Crime Junkie - WANTED: Answers from a Deputy

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

When Terrance Williams goes missing, most law enforcement officers consider him a low-priority; He wanted, or needed, to disappear. But when his last known location is with Deputy Steven Calkins, suspicions are raised as to whether or not this is a random disappearance, or a plotted out crime. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/wanted-answers-from-a-deputy/   

Hi crime junkies I'm Ashley flowers and I'm Brett today I have a super exciting story for you guys I have been following this for a long time to one of the ones that like keeps me up at night. But if after the episode you want a little bit more we're actually releasing some extra bonus content on Patreon this Monday was my last Monday doing the radio show I do in Indianapolis and so I decided to take. All of the stories that I've been doing on that radio show and make them extra content so on Patreon in addition to the full episodes and many episodes that everyone is already getting I am now going to start re-releasing episodes crime junkie style I'm super excited because I get to weigh in on them. Yeah and there's stories that like a lot of people haven't heard I know our listeners in Indianapolis have been listening to my radio show for the last year but this time everyone all over the world can listen now and in our format super excited again you can go to patreon.com slash crime junkie for that extra episode today we're actually going to put a clip of the bonus episode at the end of this one so stay tuned. For today's story I am taking you to Naples for the first time in a while. For today's story I am taking you to Naples Florida in January of 2004 a 27 year old man named Terrence Williams had recently moved to Florida following his mother there. He went there to find work because he actually had four kids with four different women back in Tennessee and making child support was becoming increasingly difficult for him so he goes down to Florida and gets a job in construction and in addition to his job in construction. Terrence actually ends up getting a job at Pizza Hut as well just to put some extra cash in his pocket now Terrence had recently lost his driver's license back in Tennessee because of a DUI so he relied on his mother to take him to and from work each day.

Sometimes he would get rides from his roommates or pick up rides but it was mostly his mom transporting him everywhere he would be getting his license back soon though if all went well and he didn't have any violations he would be getting it back in June. So in December of 2003 just before this story starts Terrence actually decided to buy an old Cadillac and from what I can tell he wasn't using it a ton he was still getting rides from his mom all through January and the car would mostly just sit there waiting for him waiting for the time when he could actually drive it legally and register it. So our story really begins on Sunday January 11th 2004 Terrence had been getting along with his coworkers at Pizza Hut pretty well and he was getting off of work when one of them invites Terrence to a party that they were having. Terrence mom picks him up from work that day and takes him back to his house he actually wanted to go home first because he wanted to change out of his uniform and into something normal before going to the party. But this left him without a ride to the party he tries to talk his roommate and friend Jason into coming to the party with him so that he could ride with him but Jason just isn't feeling it and so he wants to go just chill at home that night. So Terrence does something really dumb instead of just getting a cab he decides that he's going to take out his new Cadillac. Not long after he leaves Jason actually gets a call from Terrence and he's calling from a pay phone and he's like dude there are cops everywhere I just need to pretend like I'm talking to you for a little bit and kind of wait this out and hope that they leave so I don't give them any reason to stop me. So the two of them kind of chat on the phone for a bit and finally Terrence is like OK it's all clear I'm going to talk to you later.

Jason doesn't realize this at the time but this is the last time he would talk to Terrence and he has no reason to think that Terrence would try and call him later so when he goes to bed that night he leaves his cell phone in the living room. Now when Jason wakes up the next morning Terrence isn't home and this isn't super weird right away though because Terrence would go away for days at a time sometimes and he would stay with other people stay with friends stay with his mom. It was just part of their normal routine not to see one another sometimes but what is a little off is that Jason had some missed calls from an unknown number on his cell phone around four a.m. When he calls this number back it's actually one of Terrence's coworkers from Pizza Hut and she didn't know why Terrence would have been calling him or using her phone and she said that he actually left the party sometime between five and six in the morning on the 12th. Jason is thinking that maybe he was calling for a ride but clearly Terrence ended up leaving on his own so he doesn't think too hard on it but when Terrence still isn't back on Tuesday he reaches out to Terrence's mom by email just to see if maybe she had seen or spoken to him because something is just making him feel off about this whole situation. When he hears back from her she hadn't talked to him at all and to her this is a sign that something is really wrong they normally talk every single day so for her to have gone a day or two with no contact and then to be contacted by his roommate to say that he hasn't come home she knows that something isn't right. I feel like this is a recurring theme in the last few episodes we've done you mean where like someone just kind of isn't in touch with anyone and at first they think it's normal but the more they ask around it's not at all. Yeah yes so for the next day Jason and Terrence's mom start calling around friends, hospitals, jails, literally anywhere Terrence might be and they call into his work and find out that he's missed work all three days Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Once his mom learns this she goes to a branch of the Collier County Sheriff's Office to report him missing and here's something we also have heard before they give her a response that is all too familiar and they're basically like listen he's a grown adult he doesn't have to check in with you he doesn't have to talk to you every day. So if you haven't seen him in a month then come back and let's talk a month a month that's so long yeah but in his mom is not having this so she doesn't blow up or she doesn't make a scene what she does is she puts an army on it she calls all of her family back in Tennessee and starts having them call around to all of the same hospitals all of the same jails all of the same Sheriff's offices and dispatchers and this is proof of what we said in our if I go missing episode the squeaky wheel gets the grease because the Sheriff's office said that because of the sheer volume of calls that they were getting they couldn't ignore it exactly they said we decided to take this seriously and I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make they think that you know we have our whole family together so we're gonna send one person to the police office and surely they know that there's a whole family behind them worried but they don't if it's just one person it's not a big deal if you make a stink they will take notice I love that so the Sheriff's office ends up sending somebody out to Terrence's mother's house to take a statement now while this is going on she still has family calling around asking questions and one of Terrence's aunts finds a massive lead she finds out that Terrence's car had been towed from a cemetery on the 12th the day that he was last seen I'm sorry what yes apparently it was obstructing traffic and seem to have been abandoned so a deputy ordered a tow when they go check out the car sure enough it's his his jacket was inside a carton of his brand of cigarettes were inside it's just like he vanished into thin air they find out that the car was towed in fact on the 12th around noon and this was the same day again that he was last seen leaving that party around five or six in the morning now even though his car was towed from the looks of it it seems like the car had been completely abandoned because there was no incident report or arrest record to go along with the tow which you would have expected to see if there was a person in the car and especially if that person was driving an unregistered car without a driver's license so the family decided to go to the cemetery and actually talk to the people working there to see if they remember seeing anything and they do according to their version Terrence was with the car they said that a deputy had his emergency lights on but no siren and had pulled over the Cadillac into the parking lot

from what it looked like where they were kind of far away it seemed like the deputy had asked this guy for some kind of ID and then ended up putting this guy in the back of his car now the deputy then actually came up to the people working and asked if he could leave the car here for a bit and then he would come back or have it towed and they said yeah that's fine and he was back somewhere within 15 minutes to one hour where he gets the car moves it from a parking spot to the side of the road where it obstructed traffic and then he tosses the keys outside of the car and drives away so now the family has a witness saying that Terrence was in the back of this deputy's car so they want to talk to that deputy to find out what interaction he had with Terrence and where he took him Deputy Steve Colkins is the one who took this report who called for the tow and so it's actually his day off like once this all comes to a head so a dispatcher ends up calling him and the whole interaction just like isn't awesome so I have a transcript of part of the call which we can read for you I hate to bother you at home on your day off but this woman here has been bothering us all day you towed a car from Vanderbilt and a hundred do you remember it no do you remember she said it was near a cemetery cemetery at this point Colkins assures the dispatcher that there was no one with the vehicle Well somebody at the cemetery is telling the mother that you picked up the driver and he's been missing since Monday oh for Pete's sake now when he says he has no idea what they're talking about the dispatcher just takes his word for it and tells the family what he said he had no memory of the tow or interacting with someone just four days earlier The sheriff's office isn't ready to drop this complaint quite yet though on Monday January 19th a week after Terrence was seen and his car was towed investigators make contact with Deputy Steve Colkins again and this time his memory seems to have improved what he says now is that on that afternoon he actually saw Terrence's car was having problems so he pulled him over to see what was going on Both cars pulled into the cemetery lot and Terrence begged him for a ride and said that he was going to be late to work and at first Steve says that he tells him like no you just need to call a cab but then he says that he has second thoughts about it and he says this guy seemed so nice and he was so polite he's just trying to get to work so he ended up offering to give him a ride to the circle K where he worked um circle K he didn't work there I thought he worked at Pizza Hut right so stay with me here he says that he drops off Terrence because he's in a hurry and Terrence told him that his registration papers for the car were in the glove box

well he goes back to check and he says that the papers weren't in there at all so he starts to feel frustrated like this kid has lied to him so he calls the circle K and they say that no one by that name works there which we know so now he's even more upset he's like this kid has lied to me so this is when Deputy Kalkin says he moves the car to the street and he says he doesn't do it to make it look abandoned he says that he did it so that way when he called to have it towed the towing company would have better access to it now Terrence's mom doesn't buy this story for a second she says first of all his car was working just fine she was even the one to go pick it up from the tow yard and it was functioning perfectly and no one had worked on it so the story isn't adding up what kind of problems was it having and that all of a sudden is like remedied by itself she said that Terrence was not friendly with law enforcement he had that DUI he had a couple other run-ins with the law back in Tennessee and she said there is no way that he would have asked a deputy who pulled him over for a ride instead of just calling her now something that I can't quite shake either that I don't hear be brought up in like any of the message boards or documentaries on this is I find it's super strange that Deputy Steve Calkins had Terrence's keys at all like that to me doesn't fit in with the deputy's story he says okay the car was breaking down so I go take this kid to what I thought was his work and he gets out but in what world like if that actually happened if my car is broken down I get a ride from a cop somewhere like I would take my keys with me because I'm gonna go figure out like have someone give me a ride figure out how to fix my car why would he be leaving the keys with the deputy yeah it makes zero sense right so again nothing really to solve there but just one of those points that I haven't seen anyone make but like has been itching my brain so investigators doing their jobs decide to pull the security footage from the circle K you say you dropped him off well then we should be able to see him there but there is no Terrence there's no deputy Calkins anywhere on the footage from that day about the same time the family decides to file a complaint against deputy Calkins they think that he's lying and that he didn't follow proper protocol so internal affairs is actually brought in mind you once the sheriff's office had to start looking at

one of their own they actually had already brought in the Florida Department of law enforcement and the FBI to oversee the investigation to avoid any kind of accusations of a cover up which was like super smart on their part yeah that's very very smart yes but now they also have to bring in eternal affairs once this complaint has been filed and once internal affairs takes a look at this complaint they are extremely unnerved because they had just closed an eerily similar complaint against the exact same deputy you see back in October just three months before Terrence disappeared another man had gone missing a 23 year old man named Felipe Santos was living outside of Naples Florida and would drive into the city each day to work a job in construction now the problem with this was that Felipe was an illegal immigrant so he was unable to get a driver's license or be insured so on Tuesday October 14th of 2003 when Felipe got into a car accident while driving to work with his brother I'm sure his heart just sank into his butt but he didn't try to run from the accident he actually pulled over with the other driver whom he'd hit and she flagged down a passing patrol car and in that patrol car was deputy Steve Calkins and according to the other driver Felipe was put into the back of deputy Calkins car and to this day Felipe has not been seen again now when the family heard that Felipe was put in the car they fully expected him to be arrested and perhaps even subject to deportation so right when they find out about this they go to the local jail but Felipe isn't there they try asking around but they're not really getting anywhere and it's two weeks before they get a copy of the incident report which has a narrative from Steve Calkins that says everyone at the site was amicable that he did put Felipe in the back of his car but Felipe was so polite that he ended up dropping him off at a circle K so he could get a ride home oh my god sound familiar he did say however that he issued Felipe three citations that he would need to pay on

and show up in court for now when they talk to the other driver to verify Culkin story she says yes he did get in the back of his car but she said that it's it wasn't all amicable in fact it was deputy Steve Calkins who seemed to be super upset and worked up over the whole accident and at the site he even said something in an angry tone about being so sick and tired of handling instances like this with people who had no driver's license and no insurance so Felipe's family filed both a missing person report and a complaint against deputy Calkins they said listen he should have been arrested and if he would have been arrested we would know where he was at right now now mind you Felipe was illegal but he was not on police's radar at that point when Culkins issued him that citation and then he didn't appear in court because he was missing that put him on law enforcement's radar and now he had a warrant out for his arrest so some people were looking at this and being like well of course he's not going to come back see he's just running from a law he has an arrest warrant out but like it doesn't make sense it's kind of like a chicken or an egg thing like he disappeared before he got that citation and he got the citation because he probably was with somebody who made him disappear and he would have gone to court had he been here but he is not here you know what I mean but he had disappeared before the citation which would calm court yeah like no it's totally confusing yeah so there there was like some people being like well he has a reason not to show up and everyone's like no like we're pretty sure he wasn't showing up before then and like he didn't even know this is a thing so internal affairs gets involved at this point for the first time in deputy Calkins career and after two months of investigating they find that deputy Calkins should be exonerated

from any wrongdoing he was a deputy with 17 years of unblemished service and sure he didn't arrest the guy but maybe he was just trying to be nice and give him another chance and technically he did nothing wrong that day and he didn't do anything that was against their professional code now Felipe's family gets a letter saying that deputy Calkins has been cleared and it is just 72 hours after they get that letter that Terrence went missing after his encounter with Calkins oh my god so this is a small department and I think everyone was on edge when almost the exact same thing happened with another man in a similar situation internal affairs processes Terrence's car and they said that they recovered some quote trace evidence but they won't release what that was to the public and really if it's that small I'm not sure it helps a ton because even Calkins eventually admitted to having moved his car into the road so like I would expect some of his DNA to show up there right as you know my greatest fear is that my ridiculous amount of hair shedding will get me in trouble to show up at a crime scene so I 100% support the idea that just by sitting in a car trace evidence gets transferred

yeah and so again saying that he was in the car now if the evidence showed up somewhere else like in the trunk or in the back seat that doesn't quite fit with his story so I'm wondering if it's like that and that's worth noting but again they did not release what it was at this point they bring Calkins in for a taped interview and they give him a polygraph which he ends up passing so they process his car too and his car was immaculate now they still don't have enough evidence to fire Calkins or even accuse him of foul play so they keep running down leads and they keep watching him they actually put a GPS tracker on his car thinking that maybe if he did do something to these men he would go back to where he took them from the GPS records they identify 12 areas where they think searches should be done and they do aerial searches use cadaver dogs but none of the sites reveal any new clues that might help find Felipe or Terence so 12 locations seems like kind of a lot I wonder if someone in law enforcement maybe have tipped him off I mean like you said it was a small department if people were looking into him what are the odds that someone let him know about it

yeah I actually had the exact same thought as I was researching this episode because for them to identify 12 places that they thought were maybe remote or like off his normal route seemed like a lot to me as well and again this guy had been in law enforcement for 17 years had an unblemished record like you make friends and so I can easily see now granted normally like deputies and internal affairs like internal affairs aren't friends with people but I could see somebody like getting a whiff of this and being like hey heads up I think maybe you should watch your back I think even if it's I think they're following you and he's just taking them on a wild goose chase now again total speculation but it was something that stuck out to me too because I was shocking that they found 12 places that they should go look but they didn't find anything in these 12 places so while they're tracking his movements they're also looking into his story now remember his story is that their interaction was super brief and he actually ended up saying in his first interview that he had only gotten Terrence's first name well they decide to pull all of the recordings from dispatch that day and they find another call from deputy caulkins that contradicts everything that he told them oh my god yeah buddy chills you guys and this call is super gross like you can tell caulkins is trying to mock African American people but he's doing just an awful voice

and he's like oh I got this homie Cadillac off the side of the road blocking traffic and him in this dispatcher or like kind of laughing about it and he's basically saying he calls in whatever code it is to say that it's totally abandoned and he's like you know this person's gonna come back looking for it and it's gonna be gone so not only is he being a super tool and grossly offensive but he's lying again in this call he says that he just found the car obstructing traffic and that the car is abandoned which implies he hasn't seen or interacted with the driver at all then just 20 minutes later he calls back into dispatch again requesting that dispatch do a background check on a man named Terrence Williams now again up to this point he said he never knew Terrence's last name so Terrence had to have told him which means he had more of an interaction with Terrence than he's been telling people can I pause for a second what's the likelihood that he ran the plates and found the registration for Terrence he didn't because that was the whole thing the car was unregistered Terrence when he bought it didn't have a driver's license and was unable to actually register the car so there was nothing that could have led him in that car to Terrence Terrence didn't have ID the car wasn't registered to Terrence that's it

yes so it's 23 minutes after this call that he ends up making the call for the tow so what did he do with Terrence in those 23 minutes because we know he didn't take him to the circle K when internal affairs brings him into question him about this he's like I don't know where I got the name and he kind of like tries to fall back on your questions and he's like maybe I found it on the paperwork in the glove box and they're like nope nice try you already told us that there was no paperwork and the more they questioned him the more his story begins to fall apart they end up issuing him another polygraph and I don't know what questions they asked him the first time that he was able to pass but this time the questions are much more pointed and they have a lot to do with what happened after the car was towed like where did you get a date of birth to run a background check was he with you after the car was towed and this time he fails deputy Colkins insisted his last interaction with both men was at the circle K but after that failed polygraph he stops cooperating with investigators and has not cooperated to this day he was eventually fired from the sheriff's office for non complains with rules regulations untruthfulness and conduct unbecoming of an officer but they say they still don't have enough proof to charge him with any wrongdoing in the disappearance of either Felipe Santos or Terrence Williams I mean I think we're all on the same page that Colkins had something to do with it right

yeah I don't think there's a theory like a viable theory where he actually drops these men off at the circle K never sees them again right there's not like some circle K killer in this particular town or anything right I mean his story again just doesn't even add up he lied about knowing Terrence's names again he still had Terrence's keys which is super weird so I think we can conclude that he did something to these men like but what is the something so what are the theories one is that he killed them like maybe he snapped and I go back to what that driver said who had an interaction with him after Felipe Santos's accident and he basically told her like I'm so sick and tired of dealing with these incidents where people don't drive his license they don't have insurance because that is something that Felipe and Terrence had in common like Terrence wasn't illegal immigrant but he had gotten his driver's license take away he was driving uninsured and he could have been sick and tired of it and on top of that they're both minorities right now what I find surprising about this this theory though is that

he literally goes through this whole thing I can see him maybe he does he snaps and does it to Felipe Santos he goes through an entire I.A. investigation they come up with nothing and then right after that he does the exact same thing so risky right and like he knows that I.A. is going to investigate and not like he got away with it the first time and nobody even questioned him so if you're going to like do this again you don't even come over the better story and like he knows all of his calls are recorded when he calls into dispatch so he knows they're going to check the circle K2 like again nothing nothing adds up I mean not even like a different story but like a different like motive or interaction it's the exact same thing I mean this guy's an officer he knows how investigations work and he did nothing to try and cover his tracks so if we find bodies later and it turns out that he did kill them I'd almost have to wonder if there are more like if he was so sure that he'd get away with it that even after an internal affairs investigation he does it a couple of weeks later

like that is bold 100% the other theory that I've actually heard and I actually heard it on another podcast who covered this case many many years ago called the trail and cold is police have been known to do something called starlight tours have you ever heard of this I feel like I've heard the term so it's really prevalent I guess in Canada with the Royal Mounted Police up there and Aboriginals and apparently what would happen there and it's been known to happen in the US as well is when there's somebody who is vulnerable who maybe wouldn't come to police and report this kind of abuse what police officers would do instead of arresting them instead of writing up a report is they take these people who've committed some kind of wrongdoing and they drive them super far out into the middle of nowhere and they basically just drop them off and they have to find their way home and it puts them through a ton of hardship again especially if you're talking about Canada when temperatures can get super super low or Florida when it can get super super hot

so it's a theory in this case that maybe what he used to do is he was just so pissed off and annoyed with these people who were driving without licenses who he didn't think should be here or he thought less of so he would put them in his car, drive them miles and miles and miles away and leave them and then something would happen to them to where they didn't make it home whether they succumbed to the elements whether something sinister happened to them in between there and their home but that these two cases they happen to be back to back but that's why he kind of maybe was able to pass a polygraph sometimes is he technically didn't do anything to them but he also left them in a very vulnerable situation oh my god this is still though surprising to me because if Felipe Santos if he took Felipe on a starlight tour and then there was an internal affairs investigation you think you'd clean up your act for a while and maybe not do that again if you know that like oh gosh I dropped this guy off in the middle of nowhere

and he actually might be dead yeah right but again I don't know now the one thing that I keep coming back to as well is I know they put a GPS tracker on his car after the men went missing but I wonder if they did any kind of mileage tracker to see how far he could have driven the day that Terrence like was with him in his car because did he have other stops that day was there like just a chunk of time that he was missing you would think it would give you some kind of radius to be like okay the men have to be within 20 miles 100 miles but I don't know if that ever happened so we don't know

I think we can all agree that he had something to do with it but until a body is found I think we're gonna be left with just questions and no answers and the actor Tyler Perry actually got really invested in this case and the last I heard he's still offering a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who has information on this case that can lead to either them being found or an arrest if you're in the Naples area the FBI located in Tampa still has a team looking at this they're not active but the case file is still open so you can call the Tampa FBI office last I heard that number was 866-838-1153 thanks guys so much for listening to our episode today if you want to see some pictures you can always go to our blog crimejunkiepodcast.com

or check us out on social we're on Instagram as crime junkie podcast and on Twitter at crime junkie pod there's also so many awesome people in our Facebook discussion group just go to Facebook and search crime junkie podcast discussion group and don't forget if you want an extra fix you can go to Patreon we release an extra mini episode for everybody today and remember after the credits we're going to play a bonus clip from our Patreon episode it comes from Justin Daniel crime junkie is an audio Chuck production so what do you think Chuck do you approve like I mentioned she was super religious and she had been a for a long time so when she got to Stanford she actually spent a lot of time at the Stanford Memorial Church it was like her go to when she would go pray

or just to spend some extra time relax it was like very peaceful for her and one evening in particular it was around 1130 Arles and Bruce decide to go for a walk around campus Arles wanted to go drop some mail off she had a bunch of letters back to family and friends at home and so they were going to walk to the mailbox which is like across campus and it was October so it was finally starting to get that like cool kind of crispness you only get in like October November love it yes so the pair walked for a while but as they walked and they've been talking they start to bicker about whose job it was to put air in the car's tires like exactly yeah exactly the kind of fight you have as a married couple

like it doesn't really matter but you guys are just bickering yeah don't ask me how to load the dishwasher in our house we have that same one Arles got frustrated with her husband and as they were nearing the church actually she's just like listen just give me some time alone like she wanted to go inside and pray and Bruce is like yeah that's fine with me so he leaves walks off to go home and their apartment is about a half a mile away from this church and so Arles goes into the church to pray Bruce gets home and he does this thing that I think we all do or at least I do and I assume everyone else does is he starts like preparing to have this fight like what points is he going to make and like I bet she's going to say this stand yeah oh I'm yeah I'm all about that yeah like I'm gonna come back with this and I bet she'll say this

so he's like prepping for this fight meanwhile back at the church Arles has walked in and there are two people already inside that notice her come in she went and sat all the way at the front knelt down to pray and as the two people got up to leave they notice a young man entering maybe 20 25 years old with blonde hair parted down the middle not too long after at about 1210 the security guard pops his head in the church and made an announcement that the church was closing up like it did every night at midnight he was running just a little bit behind but he says when he comes in to make this announcement he saw no one no Arles no two people that had just left no man with sandy bond hair church was completely empty