Crime Junkie - MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF: JoAnn Matouk Romain Part 2

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

The January 2010 death of JoAnn Matouk Romain gets even more mysterious when her family learns of two other cases connected to hers. One, which seems to not even be real, and another that is all too real and shares some eerie similarities.Click HERE to sign the Romain family's petition.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/mysterious-death-joann-matouk-romain-part-2/

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And we are back with part two of our episode on the mysterious death of Joanne Matuke Romain. This is possibly one of the most twisty stories I've ever come across in our four years of doing this show. So I'm telling you, you cannot just jump in here. Go back and listen to episode one.

But here is a quick recap, because I know there's a lot to process. In January, 2010, police say Joanne Matuke Romain went to a prayer service, then walked across the street down this snow-covered cement embankment into the freezing lake to take her own life. Mind you, she would have had to walk two football fields out into the water.

In those heels of hers to get deep enough to drown, but that doesn't seem to bother any of the officials. It also doesn't seem to bother them that despite their extensive search the very night she went missing, Joanne's body was discovered 70 days later, 35 miles away, even though there was no current that could have taken her that far.

And there wasn't a single disturbance or scuff mark on her shoes. Finding her body just confirmed police's theory of a suicide, but the family was resistant and hired their own PIs and did their own autopsy and got all the records, which just opened up a floodgate that raised a zillion questions.

The private autopsy, which by that time was the third autopsy, showed Joanne had died of a dry drowning, meaning there was no water in her lungs. She had contusions on her left arm, the same arm she usually carried her purse on, which was found torn. And then there's the timeline.

All of the digital records show that police learned about Joanne's abandoned car half an hour after a full-on search was started. It all feels staged. And Britt, you ended the last episode with a great question. And here I'm actually gonna play the end of the last episode

so everyone gets it exactly. I don't like any of this, but just for the sake of argument, what if you said this was all some terrible clerical error, digital error, human error, error across the board, whatever. The times are wrong. What's important is that they got the search crews out there

as soon as they knew what was missing. The times really even matter that much. Well, I think they do, combined with everything else we know. Police looking for Joanne and not Michelle, who again, the car was really registered to, the missing keys turning up that no one can explain. And what if I told you

that there was another missing persons report from that same day, same church parking lot, same lake that got zero attention. Come on, check him out. Listen, all of the facts in Joanne's case are baffling. But of all of the stuff that has been reported and re-reported, somehow this tidbit doesn't get the attention I think it deserves because this is the one thing that I read that made me scream from the rooftops that nothing makes sense besides some big conspiracy because

it's the one thing you can't explain away. So let me read you a direct quote from Scott Bernstein's second article in the Gross Point News from back in 2020. It says, quote, quizzically, the call officer Andy Roger placed to the Coast Guard at either 9.30 or 10.30 p.m. depending on who you ask, was actually the second call regarding a missing woman in the water that the Coast Guard logged that evening. Another identical call came in at 6 p.m. reporting a woman going into Lake St. Clair by St. Paul's an hour earlier and her family in a frantic state looking for her.

This was 80 minutes before Matuke Romain went missing, end quote. The article goes on to say that Joanne was with people at this time, it couldn't have been her. And sure, maybe it wasn't her, maybe it was someone else, yet quote, there were no other reports of a missing woman or anybody else going into the water in that vicinity made to any of the Gross Point Police or St. Clair Shores Police Departments that night. The Romains feel the first call is another sign of a cover up, end quote. So just to clarify, the Coast Guard has this call on record, but the police have no reports

to match it. Right, there is no explanation for it. And like I said, there was zero search effort for this other person as far as I can tell, like nada. So if this call was real and not somebody like missing their cue for this weird staged thing which I can't even begin to explain, why not go looking for this woman? Why does that woman get nothing and then like a couple of hours later on the same day under seemingly exact same circumstances, Joanne has an army out looking for her.

I mean, I would assume they would say it has something to do with the footprints the officer said he found leading from the car or whatever, you know, into the lake. I mean, to be honest, I can't find anyone's official response to this question of what happened with this first call. That's part of why it's such a loose thread for me, like I obsess over it. But let's say it was the footprints. Let's talk about everything wrong with those for a second. When the family got the files, there were no photographs of women's high heel footprints,

not by the car, not by the water. Now later, the officer who originally found them changed his testimony and said that they weren't by the car, they were actually by the road or by the water. My question is, what made you even go to the water in the first place? Honestly, this whole thing is really freaking hard to buy, even if there was a GD breadcrumb trail because hang on, I need to show you this, right? You guys can all see this picture too if you're listening in the Crime Genki app. So here is the church.

And to get to the water, you have to walk across the road, then walk across the median. And then across another road, like this is not what I was picturing at all. Yeah. So again, like he's saying that there was no footprints by the car to begin with, but even I'm saying even if there was, like wouldn't you lose those across the road or it just doesn't make sense. Well, and like it's a road. People could also be walking along a road, what's so weird about footprints along a

road. Yeah. But anyways, that aside, they get these pictures and there are no high heel prints by the car. In part five of the Dateline Detroit story on this case, they said that there were workboot prints, but nothing that came close to matching Joanne's tiny size five feet and definitely no heels. And the very few photos that they do have from down by the water where police says she went in, there's nothing.

I mean, like there is something. It's like this mess of activity. It doesn't look like someone to me at least sat down like scooched down, but there's zero high heel prints. I actually have a picture of that too. All of a sudden, do you hang on? Yeah, Ashley. So kind of on this note, the first snow we had, I was getting out of Justin's car on

kind of like a slope and I basically fell out. I was also wearing pointy toed flats, which was probably not the best option. Even though it looked like a horse fell out of his passenger seat, you could still tell that, like, I had very defined footprints once I did find my footing. I had pointy toed flats on. You would be able to tell from this picture if there was anyone in tiny four inch heels anywhere in the vicinity of this. Well, the one thing I will say about that is like to your point, you got your footing

again and like got back up and moved. Like again, if she truly is like going down into the water, it would be a mess of activity and I can see they're not being any prints, but then it goes back to there's still not any prints. Right. Like, like she didn't like roll across the road either. She had to have walked across the road, across the median. Right.

And they don't have any pictures of prints like that. Even like she would have had to walk at least close to the end of this embankment to scoot down. There's still no prints. Yeah. And listen, looking at this, I think you can definitely say like, oh, there's some activity happening down by the water. But like I look at this picture and I mean, at least for me, granted, I'm not a trained

officer, but my initial impression is not, oh my God, someone walked into the water and killed themselves. But even if again, if you somehow, maybe this is something trained officers know, I don't know. But if that was your first impression, Teresa Baldes reported for the Detroit Free Press that there was no hole in the ice near that area. So again, I ask you, tell me how any of this makes sense. I'm literally giving myself a headache and I can't imagine how the family feels because

I mean, can you even like put yourself in their shoes for like two seconds? If this was your mother's story, like it's clearly so wrong. There is so clearly something else going on here and it feels like no one's listening. I mean, I agree there's something else going on, but what? Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? So did anyone ever look into the people on the family's list or were law enforcement so set on the suicide theory, they didn't even do that. Well, at some point, one agency or another, at least talk to these people who just for

a reminder, we had Joanne's husband, who she was separated from for years at that point and who was rumored to have been having an affair with her best friend. There was also connections that her brother, John had to some seedy people, specifically one guy named Anthony, who he was said to have owed money to. And there was Joanne's cousin, Tim, too, who she told people she was afraid of in the weeks and months leading up to her disappearance. So Joanne's ex-husband had an alibi. He couldn't have been the one to physically do something to her.

According to Scott Bernstein's reporting, he was actually at dinner with his two daughters around the time something is thought to have happened to her, though, notably, he took a polygraph that was inconclusive and showed signs of deception, although everyone seems to think that he was lying about having an affair with her best friend, not about doing anything to Joanne, because two years after Joanne died, he was actually married to that very best friend. Now, John took a polygraph and passed. Again, I think that was more to see if he knew who could be responsible.

And though it seems he doesn't, no one has ever ruled out the idea that his debts or his relationships with unsavory people could have been the reason that this happened to Joanne. Oh, what about that Anthony guy connected to John? Well, interestingly, he has never been asked to take a polygraph. Police said that they talked to him and felt like he had nothing to contribute to Joanne's case. And actually, another person that's never been asked to take a polygraph, or at least

according to the source material I have found, is Joanne's brother Bill, which I find kind of strange because she seemed to have a decent amount of interaction with him before she went missing. Again, after years of them, like not talking at all, and I'm kind of surprised that there wasn't more interest in their conversations. Like from his perspective, he says that all of the conversations were pretty benign. And I'm not saying he had anything to do with it, but it would seem important to me to make sure he's 100% on the up and up about what they talked about.

Right. So what about Tim? He seemed like the one the family was the most interested in at the time. I assume he talked to police and took a polygraph? They kind of talked to him. But honestly, the way police went about it raised even more suspicion that they were trying to cover something up. So remember how Gross Point Farms passed the case to Gross Point Woods?

Yeah. Apparently, they then reached out to the state police not long after to ask them to step in, fearing that there might be some conflicts of interest. But they weren't just like, here's everything, please take an impartial look at it. According to a deposition statement by one of the state troopers, the police reached out and specifically asked them to quote unquote, clear Tim. And this trooper, she's like, um, we don't clear people. We investigate them like that's not how this works.

Like if that happens at the end of an investigation, yay, but we don't start with that like as the goal. Yeah. And it was so weird to her that she actually reported that to her supervisor and they ended up declining to get involved in that specific area. Do not blame her. So I don't know how many times he was actually talked to or by whom. I did read that he never did agree to take a polygraph, but it's important to note that

one of the PIs that the family hired has come out and said that he doesn't think Tim is being dishonest and he probably doesn't have anything to do with this. Tim has made a formal statement on his cousin's case stating quote, on a very tragic night, the night Joanne went missing in January, 2010, I was on duty working for a Michigan state police narcotics task force in Warren. My location that night has been verified and confirmed by testimony of Michigan state police troopers and corroborated by cell phone records. You're a lengthy five year lawsuit, not one, but two federal courts dismissed the case

against me. Any allegations connecting me to the death of Joanne are false. End quote. Sounds like the state police might have a conflict with Tim too. Yeah, seems like it to me. So what can you tell me about these lawsuits he's talking about in that statement? Well Joanne's family ended up suing the police and a number of individuals alleging a cover up by police.

They went on for years, but ultimately like Tim said in his statement, it was dismissed twice actually because they appealed the first decision. Though the judge did make an interesting comment in their ruling stating quote, there is no evidence that someone who wanted to kill Miss Romaine knew the police would cover it up. The court however acknowledges there are disputed facts in this matter that are very disturbing and remain unresolved while the circumstances surrounding Miss Romaine's disappearance and death remain a mystery and in fact are somewhat suspicious. The fact is that the plaintiff fails to create a genuine issue of material fact to hold the

police liable. End quote. So basically, yeah, it's all shady as hell, but you couldn't piece it together enough to tell us what it means, so we just have to dismiss it. Exactly. And honestly, it's the same problem I have when I keep looking at this case. The question is why? And how big is this whole thing?

That's what really is tying me up. Like, something is definitely off, right? We all agree. That judge agrees. Something is very, very wrong here. People are being dishonest. But is everyone in on it? The Grosse Pointe Farms Police, the Grosse Pointe Woods Police, the Michigan State Police,

the Coroner's Office, the Coast Guard, that is f***ing everyone. Well, two Coroner's Offices because didn't she have an autopsy in Canada too? Yes! Listen, I know there are corrupt cops. There are corrupt departments. There are corrupt agencies. But every single one of them in this area that seems so far-fetched, honestly so terrifying. Yeah.

But there is this one other piece that you need to know, another agency that was involved. Oh my goodness. Honestly, I want to tell you that it makes this whole thing make more sense, but it might just add more layers to this mystery. And it involves a meeting that Joanne might have had with the FBI before she vanished. The FBI? Are you kidding me? Nope.

So, Bernstein wrote in his coverage for this case that, quote, a highly placed source inside the Patrick V McNamara Federal Building in Detroit says Matuk Romain met with federal authorities at a restaurant in the days prior to her disappearance. That source said he fears that news of that meeting might have leaked, end quote. Now no one on record from the FBI will confirm or deny that Joanne met with or had plans to meet with the agency. So maybe there is something huge there, but again, what? And what is so big that they're going to look the other way while all these other departments

cover up a murder? Okay, but what if they aren't looking away? What if they're conducting their own investigation? What do you mean? I mean, I feel like we've seen this before. There is a bigger fish, a bigger investigation. So smaller ones get shut down or kind of moved to the side to not blow some bigger, wilder, ongoing investigation.

Yeah, but it's been 12 years at this point and nothing has happened. And again, I come back to what the heck is so big that every agency in the area is working together to cover it up. Or maybe the FBI is working with them to make this look like something else? Like, I don't know what's happening. I'm sorry. Yeah, I feel like your brain is starting to short-circuit like mine is. But I have one last thing to throw your way that involves the FBI in a way.

And I'm literally telling you about this the way I found out about it. Like I was in that point in my research where I thought, okay, this is this is it. I have to retire after this one because like I'm literally losing my marbles with this case. Like I have to be wrong because stuff this big only happens on TV. And then literally like my last source material that I was like reading before I was like, oh, I'm gonna jump into writing. I come across another case that happened just months after Joanne that might have nothing

to do with hers. But it echoes all of the same terrifying circumstances in the exact same area. So the same year Joanne went missing and was found. But in September, another gross point resident and local bank president, David Widdlock went missing. Now he was supposed to give his wife who was traveling a wake-up call on September 20th, but he never phoned in. Now this was odd, but like so many other stories we've told, she didn't panic.

She was an attorney. He is the president of a bank. She knew that they led busy lives. And honestly, part of her must have even guessed that maybe he wouldn't call because she also had the front desk at her hotel give her a wake-up call. So she went about her day. According to Naima Jabali Nash for CBS News, that same morning around 7 a.m., a maintenance worker at David's office building noticed his car parked at the office.

And when they went to go see him, there were some overturned pieces of furniture and files in disarray in his office. The office employee phoned the police, who in turn called David's wife. Now she was just about to turn off her phone and go into court when she got that call from police asking if she'd heard from him, which obviously had her rushing home to figure out what was going on. When police started looking into his disappearance, there was more than just that ransacked office to make them worried.

According to Douglas Belkin's reporting for the Wall Street Journal, a.38 caliber revolver that belonged to David was missing from his office. And strangely, there was a brand new.38 semi-automatic still in its packaging that was left at the office. And was that purchased like recently? It was, but why he bought it, no one really knows. Like this guy wasn't a gun nut by any stretch. So those who knew him, they figured something must have been going on in David's life to

make him want extra protection. Next, police check the surveillance footage from David's office building. Joe Swickard for the Detroit Free Press reported that it showed David leaving his office at around 8pm the night of the 19th. And he was holding something in his arms like a package or maybe a thick folder. He just left his car behind at the office and never showed up on camera again. Was he totally alone when he left? Yeah, which makes the question of who ransacked his office an odd one, right?

Like did he do that? Did someone come later? Like there wasn't any reporting about whether or not anyone else was seen on footage in the building that could have done that. I mean, there was one other woman that we know is in the building that Sunday was actually a co-worker of David's, but she was totally cleared of any involvement. Days were turning into weeks and rumors began to spread. Rumors that David had a gambling problem before he moved to Michigan.

According to a Business Insider article written by Katya Wachal, quote, two former co-workers have said that Woodlock used to have a 3,000 a day gambling problem in Vegas before he relocated to Michigan in the 90s. The sheriff slammed the allegations and the acting CEO of the bank also said that Woodlock did not have gambling problems, end quote. People started talking about the bank's financial troubles. Maybe David had run off with money that he was trying to raise to save the bank. And some of it was true.

The bank was in a bad spot. According to Douglas Belkin, the small community bank was quote, significantly under capitalized. David needed to raise something like $10 million to keep things afloat, but actually he was doing it. Before he went missing, things were looking up and he was meeting with a bunch of potential investors and sourcing some good leads. That same Wall Street Journal article said that he had already had like eight of the 10 million secured.

So for like a hot minute, everyone's like, well, maybe he just took the money and started over. And this was just a rumor because there was no money missing, but there was a clue in those meetings he was taking to get the money. Apparently, there was this one meeting that he took with a potential investor that had him worried. So worried that according to Joe Swickard, he had reached out to a retired FBI agent to set a meeting about some guys he'd met with.

He didn't name names yet, but it seems like maybe he'd wanted to let someone know about something that he'd come across. What that might have been was hard to tell though, because when police went to check his emails, work files, search history, all of that that goes into like a digital trail that might give them a clue, they found nothing. Not that everything was like innocent or had, you know, no clues, but like literally nothing was there. It seems that before David walked out of his office and into some vast abyss onto September

19, he or someone managed to erase most of his digital data that might help police. Each Hotz reported for the Oakland press that his iPad, work computer files, and GPS were all white. According to the sheriff that was quoted in that article, quote, the experts we talked to say it was a sign of someone erasing his life. Something's not normal there, end quote. So they think he erased all of that? Well, it seems that way because officials begin to insinuate that this was a sign David

walked away or could have been making preparations to take his own life. But if it was the latter, where was he? Well, that question would be answered less than a month after David went missing when his body was found in the St. Clair Lake. The same lake police say Joanne first went into and his death was ruled a suicide by drowning. But just like Joanne's case, David's family couldn't buy it. Not him, not the David they knew, and especially not knowing all the weird stuff that they

found out about after he went missing. Like, for example, David didn't even know how to sync his devices. He definitely didn't know how to professionally wipe all of his data. They're saying someone else had to have done that. And what was he carrying out of the office building? No one ever found that package or file folder. And what the heck was this whole meeting with the FBI about? Surely that had something to do with it.

So they paid for a second independent autopsy, and the results were a bombshell. Or should I say a bullet shell? Even though the first coroner, by the way, the same exact coroner who called Joanne's death a straight drowning right when her body was brought back to Michigan from Canada and totally dismissed the fact that there was no water in her lungs and there were contusions on her arm. Even though that same guy said that this was a drowning too and likely a suicide. The second coroner found a freaking bullet hole in the back of David's neck and the

bullet still lodged in his head, the angle of which many reports called quote unquote execution style. However, gross point police aren't so quick to jump to the idea that this was an execution. They said that they were still going to investigate it as a potential homicide, but that suicide was still possible. I'm sorry, hold up. How do you miss a bullet hole and a bullet still inside someone's head during an autopsy? This is where you can get real conspiratorial.

The most innocent explanation is laziness or like really poor job performance. I don't have any copies of the actual autopsy report, but if there was maybe water in this guy's lungs. I mean, not that this coroner would even check for that because we know he didn't before. Right. Let's say he learned a lesson from Joanne's case and checked and there was water in there. You know, maybe he's found water and it's like, meh, good enough case closed. If you don't believe that this was just, you know, again, laziness or incompetence,

well then someone didn't want anyone to know that he was shot and wanted this whole thing to just go away. Okay, but that would be such a risk again, but like nine, 10 months ago, you had another family do their own autopsy. You're going to look so shady or at the very least like a fool if you missed this. I mean, I don't disagree. Did he ever have to explain himself?

Kind of. But the explanation is very unsatisfying. I guess at first he kind of alluded to it being like bad equipment that he had at his lab. But I don't think that the higher ups appreciated that very much because then he had to do this whole press conference where he was like, no, no, no, stuff I have is great. I'm giving all the tools I need to do my job. Just the way that the bullet was in his head was like, it was blocked when I did the x-ray.

It's like a total fluke. Okay. But someone else was able to find it. Yeah. And again, like I like to say the hole was still there, right? Like in the back of his neck, like, yeah, like something you should notice, I guess, in my opinion. Yeah.

So either they're hiding something or this guy is just really bad at his job. I don't know. Anyways, they searched the water again after this new cause of death was determined and they found a gun registered to David in the water six feet from where his body was found. This is the same gun that was missing from his office. So is that significant? Like was his body lodged somewhere or could he have floated further away from it? So I couldn't find any detailed reports of exactly how he was found or if there was no

current or anything that would have moved it like in Joanne's case. There are just references to this fact throughout some of the articles that I do have where journalists point out that it's strange that it's six feet away. Some allude to this as proof he couldn't have shot himself, but they don't provide details to back that up. So I really don't have enough information to weigh this piece of evidence properly. But the police and the coroner must have believed it was still at least possible that he shot himself because ultimately the manner of death is ruled indeterminate and the case was still

kind of treated like a, well, it could be anything. So did anyone do any tests to see if the angle of the shot was even possible to be self-inflicted? You said earlier some reports were saying it was like execution style. Well, I don't think there are any like CSI reconstructions done, but the coroner who did the independent autopsy told the Detroit Free Press that suicide was possible but would have taken a freaking contortionist to pull off. And listen, that's all folks in David's case. There are no more answers today than there were back in 2010.

And you know who predicted that? Bill Matuke, who was quoted in a 2010 Detroit Free Press article about David. He said, quote, maybe it will be the same way in our case. We're just never going to know. End quote. Wait, why was Bill in this article about David? I mean, was it about both cases? They did happen same lake kind of same time?

No, it was just about David, but apparently they knew one another, at least casually, because I think David frequented the wine store maybe more, I don't know. So we have two people, same town, same lake. We know they were connected at least by family acquaintances, both rumored to have met with the FBI before going missing, both deaths ruled suicide by drowning, both autopsies wildly wrong by the same corner, and both cases still completely unresolved. Yeah, I don't know if they have anything to do with one another, but it's hard not to go looking for answers in every other case that feels even a little similar when answers

are so hard to come by. And do you want to know like one more thing about Joanne's case that is super weird or you're like on overload already? I mean, any good crime monkey isn't going to be able to turn down an offer like that. So lay it on me. Okay, so back when Michelle and her team had gotten the records from police, they actually found out about a couple of witnesses who might have seen some really critical things, but police kind of just dismissed them.

The first was a woman who, according to Karen Drew for Click on Detroit, saw a man running down the road near the church at 750. She described what he was wearing, which included this like scarf. Well, police actually found a scarf on the road that matched what the witness described. They collected it, they put it into evidence, but just like with Joanne's car, they said there was nothing to suggest foul play or warrant any like testing of the scarf. Okay, maybe not then, but what about now? Well, coulda woulda shoulda, because they don't have it now.

They gave the scarf to Goodwill in 2015. They gave a piece of evidence to Goodwill. Mm-hmm. Well, that just made all of my thrifting trips a lot weirder. What? Could they even do that? I didn't know that that was something they did, and again, in their minds, they were like, oh, well, again, we've closed the case, we called it a suicide, but you also did that

forever ago, and you're like in all this litigation with the family, like, why? What's the harm in keeping a scarf in a box that's all we're asking you to do? Yeah. Well, anyways, they're like, sorry, it's gone. Now the other witness statement is possibly even more infuriating. The family found out that a week after Joanne went missing, so again, way before her bodies even found, a man named Paul Hawke was watching the news and saw Joanne's story. And right away, he went into the police station and described a disturbing scene that he saw

the day she disappeared. According to Dateline Detroit, on that night, he was traveling north on Lakeshore Drive, and he saw a heavy-set woman in all black sitting on the brake wall of Lake St. Clair. He said she was sitting really still, and she was kind of, like, slumped over. And he said that he saw two vehicles illegally parked on the road, and one of them matched a description of Joanne's car. There were two men that he said were standing near the cars, and one of them, like, motion for him to just, like, come on, keep passing through, like, nothing to see here, go on.

So honestly, this is the first thing that fits what we know about the case at least a little bit. It explains the disturbances in the snow, why one of the witnesses who was at the same prayer service as Joanne said she came out and the parking lot was emptied and see the Lexus at all. Yeah, and to this guy's credit, like, he's coming with this a week after she goes missing. So this is long before, like, the public would know any of this information. Right.

But it still doesn't give us, like, the why of it all. It just starts to piece it together a little bit. So was this guy able to give a description of the guys he saw? Well, kind of. You see, he grew up playing football with the Matuke brothers, and he thought that it was actually John Matuke he saw. But years later, in 2012, he said that he actually ran into John at a bar and realized that he was confused.

So at that point, he worked with a sketch artist that the family had hooked him up with and apparently did, like, this composite sketch. And that composite sketch was a closer match to Tim Matuke. OK, but that's two years in between the sighting of these guys by the road and the drawing. Plus, he's seen John, so he knows that's not what he looks like or what he remembers, supposedly. Plus, by this time, the family has already had their suspicions of Tim, right?

Right. And again, Tim Matuke had an alibi. Remember, he was on duty with the state police working surveillance, though something that the family always points out and something that I do find interesting is that no one had actual eyes on him. He was on that stakeout and he was available by radio. And as far as we know, there wasn't any point where people couldn't get ahold of him. That's why they testified to him being on duty.

But even if that's a little suss, like, his cell records show that he was in Warren 2. So there is a lot putting him there and not near where Joanne went missing. Unless someone kept his cell for him. Girl, you can spiral all day on stuff like this. Trust me, I have been in this hole for weeks. But it goes back to why? Why is everyone sticking their neck out to cover up this crime if there is a crime to

cover up? But I get why people are stuck on this thing because in the back of my head, I'm like, this all can't be a coincidence. If something is just too big to believe, that's not a reason to write it off. I feel like that judge who said, like, yes, all of this is wrong, but for what? Give me any explanation. Honestly, I'll take anything because nothing makes sense anymore. So I assume because Tim had an alibi, this guy's witness statement doesn't really

mean much to anybody. Well, I don't even think the alibi is the reason they wrote it off. I mean, remember, it wasn't Tim in his mind until two years later. He came into the station a week after Joanne went missing and police wrote it off pretty much right then. And the reason they did that was because they said it didn't matter who he saw because it never happened. Or if it did, whatever he saw had nothing to do with Joanne's case because they say

in his initial statement that he said it was dusk when he saw this. But we know that Joanne left the prayer service at about 7.15, which Brett, you and I know, like Michigan in January at 7.15, it's like dark as midnight. Hitch black. Yeah. Right. Now that witness Paul Hawk died just this past December in 2021. So there won't be any more statements from him about it.

There wasn't any info online about how he died, but it likely wasn't linked to the case at all. A lot can happen in 12 years, and it's all the more reason to push for justice sooner rather than later. I don't know what's next for the Romaine family in their fight for justice. I follow their Facebook page, which we're going to have linked right here in the show notes. And I suggest you follow as well, because if this case makes you as mad as it has made

me over the last few weeks, I'm sure there's going to be a time when the family needs your help and we all want to be ready for them. You can find all of the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. So, what do you think Chuck, do you approve?