Frenemies | The Murders of Johnny Clarke & Lisa Straub

0:06 Welcome to Unspeakable, a true crime podcast where I tell stories of real crimes with real victims, whose cases are so shocking that many are left wondering how is this even real? I use my experiences in law enforcement corrections, and combined with my years as a criminal justice educator, dig deep into complex cases of evil acts, some so evil many feel they are unspeakable. Warning.

0:51 Unspeakable is intended for mature audiences. If you are easily offended, then I'm not your girl. Listening discretion is advised. Hey y'all, Kelly Jenning's back here for another episode of Unspeakable. How have you been? What are you doing? I've been doing a lot. I've been working a lot. But this is what season three, episode nine I think that I'm about to jump into. And who would have thunk it? Man, we got we're getting so far into this and the patron members that people are signing up. I'm so tickled by that and all the shirts and things I've been mailing out. Thank you for ordering that. That that does a lot for the show, and it helps me to be able to bring you more content and to be able to do better things than when I first started. But I have a new patron member. I want to say hello too, and that's miss Dana Stager. I hope I said your name right, my friend. Thank you so much for joining. I hope you enjoy your shout out. Let me wave at you, hagarl and all of my supporters mean so much. And you know what really just tickled me is I have a listener and she's gonna know when when I say this, who lives in Australia. And that woman message to me because she was struggling and wanted a T shirt And I am mailing a T shirt to Australia. So how are they down? Unda?

2:00 I hope my chat makes it, but I don't laugh at my my, my, my accent? How are things down Unda? My shirt's going to the Lundown Unda. But I'm so it's so fun to get to mail things to Australia. I didn't even know y'all do. Y'all's addresses a little different than we do here, and so I'm just learning new things. But thank you so much. It's coming your way, y'all, and uh, I hope that you really enjoy everything that I'm offering and that I'm sending your sending out to you. So let's get started on this episode. This one was kind of a crazy one. So this is gonna be about Johnny Clark and Lisa Straub. And I know that people have may have heard of this case before, but I really spent a lot of time looking up the details on this one because there were so much kind of back and forth and some things weren't as clear cut as I thought they should have been. But this actually happened in twenty eleven in Ohio. And this is gonna be um two young people that are in a relationship together. So Johnny and Lisa. Johnny Clark is twenty one years old and Lisa is twenty and based on the research that have done and looking at pictures of him and kind of just looking at his family and things, you know, Johnny was I wouldn't say your typical twenty one year old, but you know, he kind of looked a part of the young, handsome, fit kid. He was extremely muscular in a lot of the photos that I looked at. Maybe he hit a steroid or two, I don't know, but he was really big. He had a good

3:32 smile, he had nice white teeth. He played football in high school and his goal at that time, at the time of his murder, was that he wanted to go to barber school and become a hair guy. So while that sounds great, you know, and he seemed to have goals in his life, he just seemed to be a bit misguided. Okay. Now, he is a victim in this case, and I don't want to take that away from him, but I also believe in telling the truth, and so based on everything that I saw and read, he hung around a sketchy crowd, all right, and he dabbled in the drug life. And I know this isn't the best way to describe someone in a murder case, but I just want to tell you like a you know, call it like I see it, and tell you my impression of what was going on here. And I know I'm supposed to say that he lit up a room and lati dab, but truthfully, he lived a bit of a risky lifestyle, and I think that's going to play a part in his ultimate demise. So don't come at me for being real, y'all. Okay, I'm just telling you how it is. But for example, he was convicted of robbery in two thousand and seven and He did a year or two a year and two months in prison and had just been released in June of two thousand and nine when his case of this murder came about. Now, what is robbery? You ask, good question. People seem to not understand the difference between robbery and burglary, and explain it to people like this. You can't burgle someone, right,

5:03 do y'all remember McDonald back in the day of the hamburglar. Okay, he wasn't the ham robber or the hamburger robber. Didn't It wouldn't sound a good anyway. But you know, burglary is when you go into a place and you take something. For example, someone breaks into your house while you're at work and they steal your TV. Okay, that's a burglary because you don't burgle a person. You burglarize a home or a business or something of that nature. Now, robbery, which is what he was convicted of, is when you go into a place and you take something from someone. Okay, so it's like you're having a two person or two or more interaction. So for example, armed robbery is when you're going to go into a store, you know, and you hold a gun to somebody and you demand money from them. So robbery is a bit more scary than a burglary. And the reason I wanted to explain it to you is because you know, robbery is a bit more invasive, and it denotes that you used fear or forced to get what you wanted. And so again, while Johnny Clark is a victim, I want you to understand that if you were living inn at risk lifestyle, maybe you attract more people that are also of that at risk lifestyle.

6:15 Now. I know his mama loved him, and I know that he's an absolute victim, and I can't say that enough in this case, But I want to tell you everything good about or ugly so he can really get the full scope of what was going on. And these facts, while not necessarily flattering to him, do tell a story and the details of his life. Will you kind of help to lend a possible motive to what happened to him ultimately, But even though he did dabble in this drug lifestyle and he did the robbery, he had tons of friends and everyone says that he was super popular, super charismatic, bigger than life type personality, and I can kind of see it like he almost strikes me as a y'all, like a young mafia guy in a weird way. And I know that, and I mean that almost in like a charming way, if that makes sense. Not that he's a bad guy, but like he almost had seemed like he had a little swagger to him, you know, the old school kind of gangster type thing. But he was always on the phone, and he was always looking for a good time, and that phone would play a role in the investigation. Now, Johnny had his girlfriend that he lived with at the time, and I mentioned her earlier. Her name was Lisa, and this kind of made me sad. But the more I tried to research Lisa, it was like the less I found, I really did not find much about her, and that to me means something here. So Lisa had graduated from Springfield

7:45 High School. She played volleyball, and she had lots of friends, but she would loved her family. She was close to her family. And someone that I was talking about her that knew her said she was always smiling. She was a smiler and she was a nursing student Owen's Community College in Ohio. And I'm just telling you she was beautiful and I know, beautiful does not mean anything in this world. I know physical beauty means nothing, but she just when you look at her pictures and I have them in front of me, y'all, she just looked like she was in the prime of her life. She just has this thousand watt smile, brown hair, and she's a pretty girl, and you almost get this vibe of good girl falls in love with bad boy. And I could be wrong, y'all. I've never met them before. But I tried to get more information about her, because I'm serious. I literally did not find much about her. I went online, and I think I was I'm pretty sure it was her mother that I found, and I reached out to her mother, but as of this recording time, I never received any feedback from her. But I tried because I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to know who she was.

8:54 But I know she cared about people because she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to take care of people. But like I said, she's pretty long, brown hair and white teeth, big smile. Why I don't keep saying teeth, y'all, Pias, I am a freaking teeth person. Something about people's teeth. I love pretty teeth, and I know it's weird, but I automatically like put you ten points higher than the average Joe if you have pretty teeth. I just think. I don't know, I just like pretty teeth, and that's okay. You don't have to like teeth, but I do. Okay. But from her photos, I gathered that she seemed like she was kind of a gentle soul. She just her smile about her, seemed like a pretty gentle girl. She was a waitress at the time of her and Johnny dating, and she acted like most twenty year olds do.

9:41 This is a pure guess based on you know, what all I read and her pictures. But I feel like she had goals and aspirations and maybe would have outgrown the stage of life that they were in at the time of this crime. They were just young, you know, and doing what young people do. So in January twenty eleven, it was really cold in Ohio and it said that there was five inches of snow that had dropped in the Toledo area, and Johnny and Lisa had been very active on their phones that day, like a lot of twenty somethings, you know, you would expect they're on their phones twenty four seven, so busy. A matter of fact, Johnny Clark's phone had fifty one phone calls that day back and forth, and this was a normal call load for him though he had tons of friends, and based on the history of his phone logs, it was a pretty normal phone call volume. That's a lot of calls. Though. Now, just because he was misguided, I would say in his daily activities, as I mentioned, that doesn't mean that he wasn't parented, Okay. He had a family that loved him immensely. He was of Cuban heritage on his mom's side, and she had a very very very strong bond with her son and a very you know, she loved that boy. And the mom's name was Mate, like I'm Matie. But she wasn't a pirate, Okay. I just said that other accounts of her name people were calling her Mate. But

11:13 I saw in a call recorded call where she said her own name and she said Mate. So that's why I'm pronouncing that pronouncing it that way, all right. So back to miss Mate and the timeline of events. Around eight pm, she called to say hey and check on her son, because, like I said, they were really close and they spoke usually multiple times a day, and they spoke on the phone and had this typical mom's son talk on the phone. Life was good, everything was normal and as strange as it may seem, whenever he picked up the phone, he said, yes, Mom, I'm still alive, you know, being you know, like kids are. But that would be kind of haunting. So by the time they were having their conversation around eight pm, it said, you know, the snow had melted and Johnny had plans to go head to his friend's house to watch the Pro Bowl. So at ten pm, he picked up his girlfriend Lisa from her job at TGI Fridays where she was waitressing, and they had plans to go to the home of Lisa's parents house. So Lisa's parents are Mary Beth and Jeff Straub. And Jeff I was looking around for some information on him, and what I found online was that he has an associate's degree and his current occupation was listed as a craftsman, basically blue collar worker.

12:33 To give you a feel of this family, they were successful and structured people. Everything I saw showed that they were These were just good people that were living their life, taking care of their daughter. They had a nice home, but they weren't home. They were on a cruise and were excited to be celebrating their twenty fifth wedding anniversary. So a few things about them. They had left their daughter, Lisa and her boyfriend to look for their home. Look over their home. But they had rules about their house, and they kept an orderly home, and one of those rules was particular that there was absolutely no smoking in their house. This would come to be important.

13:16 You will not smoke in my house, all right. Do not bring cigarettes into my house. A phone log shows that Johnny called a friend at ten forty one PM, and that friend later would say that Johnny was waiting for another friend that he was going to meet up with. And this guy's name was Anthony Watson. So also at ten forty one, Clark would Johnny Clark would click over he was on the phone, and he would click over and he would talk to another friend named Tiffany Williams. Okay, so we got a couple of friends in this conversation going on right now. Johnny and Lisa were planning to go pick up the girl Tiffany. He clicked over one and other friend named Zach Burkett, and then they were going to return back to the home to play pool. I hope you're following all of this, okay, So Tiffany would remember that during their phone conversation, Johnny all of a sudden would go quote, who the hell are you, bro? What are you doing? Which is kind of weird, right because they were talking, and then he just kind of angrily responded to someone that he seemed like he just saw, And she said it seemed like Johnny knew the person that he was talking to, but he also could hear she could also hear another man's voice in the background. Then Johnny abruptly told Tiffany, hey, let me call you back and hung up the phone. Twenty Two more calls to

14:46 Johnny's phone after ten forty one PM go unanswered. He was getting blown up again some more, and he would not answer the phone. So Johnny's mom becomes pretty nervous at this point because he always answered her calls, even if he might ignore somebody else. He was answering Mama when she called. So when both Johnny and Lisa would not answer, numerous techs and calls and attempts to get a hold of him, that friend Tiffany that he had hung up on earlier, convinced Zach Burkett, the other friend, to drive out to the home to see what was up. When they got there, they pulled on the door and started knocking. They were looking inside windows, but they just didn't see anything. And the only thing they could really even see that might be different was that there was a door open at the top of the stairs. But after no one answered at the home, they left. So Tiffany decides, well, maybe I should call Johnny's best friend's girlfriend and see if she knows what's going on, And so she wanted to get the boyfriend's phone number, so that's why she called the girlfriend. That makes sense.

16:00 I hope she called the girlfriend to see if she could get the boyfriend's number and see if he would try to call Johnny. And maybe, I don't know, maybe Johnny was just ignoring Tiffany's phone calls, right, So at that moment, Tiffany's like thinking, Johnny and Lisa just must be ignoring my phone calls. Right, So instead of that girlfriend getting her boyfriend to call Johnny, that girlfriend kind of got shook, okay, And her name was Sharita. She according to a nine one call that I listened to. In this case, she decided, I'm going to call Johnny's mom instead and tell her what's going on, because this is really weird. Okay, if you've called then he hung up abruptly, and now he hasn't answered the phone.

16:51 You drove over there, they want to at the door. I really think we need to get mom involved, and to her point, I think she was right. So a little bit of talking goes on, and then Tiffany agrees to go pick up Johnny's father named John and take him to Lisa's parents' house, right because that's where they were all supposed to be going back to play pool. At one twenty one am, maybe called nine one one to report the call and to ask for a welfare check. All right, So some hours have gone by at this point and they're concerned. So what is a welfare check? Let me just explain that to you real quick. So you know, a welfare check is whenever someone or something doesn't they're not answer the phone, they're not answering the door, and so you really feel like, hey, someone should go in an official capacity and check on this person and make sure that they are okay, but a welfare check does not give you give police the right to kick indoors or anything like that. So like in the movies, if they're going to check on someone, you know, they might kick in a door or break a window or something. Yeah, that we have to have probable cause. That's not going to happen. Okay.

17:55 So police do respond. They show up and they talk to the you know, the friend and their dad and you know what's going on. One and the deputies searched the outside of the home and they saw no tracks in the snow. They saw nothing outside of the house that would indicate that anything had gone on and then run from the house. They didn't see any forced entry, They saw nothing. The only thing they could note was that the TV was one, but there was no obvious forced entry or any other alarming signals. And so you know, here's a snippet of that nine one one call, and I want you to listen to mom's voice, y'all. She sounds scared and she's extremely anxious in this phone call, as you would expect.

18:36 So here's a snippet of that call. It's not the whole call, but I want you to listen y'all. In her voice, she sounds scared, and she sounds extremely anxious. Hello, hell, late nine one man. My heart is beating out of my chest. I just got a call from one of my son's friends. Okay, her phone number, I have it right here. She just picked my husband up too. My son and his girlfriend live out at twenty one sixty one long Acre Lane. I believe that's Hollin. This girl says she was on the phone with my son and his girlfriend and he was supposed to go pick her off. He was sooner. He was going out the door, and all she heard was the phone drop and heard my son saying in the bedroom, who are you? What do you want? What are you doing here? And she says she just girl by the house and the households ramsacked. All the lights are on.

19:26 My son's light answer, and then neither is the girlfriend. Oh my god, please, I'm praying that my son. It's okay. Oh lord, okay. So Mati calls nine one one again at two twenty seven am, and she got in the car and drove to the home with a family member to meet John, Tiffany and Zach. Okay, this mama has that sense that lots of people have mama's. Have you know I've woken up in the middle of night, out of a dead sleep and went, oh my god, I think one of the kids is sick and gotten up, and sure enough I go in there and I have a sick kid. It's just that, since you have as a mother, this mama knew something was wrong.

20:10 Okay, she made that first phone call, and now she's making a second one. I'm gonna go ahead and put that in. Now listen to her voice. I'm coming up to the residence right now. Well, which residence Lisa's house? Okay, I needed an address. Twenty one sixty one long Acre. A plane did. And what's your name? My name is my pay Boscus Clark. This is the street I think, Mama, long Acre. This is it, This is it. I'm one of my cousins right now that's in the military. What's your phone number? My phone number. I want this Thills plate number before we go anywhere, so I can give it to the sheriff on the phone iron in their back pool and in the driveway. I want this plate number, ma'am. I'm gonna give you this plate number. Okay, this girl's car is driving for me. I'm gonna stay calm, I am. Will you stay on the phone with me, ma'am while I talk through this girl. I have a feeling you set up my son. My son is missing. You've nowhere to be found. Do you want to tell the police what you just got done telling me on the phone? Okay, come here, ma'am. I'm gonna let you talk to her because I have her blocked them out lethal police drive away, So deputies respond again, and this time they spend more than twenty minutes looking around the outside of the house. The issue, though, y'all, is you have to have probable cause or exigent circumstances to force entry into a home. You know, real quick, you know, exigent circumstances are going to be something like if they heard oh no, help or stop no, or gunfire or

21:41 something that's exigent circumstances. But if the police don't have that. I saw so much chatter online about the police were inept, or the police didn't do their job, or they didn't care. No, guys, it's called protections, you know. They're built into the into the law, or else police could just go kicking down any door, any time, anywhere without any probable cause. Okay, so you're like, well, wait a minute, they didn't answer their phones, and what about that phone call. I mean, y'all, adults are allowed to not answer their phones. Number one, thank god, my mom would be sending the police every day because I'm busy and I don't always answer the phone. And y'all they're also not allowed. I mean, they're also allowed to not answer their doors. You don't have to answer the door. This is the United States of America. Who right, you can do what you want. So just because they're not answering the door and they're not answering the phone, doesn't necessarily mean something bad's going on.

22:30 I mean, they could be burns, there can brown grown, right, they could be busy, they could be doing anything. They don't have to answer the phone or the door. So literally, also something to take into account is the actual owners of the home. We're on a cruise and the police cannot just go kicking down the doors because of just a nervous mom whose son won't answer the phone. And I want people to understand that, Like, I literally want to teach that people. It's not that the police were being lazy. It's not that they weren't doing their job. They responded twice, but there was nothing there. And you know what, do you want them to do? Break the law, because then people would come down on them for that as well. So the police just literally felt like they had no probable cause and they left again. Now, according to Johnny's dad, John, an officer pulled him aside and said this quote. As an officer, I can't tell you to go into that home, but as a parent, I would wait for us to leave, and then I would go in.

23:37 And I believe that I know people. I know people with good hearts, and I agree with that statement. You know what I mean, if your child was in there and you feel like in your heart of heart something is wrong, we don't have the legalities to go in, but you got a foot. And by the way, John's Johnny's dad, John is a big old boy too, Okay, he's a big old man. Then kick that damned door down and then and Lisa's parents will just have to be mad at you, and you can replace the door if they're okay, and then we can laugh about it in ten years. But right now, take the damn door down. That goes from my kids too. If you're hey, if you're friends with my kids, just now, I'm gonna kick your door down. Nobody answered, all right now. I think the police officer was just trying to give some heartfelt advice there. But John, Madie, and the family member that they were with drove to a nearby gas station. I guess they didn't really know, you know, what to do, and they were trying to decide a course of action. I'm not going to armchair quarterback that It was kind of like, you know, what do we do?

24:41 You know, we do we break into this property. We can't get in touch with the with the other parents. So they then returned to the home and John and a family member went around back of the house while Madie was real nervous and so she just waited in the car, all right, And they look around the back of the house and they were able to see through some blinds, like they kind of were able to reangle their body and look through some blinds, and that's when they saw a phone and Johnny's body on the ground. Dad. John immediately ran to the front of the home and went straight beast mode and kicked in the door. He blew it down, and when he got inside. To his horror, he also found Lisa laying on the ground with a bag taped around her face. Johnny was near by her, and he had a bag on his head as well, so he ripped both bags off and was trying to give CPR. But he said as he lifted him, he could immediately tell that he was beyond resuscitation. And without being horrible about this, your body, you know, there are signals your body can give to tell if you're beyond resuscitation. According to Johnny's mom, when his dad touched his face, it was stiff and it wouldn't move all right, So there was there was, you know, some obvious signs there. So it seems like rigor mortis had set in. And you know, forensic pathologists are essentially required to estimate the time of death or the estimated time of death, to assist in the death investigation by limiting the investigation period

26:15 and thus narrowing down the number of suspects and a homicide case. So this would actually be important to know if his face was stiff, because rigor mortis, you know, sets in in a certain timeframe, so in the immediate period after death, the body is going to undergo rapid biochemical and physiological changes that are primarily caused by the absence of circulation of blood and the loss of you know, your body's regulatory mechanisms. So kind of like if you watch The Walking Dead or anything like that, you know how they always have those clouded eyes while the cornea begins to cloud within two hours after death. Okay, So these are really kind of important things to note about the body because it can give you a timeframe. So what also happens is that the skin will then start losing its elasticity and it's like luster and you know, you'll you'll look really pale within the first few hours after death. And the early you know, post mortem phase is most frequently estimated using they call it the classical triad of post mortem changes. So you've got rigor mortis, liver mortis, and alga mortists if you didn't know that, and I'm not trying to go too deep into it, but hey, the science of it's kind of to me impressive of how we kind of figure out times of death. And so when it goes to you know, alga mortists, that's whenever the body's cooling, and then rigor mortis is going to be the postmortem stiffening of the muscles. And so if he went to go pick him up and could tell that he was stiff, then you know that we're you know, we're within a few hours of their death. So the smaller muscles over the face and

27:49 around the eyes, around the mouth, and you know, that's where rigor mortis like the muscles where it it first appears. And following rigor mortis muscles will be in the hands, then your upper limbs, and then finally it'll be in the larger muscles of the lower limbs. So you kind of stiffen from top to bottom, head to toe, if that makes sense. And that's going to happen, like I said, within two hours of death, and then you know, the muscles of the face will progress over the limbs over the next few hours and it completes itself. The rigamoris completes itself usually within six to eight hours of death, and it stays for another twelve hours, but then it disappears. Okay, so it's not like you stay stiff until the end of time. You know, you stiffen up and then it will release and then livermortis comes in and that's whenever you get that purple ish discoloration of the skin and the body, you know, the blood kind of pools towards gravitational pulls, So if you fall, this is kind of morbid.

28:49 But my cousin died years ago, and I remember it his funeral. His face was so grayish looking in purple. But I later found out it's because he fell forward and he laid there for a while before they found him, and so all the blood pooled in his face. So you know science, if you fall on your back, blood pools to the bottom in the back. So Dad goes running out of the house when he sees that Johnny is beyond resuscitation, he loses all composure and at this point Mom makes her third nine one one call. I want you to listen to the horror in Johnny's mother's voice in this nine one one call, Like I'm getting goosebumps sitting here, just the absolute horror in her voice. And you know, I want to explain this to you. And nine one one. We have callers organized by party. We have first party, second party, third party, fourth party, and their studies done because there's there's actually techniques to control a caller who as heightened emotions based on the trauma that they're encountering. And we call this just so you know, the ECCS Emotional Content Cooperations. But that said, a second party caller, which is going to be a person who is seeing something that happened to someone else, right, so seeing their son like that, they usually score the highest. If you get shot, did you know you're likely to not be as upset if you call nine one one vocally, as if your friend saw you get shot and called nine one one,

30:21 they would tend to be more upset. And that kind of weird how the I don't know how people react in times of trauma, but this woman's voice is an example of that second party caller. She is losing control of her emotions as would be expected. Listen to this. You need to get the police out to the wrong Sacer Lane for my son. It's in the basement, tight up of this house. I just come through the window. The police now here on time the ground and we can see the people him and at scirlford are right up in the basement. Okay, all right, we'll get them out there, get them call them. We need to calm down. We'll get them out there, but don't get me conscious, ma'am.

31:12 Okay, he said, they're unconscious, Yes, okay, all right, cell phones on their cell phones on their bodies, unclosed on. My hands are tied. Okay, all right, we'll get them out there, ma'am. Oh my god, I need you to calm down. We'll get them out there, okay, please, sorry, all right, we will long Acre Okay, long Acre Lane. I have the address. We'll get them out there. Doesn't that just tear at your heartstrings? I mean, you've been there forever and your son's been laying on that ground the whole time, and there's nothing they could have done, but my god, you know, wouldn't you have I'm sure that that terrorizes them to this day. So additionally, his mom would add that there was a pile of blood on the floor, and there was a bag on Lisa's head, and then there was dry blood on the side of her head. I mean, I cannot even fathom the sick, helpless feeling that this mother was feeling. Right then, you know, her son was a victim. Obviously the son's girlfriend is an absolute victim. But this is again that ripple effect that crime sends out.

32:28 It's just like a wake of epic sadness and desperation that you hear in her voice. You know, it's not just the victims, it's their families. And to find your child in that state. I don't ever ever want to feel what she felt. So let's talk about the crime scene. So investigators arrive on scene, and it's clear that both of them are dead immediately and that this is foul play. Right, because you're not going to die, put a bag on your own head, Okay. It seemed obvious from the start that the attackers were looking for something very specific, and the investigators believed this because cabinets and drawers were pulled out and contents were dumped on the floor.

33:13 They did say, well, maybe this was a robbery because Lisa's purse was emptied. Now, if you went upstairs in the master bedroom, the mattress was pushed off of the box springs like they were looking I guess under the mattress for something. There was also a walk in closet and all of the clothes were pulled out of the closet and dumped on the floor. It looked like they were looking for something, not just at random. Now, if you walked further into that closet, there was an overturned dresser with like an attic panel, and that had been opened as well, so that opening space was opened. And something that kind of struck the investigators that was kind of strange was that there was lots of jewelry that was left. They didn't take the jewelry, And there was also a few envelopes of cash currency in the house that was not taken. But it was Iraqi currency, it was not American currency, So what the hell were they looking for? I mean, if this was your typical robbery, or it couldn't have been a burglary, right because they were home. But if this is your average robbery, they would they wouldn't They have just taken everything of value? Why would you leave anything behind? And I think what I had read said that the value of that Iraqi currency was like fourteen thousand dollars or something like that, so it wasn't like it was just one dollar bill. It seems kind of strange.

34:45 So the Strobs were notified to their horror, and they were desperately trying to get home from their cruise ship. So while they're stunned and in shock and oh my god, they're getting questioned by the police, and they said, look, there was no money in our house. We don't leave money in our house. There's no safe, there's nothing. We literally have no money in the house. The only money we left was forty dollars that I had left on the counter, and that was so the kids could buy pizza or whatever so they could eat. But there's no money in our house. There's nothing of value or great value that anyone should be looking for. Some additional things they found in the home the investigators was that Lisa's bedroom door was damaged and it's kind of seemed like she had tried to barricade herself in the room before someone, you know, the attacker, broke in the doorway and got her. And despite the recent snow though, there were no footprints around the home, which wouldn't necessarily I guess have to be if it had melted by that time on the concrete. Then if they drove up or you know, and when stayed on the sidewalks, I guess you wouldn't necessarily have footprints.

35:57 But what they immediately ascertained from this was that the attackers must have come in through the garage door, which led directly to the kitchen because there was damage to the interior of that side door from the garage. And y'all know how to do. I'm gonna be posting photos of this on my Facebook and my Instagram. Y'all know how I am. I make yall little artwork, make it pretty, put edges around it, right, so y'all be checking nuts. See, y'all can be investigating with me, okay, but I'm gonna put those pictures up there for you. So investigators came to this conclusion. They thought Johnny likely saw the killers as they came in and him and Lisa were about when he and Lisa were about to leave to go pick up Tiffany and Zach, and then they attempted to run back into the house.

36:40 They believe he pressed his weight against the door to try to stop these people, because remember how I said Johnny was strong. Again, I'm gonna put pictures of him up there too. But this is a strong guy, y'all. He weighed two hundred pounds and it would have taken a lot of effort, and police believed multiple people would have had to help to force that door open. And you know, you could tell they fought and there's something in that that as just as a human being is. So how terrified must they have been, you know, and you're trying to keep people out and they're busting their way through, And I couldn't just see her little self running and trying to hide behind a door and someone busting it open and taking her and making her, you know, kneel down and put a bag over her head.

37:36 So in further investigating, detectives would learn from multiple people that they interviewed that Johnny often talked about a safe that was in that home that held one hundred thousand dollars. Now, it is not smart to brag or lie about how much money you have in your home. You know, that's like ghetto one oh one lailo and say nothing. You know, I digressed there. But he was young, and I guess he was trying to brag for his friends or whatever. And they believed that probably played a role in this. So Lisa's body was found facing east and her hands were duct taped behind her back. Johnny's head was facing west. His feet were duct taped behind his back and his feet were also bound with this black tape. They both had bags over their head and then those bags were secured with duct tape around their necks, like they took the time to duct tape them and suffocate them with bags over their head duct taped around their neck. The medical examiner later would testify to the fact that the tape or the bags could have killed them within minutes. There was no oxygen in these bags that were around their heads.

38:55 Both of their upper clothing was riding up on their bodies like their shirts, while their lower halves were pulled down slightly, And so the medical examiner believed that they were dragged across the floor and staged in the kitchen, which I would say makes sense, right, because there was damage in the upstairs doors like they were trying to you know, she was trying to hide, and then someone broke it down and then drug them to the kitchen. They also found an empty wallet on Johnny's stomach. I don't know about you, but I kind of can vision this, like like maybe it's just me, but I see audacity. I see pompousness in the person who would take someone's wallet out, rifle through it, take what they want, and then drop it on their stomach. Like that's the most that sounds like an epic fuck you to drop it on their stomach. Like, if this was just a hit and run, I would take the whole wallet and you know what I'm saying, take it and go. But this took time, looked through it, took it you want, and then pop it down on their stomach. There's more to these crime scenes to me than just you know, the wallet was taken. So the bags which had been stored in the garage were ripped open, right, because remember Johnny's dad came in trying to save them, and a piece of one of the ripped bags was found in an upstairs bedroom.

40:22 Jeff Strawb later testified that he did not the dad, right, Lisa's dad testified that he did not own duct tape, meaning the killers had to have brought the duct tape to the home. So that piece of bag. I know, you might be kind of wondering, wait a minute, what happened there. I think what happened was that the bags were from the garage. They tore him, brought him in with them. I think Lisa went upstairs to hide, and I think they bagged her head up there. So there was a piece of it ripped from when they were bagging her. That's how I read that. I could be wrong, all right. Other than the kitchen area and those upstairs bedrooms, the home was largely undisturbed. Which if you were going to do this extent and kill people, why didn't you go through the whole house? Why wouldn't you go through it room by room?

41:07 You have total control of the home, you know what I mean? Why didn't you check everything? The one of the attorneys on this case said it was remarkable how clean the home was, or that the scene was. He said, normally you have like blood and fingerprints. They didn't have any of that. And what was super interesting here was the absolute unusual method of killing. Like you know, detectives are used to seeing shootings and stabbings and maybe even manual strangulation like with your hands, you know, But to bag somebody duct tape them, y'all. They didn't. They didn't shoot them. That would have been mercy, like shooting someone in the head would have been mercy.

41:52 No, they terrorized them, bag them, duct tape their neck tight until they suffered. I don't know. That sounds kind of angry to me. It's ruthless, and it's not an ounce of mercy. So the brutality and unconventional killing method had the police wondering. I'm wondering if this is a MS thirteen cartel related crime, because it has cartel vibes, y'all, it really has cartel vibes. It has drug vibes. And remember Johnny's in the drug scene, and I think Johnny again, I am not victim blaming.

42:35 I'm just talking in let's either tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or we can just say everything was great and he was this poor, pitiful guy. Okay, it is poor, pitiful how he was killed, but I'm saying his lifestyle was in risk lifestyle. And if you're selling drugs and you're dabbling in drugs, I don't think it unreasonable to say, hey, maybe maybe there were some ties here, you know, the cartel. I I've always been interested in the cartel. I mean, if you're listening and you're in the cartel, I'm not interested like as in joining, I'm interested as in like, wow, y'all do some while shit. Okay, but the killing here, it just seemed so odd that you would put a bag over someone's head, right, I mean, it's just not it's just you have to be so confident when you go into a house and your weapon of choice is a bag, you know what I mean, Like you believe you have the manpower behind you that your weapon is a bag and duct tape, you know. So it just screamed that this had drug related, you know, motive behind it to me. And so I was looking up cartel stuff because I've done a whole lot of studying of the cartels and you know, the Tijuana and just tons of cartels. But you know, they disappear people all the time, but they also have people who

44:06 were their job is to kidnap people and then to either hold him for ransom or to get information or whatever. And so there was this guy that I've looked up who was, you know, talking about how his job was to disappear people. And they were asking him about what he did and he said, well, each kidnapping starts with locating the target. The best place is at home, that's his own words. The best place is at home. And they like it when they think everyone is asleep. And remember this happened at night. They may have thought that they were you know, that they weren't up, but sometimes they're kidnapped from public areas. If the target is unarmed, two men are enough to carry out a quote unquote pickup or a levanton as the gang member kidnappings are known. If he is armed, it requires more manpower. And then he goes into like how they torture their victims.

45:00 So the victim is taken to a place where no one will hear them, which would have been if you think about it, inside that house, nobody's around, and they're going to get information from them by torture. So he describes three methods, beatings, waterboarding or simulated drownings, and kind of like you know, where they'll put a cloth over your face and pour the water. They do electric shocks, he says, to the testicles, the tongue, and the soles of the feet. But he has no training in torture. He says, he just learned it all, you know, quote with time, you come to learn how to hurt people to get the information that you need. So if the goal here was just to come in and kill them, why wouldn't you just go in and shoot them? Death was not the goal here. They were wanting something and I'm thinking it was money or it was dope. Because you're going to find out in a little bit some of his other associates in the dope game. Nothing obvious jumped out on scene to the investigators. This is where the forensic science would really come through.

46:06 And by the way, I know it's been a minute, but shout out to the Louisiana Crime Lab in Baton Rouge. They were so cool. I think I've told y'all already. They hosted me and I went and I was a speaker at their conference. Those are the real MVPs, y'all of the court system. I just feel like they do God's work in there. You know, they take nothing, you know, a human hair, and they're able to figure out, you know, everything about someone. But in this case, forensic science really came through because the crime lab came back with several sets of unknown DNA and Johnny's ankles had that duct tape around it. Remember that they got DNA from the duct tape on his ankles. There was also DNA in his neck tape and the bag that help excuse me, the bag that was over his head as well as a pocket of his sweats, so like someone put their hand in his sweat and pulled out the pocket.

47:00 There was DNA found there too. Another small but really important clue was found near that door leading from the garage. Remember how the police believe that's how they came in. Well guess what they found right behind that door a cigarette butt. Now they say cigarettes will kill you. Cigarettes will also get your ass busted for murder. Okay, don't forget that part. They should put that on the cigarette pack, like Surgeon general warning it'll cause cancer, but police warning, your DNA will be left here and we will use it against you when a cordilaw stop smoking, you know, just a thought. But that cigarette was found by a deputy named Frank Ready, and he really felt that it was odd considering there was no smoking in the house. They were not allowed to smoke in the house, They didn't smoke in the garage, and there was no ashtrays anywhere. So like, if you were going to be smoking in the garage, wouldn't you think there'd be an ashtray in there.

47:59 People who smoke, you know, make them a little chair and sit down, have a little smoking station or whatever. Where do you put your cigarette butts? Usually people put them out right and then they dump their ashtrays later on. No cigarette, no ashtrays, So why would someone throw a cigarette butt behind a door? And it was the only one, so it really just stood out to that to that investigator. Now they collected that little cigarette butt and they processed it at the crime lab and guess what. That cigarette had not one, but two sets of DNA in it. And when they ran that in CODIS, they got two hits. So what is codis real quick. It's an acronym for Combined DNA Index System and that's a computer software program that operates you know, local, state, and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders. Okay, it also run that you can run DNA against unsolved crime scene evidence and miss people. It is a very important program that we have and God bless who ever created it because it houses everything.

49:08 I say this over and over again, the same twenty percent of our populations are committing one hundred percent of the crimes in our in our areas. These databases they work. And shout out to Livingston Perish because I think it may be up and running now, but we are going to be one of the first in the state that does rapid DNA testing in our jails. Think of how cool that is that means instead of having to send it off and wait a year, they can rapid DNA test right then the blood and if there's a hit, we can say, oh so your DNA was at this robbery and at this robbery and at you know, this abuse, and you know how cool is that. I think we're going to see a lot of positive changes from that, and I think it's amazing. So you go, boys, get that DNA amaz Amazingly. Criminals seem to either forget about DNA or they just don't care. And whichever one it is, it ain't working out for him. So if you're a habitual offender, you ought to know how the world of forensic science works. Because the DNA on that cigarette was matched with the DNA on file for You're ready for it, Sam Williams and his close friend cameo Petaway. You're like, well, wait a minute, kill we haven't heard these names yet. Nope, you haven't. But we'll get there. We'll get there. It's almost pathetic how easy it was to get a match right off that DNA. So now investigators had some suspects.

50:37 Your DNA does not show up on a crime scene by chance. Sorry, all right, let me introduce another player in this and I know right now, you're like Jesus, there's a lot of players. Just hang with me and I'll try to be thorough so you can keep up with them. But there's another friend named alex or Alexandra casino. And it's not a casino like you go play the slots. It's cou s I n O. It's like casino, all right. A review of Johnny Clark's phone records on the day of his murder shows that he received fifty one calls. I think already told y'all that, and many of them were close friends, so it didn't really raise the interest of investigators. It was kind of common to his behavior patterns.

51:22 But there were several calls to and from that guy, Zach Burkette. Remember Zat Burkette showed up with the girl Tiffany at the house looking for him. Remember Johnny was supposed to go pick them up. Zach was at a nearby eyehop eating lunch with a mutual friend of me that day. And you're like, friend of me, y'all know what that is right a front of me. It's not a friend, it's more of an enemy. But it's still an acquaintance person in the group. Y'all know a friend of me, right, all right, Zach was eating lunch with a friend of me named Alex Casino. According to Zach, Johnny was repeatedly hauling him at that eye hoop, trying to figure out where he could he could get pills for later that night. And I tend to believe that we know that Johnny was in the drug scene, why wouldn't he be trying to get pills for their party that night. Something about that admission just really leads me to believe also that Zach was in on the drug scene as well, and he wasn't just some innocent player in this. But this is something strange about it, y'all.

52:28 Zach was only seventeen years old. What is a seventeen year old doing as a drug connect for a twenty one year old? And I know maybe some people don't think that's far fetched, but I mean, damn right, I just I think that's kind of strange. And you know, this Alex Casino girl is also twenty one, So why are these twenty one year olds hanging out with a seventeen year old? You know, Whenever they were looking at these phone calls going back and forth. Casino popped up, okay, and they're like, well, who is this Alex girl? Why is she in Johnny's phone calls? And why you know, based on an interview, why did they have a strained relationship? They would say, they said, hm, we need to go down this path, all right. Well, Casino was interesting to detectives because of a falling out she had with Clark, Johnny Clark over a dog and a car. So in October, Johnny and Lisa agreed to buy a puppy from Casino for one hundred dollars, but only paid her fifty bucks. But then around Thanksgiving, Casino said that she was talked into buying Johnny's Dodge Stratus for fifteen hundred dollars. Now, Alex had a heated argument with Johnny before his death about the selling of that car for fifteen hundred dollars. Because during her interview, which there is a video interview of her and y'all, she has kind of like, oh she's a white girl.

53:58 She has kind of like a wolf cut, dark hair, kind of give you a visual about her. But according to her interview, Johnny was begging for the money and she agreed. Look, i'll give you half of the money. I'll give you seven hundred and fifty dollars and then i'll give you the other half when I have it. And so she never paid the remaining amount because dun dunda, as typical drama would go between young people who drive a piece of shit cars. Oh, wheel fell off of the car. So he got really upset because he was out of a car, and she was upset because she was out of half of the money, and now she had a broken car, and it turned really ugly, and I you know, eventually his dad took possession of the car back and it was just kind of squashed at that point. But investigators wondered could she have something to do with these murders, because I mean, this was a really heated argument over this car. So according to others, Alex also had threatened Lisa Right, Johnny's girlfriend over the car incident, and these were some pretty legit threats.

55:04 But in her interview, Alex said Johnny owed a lot of people money, and she said not hundreds of people, probably like thousands of people. She you know, he owes money too. But something that was interesting was when the detectives offered her like people to place the blame one. She never really took the bait, so it was like they kind of thought that she go, oh yeah, yeah, probably him, probably him, but she never did. She was just like, I don't know, he owes a ton of people money. It could have been anybody that was trying to get money from him. So they did a DNA swab and they gave her a polygraph test. Her DNA did not match any of the DNA that was found at the scene, and she passed the polygraph. But Johnny's family said that Casino threatened Johnny as well, and phone records show, you know, after all of this kind of went down, there was no additional There were no additional calls between Johnny and Casino after December, okay, but as her and she and Johnny ever you want to say it, as their phone interactions were decreasing. Phone records also showed that Casino and Burkette, the seventeen year old, began talking a lot, like multiple times a day. Well. Detectives ask Casino about Casino about this change in phone habits during her interview, and she explained that Zach was her best friend and that's why they talk so much.

56:30 But again, I have questions about this. Burkette is seventeen years old, Casino is twenty one years old. What does a twenty one year old girl seeing a seventeen year old boy. Maybe I'm overreaching when I'm asking that, but I guess when I was seventeen, I would have thought it was cool to hang out with older people. But never when I was twenty one would I want to go hang out with a high school boy. It just seems super sused to me. It's kind of a weird. It's kind of a I don't know, I don't like it. It just seems weird to me. I happened to be around seventeen year old boys all the time in my classroom, and I can tell you the maturity level difference between a seventeen year old boy and a twenty one year old girl is big, or at least it should be. There's a big maturity difference there. It's weird to me. And the phone logs show four hundred and twenty two calls between the two of them, Burquette and Alex Casino in February alone. And guess when those phone calls really blew up? Right? After the murders, they started talking a lot. So I did the math, which I'm not good at it, but that's an average of speaking thirteen times a day. And maybe I'm hanging on this. Maybe it's nothing, but that's a lot of calls.

57:51 I mean, I don't talk to my own family members thirteen times a day. And how long is an average conversation, you know, fifteen minutes. I mean, you're looking at like three hours on the phone. I don't know that just that whole. That's kind of a strange thing. Maybe it's a coinkydink. Okay, maybe it's a coincidence. I don't know, but there's something else interesting about this phone pattern change. And another friend brought this up. His name was Anthony Watson, and he told police that Casino also began started calling him repeatedly right after the murders. It was not like that before, and he said her topic of conversation was often asking him what did he know about the investigation? She was wanting more information on the investigation.

58:42 On top of that, Casino also sent a very jealous driven text message to a woman a few days after the murder, and her name she's not listed. I don't have the woman's name, but part of that text message said this and I quote do this, fam watch the news they get duct taped and tied up and left for dead the hill wow. In that another Conekie dink that she says exactly what happened to the other two. But Casino denied being involved, and she claimed that she was driving around with her boyfriend and smoking weed at the time of the killing, so she couldn't have been involved in that. Pretty legit alli by there, I guess now. In the initial interview, Anthony Watson told police that Johnny and he were planning to meet up, but when it got too late into the night, he told Johnny that he had to get up early for school in the morning and that he would not be able to meet. But in November, Watson was brought from County jail after being arrested on a felony burglary charge, and he decided he was going to speak to detective some more. Okay, so he wanted to tell of a com conversation that he had weeks before with a woman, and he said that this woman placed herself at the scene of the crime.

1:00:07 He also named Sam Williams and if you remember Sam Williams is one of the DNA hits off that cigarette butt behind the door. So his quote was Johnny sees Sam or saw pushed them back inside and that's when it all went bad. That's what he told the detective. He also claimed that there was another man there that he called Drow and a second woman. So he starts giving all these other players in this game that detectives are like, well, who are all these other people who don't you know who are they? And he said specifically that they were looking for a safe that was rumored to be in the home. And remember Johnny had been bragging that there was a safe with a bunch of money in it at the house. Now, at the time of that second interview of Watson, Sam Williams and Cameo Petaway, the one whose DNA was found on that cigarette butt, they were already in jail, and so it was kind of like, how much do we take off of what he's telling us because this was already being speculated about in the media, right, So was he just getting this from the media and then was he trying to get a deal by just giving up this other supposed information or is this legit information? But At the end of the interview, the detective told Watson's attorney that he was going to speak to the prosecutor, the one that was prosecuting Watson, okay, And before he left, Watson said he feared

1:01:40 for his family's safety after naming these names he had given. He was never called to testify against Williams or pet Away, the two DNA guys, which we'll get to in a minute. He was never called to testify against them. There was not even any paperwork on it because of his cooperation with detectives. There was not even paperwork on it. But I will tell you his felony count that he had was lowered to a misdemeanor. He pled guilty and he received probation, so he did not testify. It was not written on paper. But get this. On September twenty eighteen, an unknown person gunned down Watson outside of his apartment, and his murder remains unsolved to this day.

1:02:31 There's so much more to the story. Y'all been going for a hot minute, but I don't want to skip the stuff because it's all about the details. Okay. I think I'm gonna wrap it up for right now, and we'll have to do this into a part two. But if there's anything we've learned, we have to be careful who you trust, because I mean, think about it, Salt and sugar will look the same.