn't telling the truth. Why? I have no idea. But no one ever bothered to ask Ida, who despite her mental health issues, knows exactly what her daughter's name is. And no one ever bothered to double check Georgia's birth certificate or her school records, both of which did say Leah. So that was the first mistake, but Angel and Maria say it was far from the last. They say police failed to follow up on certain leads and they didn't communicate with the family or share accurate information with the community. Now, a sergeant with the sheriff's office told Dateline NBC that police have followed up on each and every lead and they want to solve the murder for Georgia and her family. And on their Facebook post about Georgia, the sheriff's office says that they never gave up on her, even though no progress was made in the case back in 1997.

They say that they do their best to find justice for every violent crime victim and their families. I can give you an example of what Angel and Maria are talking about. One of Georgia's friends thought that the composite sketch looked just like her mom's ex-boyfriend, a firefighter from San Francisco. And she's not just naming a guy like randomly out of thin air. The firefighter knew Georgia. They had given her rides home from her friend's house. He had access to a white four-door car. It was his girlfriend's Honda. And Angel says that this guy had a reputation for acting inappropriately with young girls. So the friend went to speak with police.

But maybe because she was young or had a juvenile record, Angel and Maria say that she wasn't taken seriously. In fact, the officer she spoke with apparently asked her if she was sharing her suspicions because she was mad about the way the firefighter treated her mother. So they thought she was just like spite reporting this guy. Yeah, basically. The friend's mother who had actually dated the guy also spoke with police about him. And a family friend of theirs made an anonymous tip about him because she remembered seeing him with Georgia at times. So we've got three different statements on one person. But Angel says that police didn't take reports on any of those statements. When she asked the detective about the guy, Angel found out that he wasn't even on their radar.

The friend had to give another statement to police, like some 20-plus years after she gave the first one. I mean, yeah, I was going to ask, did they ever even find out who the guy in the white car was? Well, I mean, the short answer is, I don't know. But again, there are multiple stories. Because according to a press Democrat article, police believe that the man driving the car was someone Georgia had met up with occasionally in the past. And he might have been from San Francisco. Angel was told by police that they did interview a person of interest who they thought was the guy in the sketch, but he apparently wasn't under suspicion anymore. And in that news release post from the sheriff's office last year,

police say that they've never been able to identify the man and he's still a person of interest. But there are some other strong possibilities. Angel and Maria both think that Georgia's older group of friends is involved in some way. Considering the predatory nature of the relationships and the fact that there was in all likelihood sex trafficking going on. Just knowing how predators work, like they oversee a lot of what you're doing. So even if my sister wants somewhere, people are keeping tabs on her. Members of that group mentioned separately that they were supposed to hang out with Georgia that night, but she never showed up. Plus, some of these friends were super vocal after Georgia's death, like talking about how much they missed her and stuff.

But they haven't been very helpful more recently when Angel reached out to them with questions about her sister's murder and everything that led up to it. Now that we're trying to get the answers and we're getting closer, the people that knew what was going on the last days of her life, they're quiet. They're hiding. Maria also thinks there is another possibility. There was a man who lived near Georgia's friend, Jessica's family. This guy was heavy on police's radar in the case with good reason. In the 1960s, he was arrested for raping a teenager. In the 1970s, he was convicted of murder after he admitted to sexually assaulting and strangling a woman.

And according to California's sex offender records, he is currently in prison for quote, continuous sexual abuse of a child. End quote. Now this man is white, so he's not the man that Georgia got in the car with that night. But he lived right near Jessica and he was really close with Jessica's family, which would have given him access to Georgia. And he apparently like freaked out when police questioned him about Georgia, although I'm not sure when exactly that took place. Has he been mentioned in any news coverage about Georgia's case? No, not that I could find. It seemed like Angel and Maria found out about police looking into him like years after the fact.

And listen, the two of them have been working really hard to find out the truth. And by the way, like I don't know if I said this earlier, it actually wasn't until after their work began that they found out about Georgia's middle name, not being Lee. They ended up keeping the name Lee on the website that they made on the social media pages because like they had already started to build up so much momentum. Like that's honestly what people have gotten to know Georgia as is Georgia Lee. So if you like start Googling, you might see a discrepancy, but that's why. Truthfully, the discovery was devastating to Angel. You see, Angel's middle name is Lee, and she figured that she and her sister had the same middle name. The worst part about all of that is Maria says that police never took ownership of that mistake.

Wayne shifted right back onto their family. Oh, well, they could have reached out at any point in the last 24 years. I'm sorry, your office has a birth certificate and a death certificate that don't match. That is on you. That is not at all on the family. But there were reasons that the family didn't reach out. Ida was struggling with her mental health and there was a long period of time when Angel and her older brothers who did know Georgia's middle name was Leah were estranged. So there was a lack of communication within the family and they weren't comparing notes.

So it was only after Angel and one of her older brothers reconnected that she learned the truth. Her brother saw people posting on social media about Georgia with the name Lee, but he just figured that it was like those people who were making the mistake. Right. And like, he's not going to call the sheriff's office and be like, hey, someone on the internet is using the wrong name for my sister or baby. Exactly. Yeah, he didn't think police had the information wrong or that Georgia's gravestone even had the information wrong. And some people have told Angel to basically like get over it. Like, so what?

It's just a middle name. Focus on finding the killer. But you're talking about the key part of someone's identity. And again, to go back to this whole thing, like if you can't even get the name right, like, I'm pretty sure some others have done wrong. What else is going wrong? Yeah. And another frustrating part about that is again, this as Angel has done so much work to publicize her sister's case to find out that you did all of that and they're not technically publishing like the right name is so frustrating. Because it's one of those things that you have to try and go back and undo and now explain to people.

And that's just it's exhausting when again, someone just didn't do the work in the first place. I would say it's not the same, but we altered the spelling of our son's name when we adopted him. But the process of even just like going to the school, going to his doctors, going to the dentist and making sure that like the slight spelling differentiation is official now was a nightmare. I cannot imagine doing this decades down the line. And trying to tell the world, right? Like how many thousands or millions of people have heard Georgia's name? Well, and like not just to like make sure records are straight, but to help solve your sister's murder. The stakes are high.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Now, again, what really frustrates me, you want to talk about we had said earlier that they don't feel like the sheriff's office is taking a lack of ownership about that mistake. Well, the sheriff's Facebook post about Georgia last year still referred to her as Georgia Lee Moses. And to this day, it has not been updated or corrected, which to me, easiest first step in trying to make this right. Yeah. Yeah, it's literally the least they could do. You can edit the post. You don't have to delete the post like or delete the post and repost it. Yeah, they've got those little three dots.

You can drop down, edit. No one will ever know or remember. Yeah. And not changing it, not changing something that we are all so 100% in agreement on like that this is wrong. It honestly feels like a slap in the face. Like if you can't even admit that that's wrong and give her the dignity of the correct name, how are you looking at this investigation as a whole? Well, I can say if the Facebook post is wrong, that means that their records haven't been changed. Like the missing persons report from decades ago hasn't been altered with a new name. Her murder case file hasn't been altered with the correct name.

Like, right. And honestly, I don't know the process for that. Maybe you can't go back because again, maybe once it's on paper, it has to stay that way and they updated a report. I don't know what's happening behind the scenes. There has to be a way to update the report. Again, don't even talk about what happened behind the scenes. Like my whole thing though is like if you're truly trying to get her name out there now. Use the right one. Use the right one.

At least in what's public facing. Like, I don't know. But there's also another big thing that like I can't wrap my head around either. So the sheriff's office also says there's a reward of $2,500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for George's murder. But that's not the $15,000 that's been mentioned over the years in multiple news articles. What? What happened to all that money? Not a clue. Angel says that she asked the sheriff's office about the reward when she started contacting them a lot in 2020.

Because, I mean, she figured this is a pretty good incentive for people to share information and find the killer. Right. Now she says that someone in the department confirmed that $15,000 amount to her. But after the new detective was assigned, Angel mentioned it to him and he didn't know what she was talking about. People were even asking about it in the comment section on the sheriff's Facebook post. And the department's response was that they don't raise money or manage the reward funds. And that rewards are offered and paid by other people or other groups. They say that the $2,500 is offered by the Sonoma County Alliance Community Engagement and Safety Rewards Fund.

But I don't know what other people or groups they're talking about. And so, did that money never exist? Did someone, like, pull out of an agreement? Like, I have so many questions. Yeah. And I've seen instances before where, like, there are time limits on rewards where, like, people will basically, like, say, hey, if someone goes forward, I'll put this money up for so long, but they don't want to be, like, contingent for that forever and ever. I don't know.

But it's weird that no one can say what happened, right? And you, again, like, you would expect to see some sort of record of that, like, expiration date or something somewhere. Yeah. Now, Angel is offering a reward of her own for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of her sister's murderer or murderers. And the total reward, which now includes that $2,500 the Sheriff's Office mentioned, is now $25,000. Now, we're going to put that in the show notes. But if you have information about Georgia's murder, please call the Sheriff's Office at 707-565-2185. Or you can even submit a tip or send an email.

We're going to have both of those links and email addresses in our show notes. Angel just wants her sister to have the justice she deserves. But that doesn't only mean her murder conviction. Justice for Georgia Leah Moses is also honoring and restoring her legacy and sharing the true story of who she was. She was just a free-spirited kid that just had way more burdens than she needed to have. She literally was, like, years ahead of her time as far as how much she loved and cared for people. She was just such a positive person and, you know, it's unfortunate that someone who deserves so much care was given the bare minimum. So I want to close out this episode with a story about Georgia, not her death, but her life.

A friend of Georgia's invited her to a birthday party, but Georgia couldn't afford a birthday gift, so she didn't want to go. The friend told her, you can just come anyway, you know, like, don't worry about it. But she couldn't bear the thought of going to her friend's birthday celebration empty-handed. So Georgia brought her own most prized possession, a book of nursery rhymes, to her friend's party, and gave that to her as a present. She sacrificed the item that she cherished most in the world to show her friend that she loved her. I know sharing a story like this isn't going to make up for the years of judgment and victim-shaming and apathy that Angel and others who loved Georgia have endured. But I hope that it stays with you as much as it stayed with me. Again, please check our show notes for all of the contact information if you have information about Georgia's case.

We also have a hotline number in there if you or someone you know is a child who's being sexually abused. You can visit crimejunkiepodcast.com to check out photos, documents, and source material for this week's episode. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio check production. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?