Lazy Assassin: The Carly Gregg Conviction

0:06 Welcome to Unspeakable, a true crime podcast, or 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. Unspeakable as intended for mature audiences. If you are easily offended, then I'm not your girl. Listening discretion is advised. Hey y'all, kJ you're back for another episod that's sort of unspeakable. How is it going. I hope you're having a good week.

1:03 I'm having a fantastic week. I want y'all to also know that if you are local, I'm gonna be at fall Fest on October the fifth. I'll have a booths out there, I'll have merch. Please come by and see me. I'll be near the railroad tracks. Also on October the third, I'm going to be a special guest at Live Oak Junior High So, again, if you're local, and if you have kids that go to school there, I'd love to meet you. We're going to do a whole thing on internet safety. So if you are in town and you would like to come by, please come by. It's going to be a good little, good little mini show, and I'll be excited to meet everyone there. Also, I've got some shout outs to do today. I do want to say this though. I don't record every single day, so I want my listeners to know that I record once a week, So whenever you join, you won't get a shout out necessarily the very next episode, because I may have already recorded it. But hang in there. I'm not ignoring you, and I promise you you will get your shout out today. I'm gonna start with Okay, no lie, I want to tell y'all what I go through for you.

2:00 I want to say your name right so badly that this first person, Aaron from Aurora, Colorado. I googled how to say your last name, and I don't believe it's right. This is what the Google told me. I'm all that has I don't believe that's your last name Erin and I'm from South Louisiana. So I'm gonna say, hey, Aaron Armandaries, how are you You're gonna tell me how to say y'all's names. I'm so sorry if I get it wrong, but welcome erin. I'm so thankful to have you all the way from Aurora, Colorado. I need to cover the shooting at y'all's movie theater. I haven't done that one yet, but I'm gonna make a note, and specifically for you, Aaron, I'm gonna do it. And then right here in my backyard, Denim Springs, Louisiana, I've got Holly Lanore, Hey, Holly, how are you? As well as in Amherst, Ohio? Anita done?

2:48 Hey Anita? What's going on out there? Now? My next listener. I know you did not get a key chain when you were a kid. I know you didn't because you have got a very name, LeeAnne Repenhagen, but you have a lot of duplicated letters. So Leanne, I'm gonna have to make you a key chain because you deserve one. But how are you doing? I don't know where you're from. You didn't fill it out on here, but welcome. Thank you so much, Leanne. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And then this one's special to me. Jenna Dee's right here in Denam Springs, Louisiana. I taught you, Jenna, and I love you madly and I hope that you're doing well. And then in League City, Texas, I've got Christy Erickson. Hey, Christy, how are things out there in Texas? I hope they're going well. And then I've got Hartshorn, Missouri. And this is miss Sherry personally. Hey, Sherry, so glad to have you join. It means so much to me to have support from you, and thank you so so much from the bottom of my heart. And then last but not least, and I'm so tickled by the name of where you are from. Now I don't have a last name, so it's just Jenny. But Jenny, are you from bald Knob, Arizona?

3:55 Because I am so immature and I friggin love it bald Nob. How are you doing out there in Arizona? Jenny? Tell everybody you know I said, hey, and thank y'all so much for your continued support. It literally is the difference now this episode today, I know for a fact that if you were on TikTok, you have been following it listening to it. And I decided since it's fresh in the news and everybody's talking about it. Mama's going to cover it for you. By the way, I'm on TikTok. If you want to find me, just search Unspeakable Kelly. You'll see me. I'm there and I make little little videos every now and then. So it's all over TikTok. It's a current trial and it just completed, and it caught my attention, not only because it's all over the news, but because of the family dynamic involved and the mother's job.

4:42 She was a teacher, and it just drew my attention. By the way, I have a big announcement to make. Guess who will not be teaching anymore after this year? 'tis I? Podcasting is going so well and people want me to send and more episodes, and so I'm gonna take the leap of faith and I'm gonna do it. That's gonna become my full time job. So I'm making my formal announcement today that this is my last year of teaching. I'll finish with seventeen years and I'm going to go into the world of podcasting full time. So thank you to everyone who has supported me and continues to support me. That way I can continue to make more episodes. So this one's going to take place in Mississippi, and that's home to forty year old Ashley Nicole Smiley.

5:26 She was born on April eleventh, same date as my high school best friend April eleventh, nineteen eighty three, and Stuart Florida, and she loved the fact that she was a Floridian. One of her favorite things to do was to travel, but ultimately her heart loved returning to Florida's beaches, and she specifically loved going to Disney World with her family. It was always special because it was home to her. Now. She lived and had moved in her adult life in Mississippi, and she was a teacher, and she taught math at Northwest Rankin High School. So shout out to that high school. If I have an listeners there, y'all say hey to me on Facebook or TikTok if you're from there. I'd love to talk to some people from there. But she was known to be a gifted math teacher, and she was good at technology and the arts. And she was a little bitty woman. When I looked her up, she was five foot one, maybe one hundred and twenty pounds.

6:16 She was a little bitty thing. She wasn't huge into makeup. She preferred a more natural look, very fair, complexted. She was thin, long blonde hair, and then she had big blue eyes. Something I found kind of fun about her too, was that she loved to play video games. I mean, she's in her forties but loved to play video games and low Ki I used to play video games too. I loved playing Call of Duty like the old maps. I loved it. I don't do it anymore, but that was my jam, so I could have totally played games with her. And she also did the other things you would expect a forty year old to do. She loved to read. She was also smitten with her two dogs. She had two Golden Retrievers. Their names were Wyatt and Thin, and she did love to take long walks with them and be out in nature and just join the sunshine with her pups. She was also a very devoted mother to her fourteen year old daughter, Carle, and Carly was literally her entire world, and in her mothering of Carly, her goals were to be compassionate, to teach strength to her daughter, because she wanted her daughter to be successful in this world. That is so difficult to navigate these days.

7:26 It's hard. And Ashley herself had experienced great difficulties in that she had Carly and then she had another baby girl, but that baby girl ended up dying very young from a genetic abnormality. Her baby's name was Natalie, and maybe because of Natalie's death, that's why Ashley was so overly I don't know if you could be overly dedicated, that's not the right word, but she was very intensely dedicated to her Carly and her ability to remain kind. I found so beautiful when she had obvious reasons that she she could have chosen to be angry with the world and to not be nice, but she recognized the fragility of life and she intended on giving her remaining daughter an absolutely beautiful life. Now this is strictly speculation. I'll tell you that because I was unable to find out a lot about baby Natalie that passed away, but I was curious about it. But I did find that some donations were made to a spinal muscular atrophy organization in her name, and so that led me to believe that this may have been what affected baby Natalie. But again it's speculation. I just wanted to give you a little more information on it if you're interested. But whatever the situation may be, there was no question that Ashley loved being a mother more than anything, and she gave her all when it came to parenting. Now, her daughter, like I said, her name was Carly. She was fourteen years old, in the love of her mother's life and as her only remaining child, Ashley was very protective of her and

8:57 fiercely loved her girl Carly. Looking at her, she was a skinny, little fourteen year old girl. She had short brown hair cut into a bob with bangs, and it kind of had like a little as the teenagers would say, it's giving Dora the Explorer, but she kind of had that little little girl cut going on. Her eyes are really really thin, and she has those drooping eyelids that make them look even smaller, so like little slit eyes. And she was a super smart girl, which made her mother so incredibly proud. Carle was also proud of her own intelligence. To be honest, she liked that she was a smart girl, so smart in fact, she actually skipped fourth grade all together. She did amazing on the standardized test that she took, and she just continued to excel even with skipping the fourth grade. She loved going to school and she loved performing and doing well in class. Now, as she aged, common issues started to occur. Things that happen y'all, boys started getting interesting to her.

9:59 She did. She start dabbling in marijuana. Her mom had caught her lying on some stuff and she was quick to anger, especially when she was called out on the things that she wasn't doing correct. She also began having some emotional issues, which her mother immediately recognized and took action, and that action included her going to therapy weekly. So her mother remained very involved in her life, if not even more involved once she started seeing she was having some struggles as she was maturing. And parenting is hard, y'all, especially when you're parenting a teen. You know, if you know, you know, if you know you know it's hard, it is not for the week. Luckily, though Ashley was not on her own parenting, she had met the love of her life. His name was Heath Smiley and their romance had turned into love and then turned into eventually marriage.

10:50 They had happily gotten married in twenty nineteen in the mountains of Gatlinburg and they had these happy family photos to document that day. Carly was excited she got a great stepdad in Heath, and he knew the issues and the traumas that Ashley and Carly had both been through in this, you know, in their lives, but he was willing and ready to take it all on. He loved Ashley. And he never got to play stepdad to Natalie because she passed away before Heath had met Ashley. But he loved Carly and when I tell you dove in headfirst to care for her, that's exactly what he did. Now Ashley mom. Ashley had been previously married before to a man named Kevin greg but it seemed to sour pretty quickly.

11:34 Kevin was allegedly a drug user, and Carly, you know, she wanted her dad, but she didn't like to be around him. She was you know, quoted as saying that he used drugs a lot in her presence and pretty much all the time he was using drugs. She specifically stated that he had was blowing smoke in her face and he even one time when she was twelve, forced her to drink a whole beer in front of him. She was now fourteen, and she was at the age that she was old enough to say, you know, I don't really I'm not really down with this. I don't really really want to go do this anymore. And even just talking about Kevin seemed to stress both mom Ashley and Carly out. Both of them given like this deer in the headlights look whenever his name was even brought up.

12:17 Carlely did have court ordered visitation every other week with her dad, but again, like I said, she didn't like it, and she would argue that he just didn't care for her. Even you know, he might pick her up, but he didn't like make sure she ate and that she had something to drink and she brushed her teeth or anything like that. So anytime that she would visit him, both Ashley and Heath felt like Carly just wasn't herself for a day or two afterwards when she would return back home and it was almost like she had to reacclimate to being back into the normal home after leaving her father's house. So a little bit about Heath. Heath was thirty nine years old. He was a physical therapy assistant and at the time that this case takes place, he had been married to Ashley for just about three and a half years. He had a great relationship with Carly.

13:05 They would palle around together, they would play video games together. At one point, she was loving karate, so he would go to her karate classes when she was interested in that, and he just was a supporter of her in all that she did. Heath did not have any biological children of his own, and he loved Carly as if she was his own. That was his daughter, and he wanted to support her. Heath did not have many interactions with Carly's bio dad, though it seemed like the bio dad was more of one to just kind of drop her off in the driveway and then drive off like not even making sure she made it into the house. And Heath certainly wasn't going to go chase him down or anything to go have an interaction with him, because matter of fact, Kevin was allegedly doing things that you know, quite frankly, they just irritated Ashley and Heath to no end.

13:56 So the less they interacted the better. Now, what kind of things did Kevin supposedly do well, aside from not properly caring for their daughter when he was in his care. He was also fighting them in court for custody, which scared Ashley because Ashley didn't think that Carly needed to be around him that much. He also gave Carly an iPad, which she was able to access social media through, even though Ashley had made it very clear that with everything going on in Carly's life and that she was starting to have some struggles and get in trouble, she did not want Carly on social media. She didn't think that TikTok and these other apps were a very healthy or safe decision for her. But regardless of this being vocalized, Kevin still gave her an iPad. Anyway. Now, I'm gonna say this, if you follow this case, sometimes you'll hear people say he gave her an iPad, sometimes they say an iPod, and sometimes I've heard them even say that he gave her a burner phone. Regardless of whatever the media was, It's irrelevant whatever it was he gave her.

14:54 She was using that item to access social media and Ashley really did not want her on it. And I can't I can't argue that that parental decision. These apps, we know, open a world up to kids that otherwise they wouldn't have access to And the main thing that was irritating to Ashley was that Carly continued to access the social media even though her mom had explicitly told her she did not want her on the social media. And then to add to that, and to compound the complication, Ashley had gotten herself a little boyfriend and was now speaking to that little boy through the social media, which was further upsetting Ashley because it was going against everything she was trying to do to insulate and protect Carly from outside, you know, external influences that she seemed to want to be a part of. Ashley thought that fourteen was just too young to date as well. And so then we compound this issue and then Carly gets caught sneaking out of the house after curfew to go meet up with him, and so it's like, no matter what, you know, Ashley's fighting an uphill battle. And I one hundred percent feel for Ashley on this one. Co parenting has got to be tough. I'm married happily, but I come from a divorced household. And side note here, I swear to God I think my dad tripped and accidentally impregnated my mom something of that nature. Because they are so different. It's scary and I literally cannot figure out how I was made because the two people can't get along to save their life. It is bizarre. And this

16:25 seems to be very similar to what Carly's bio parents were like, especially in parenting styles. I'm telling you, how the hell I came to be is a mystery and it defies all of science. Okay, I digress, But these two Ashley's parent up, sorry Carly's parents, they seem to be having a tough time co parenting as well, so I guess it's common. But basically, it was a constant battle and this little boy that she was dating, his name was Anthony. But it wasn't long term. It didn't last as you could expect. It ended, And you know, Ashley worked at the same school as Carly, so she did still see the two of them hanging out in the halls together, but nothing was crazy or out of line or anything like that, so she kind of let it ride, but she still had her eye on Ashley.

17:10 Considering the poor decision making, Ashley also did what I think a lot of us would do at that point, and she started taking the step of monitoring Carly's phone. So she had her phone and she had that other device that her dad had given her, and she made some limitations too. She said, look, you can have your phone, but you're not gonna have it at night because I don't want you staying up all night on this phone. I want you getting some good sleep. But other than that, Carly was allowed to have her phone any other time. Another disappointment for Ashley, though, was when Carly got in trouble for bringing a knife to school. Now, real quick, this was not a big butcher knife where she was running around the hall slicing people. Okay. It was a Swiss army knife. And she was given the knife by her stepfather, and he bought it under the premise that she would do these little crafts and arts and crafts in her room, and so he bought it for her to do work on those crafts in her room. He had been given one himself when he was a kid.

18:07 He really appreciated it. He thought it was cool, and so he was just doing something nice for his stepdaughter in that same regard, he certainly didn't think that she was going to bring this knife to school. So when Carly was caught with it. She first told the school, Oh, it's for protection because there's other students and I'm worried that they're going to try to hurt me, and so I brought to defend myself. But then rather quickly the story changed and she said, oh, I brought it because somebody else told me to bring it. So the propensity to lie was proven here because we don't know what the truth was, but whatever it was, it was obvious that she was going to be in trouble for having a weapon on campus. So, as was protocol, she was sent to the Alternative School for discipline for doing you know, bringing the weapon to school, and she was sent there for a semester. And yet another incident at school, she also got in trouble for cheating. Now, what happened in that incident. Basically, she had a phone. She took a picture of the teacher's computer when the teacher wasn't looking, and it had the answers on it, and she shared those answers with the other students. But what's crazy about that, and you probably you're thinking the same thing is why would she do that? She doesn't have to cheat. She was smart enough to skip a grade. Why would she do this? She was beyond smart. To me, it was almost as if she did it just to be defiant as well as she was trying to be cool in front of the other kids and kind of like be like, oh, I can get you the answers and kind of send them their way. So poor Ashley was constantly dealing with

19:40 these battles when it came to Carley. But y'all, we all know parenting teens is not for the week, and Heath was there to support Ashley. But from what I've gathered, Ashley was doing all of the main parenting of her daughter, from disciplining to giving advice to you know, bringing her here, there, and yonder. And I'm sure that it was just the straw that broke the camel's back on March nineteenth, twenty twenty four, when this case kind of erupted. It was like every other morning. When they woke up that morning, there was no drama. They all got ready, Ashley made some tea like she normally did, and then Carly and Ashley head off to school. They left a little bit before Heath like they normally did, and he left a little bit after them to go to work at the physical therapy clinic. That afternoon, though, two of Carly's friends decided that they needed to go talk to her mom at school. They went and said, you know, miss Ashley, we need to talk to you. And they kind of started saying, look, Ashley's always been so bubbly and friendly and outgoing, but we feel like we might need to tell you something. And she's like, okay, what the friend said, Look, you know, she's starting to smoke weed. And they were worried enough about it that they were nervous. They felt really nervous to go to Ashley, but they wanted her to know. Look, she's smoking marijuana, she's got a vate pen,

21:10 she's doing the THHC vape pins, and we just kind of feel like she's spiraling down a dark path and we want you to know. And it took a lot of courage for these young kids to go to their teacher to tell her this, but they finally mustered up the guts and they went and they told Miss Ashley, and to those kids, kudos to you for doing the right thing and trying to look out for your friend. So when the bell rang at the end of the school day, Carly went to her mother's classroom, as was usual, and that's when Ashley confronted her with the information that she had received a little bit earlier that afternoon. She didn't sell out the kids who had told her, but she said, and she was very direct with Carly, that I know what's going on and this has got to stop.

21:54 And Carly looked at her and denied everything. She's like, that's not true. I'm not doing that. I don't know why would you accuse me of that. She denied it all. But Ashley still right then and there searched her booksack to see if she had anything on her I'm sure once they left the school, and i don't know this, but I'm sure they discussed all of the situations that were going on, and I'm sure Ashley was disappointed. And as they drove home from school, they were having these mother daughter conversations that could have been happened or it could have been dead silent. Either way, I'm sure the mood was a bit not happy in the car on the way home. Included in this discussion was not only I'm sure that you know Carley was making bad decisions and smoking weed, but Ashley had also found out that her fourteen year old daughter had gotten her nipple pierced as well as a tattoo. Now, listen, y'all, I'm no prude.

22:53 Y'all know that, but I can tell you now under my roof, there's no frigging way of fourteen year old's gonna come home with a nipple piercing. That said, who gave her the damn piercing? Did she do it to herself because that's scary, or did she go somewhere and they pierced her. That's even worse, Like what is going on? So adding to Ashley's stress here also is that when she found out about the struggles that were going on as a mom, she made a decision, I'm gonna put my daughter in therapy. I want her to talk to somebody else. Maybe she'll open up, maybe she'll be willing to talk more, and we can kind of get whatever is going on under control, because usually these behaviors are symptoms of something else, and maybe they're trying to you know, it's very common for teenagers to smart to start smoking weed when they've got big feelings, big emotions. They don't know how to deal with them, and so that seems to be a way that they try to calm themselves down.

23:46 Not saying it's right, but it is rather common in today's society. So Ashley is now even more stressed because clearly it looks like therapy wasn't stopping or helping the problems that she was hoping therapy would have helped with. And during all of this as well, Ashley found out that Carly was also cutting herself, and she found this out through that iPad, and Carly had been cutting herself specifically on her thighs. So when Ashley was younger, she too had some bouts with depression and she had been put on prozac. Now, whenever Ashley went with carle and was talking to her therapist, the therapist wanted to put Carlely on some medicine as well, but Ashley said, hold on, I do not want her put on prozac because when I was a teenager, they put it on me or put me on it, and I started having suicidal thoughts that got very uncomfortable for a while, so I stopped taking it immediately. I don't want to put my daughter on the same medicine. I think that was a great call on Ashley's part and so she did approve, however, a different but similar medication for Carley to try to help with her extreme anxiety and the depression that she was obviously facing in life. Ashley also didn't just freelance hand the medicine over to Carly. She would dispense it herself because she was worried about Carly, considering she also found out Carly was taking sleeping pills at night without permission and without anyone's knowledge, and that scared Ashley, because

25:18 why are you taking this medicine that nobody knows what you're doing. It could hurt you, and I don't want you to be doing that. Regardless of everything though that I have listed that's going on, Carle also had good things about her as well. I know I've just compounded all of the troubles, but that's part of the story. But Ashley wasn't an absolute just demon her. Both of her parents said that they loved her and that she was a generally good kid. She just started having, you know, problems about fourteen thirteen and twelve thirteen and fourteen. But regardless of that, Ashley was trying to do everything for her child that she could to help her succeed, and it just seemed that bad decision after bad decision kept compounding.

25:59 But what is that's a mother supposed to do when her child just won't listen? And when they get home, they pull up into the driveway and they go into the garage. It's about three fifty five pm whenever the suv pulls into the car port, and they just go about their usual afternoon tasks. They get out. You can see Carly walk around because there's video. You can see Carly get out of the car. She walks around the front of the car to the front passenger side. She pulls a bag out of it, just like a little a small bag of sorts, I don't know, maybe a purse. And then together they walk inside the kitchen where Ashley she has a brown booksack looking like a light brown leather booksack looking thing. Ashley sets that back down on the ground at the end of the kitchen counter, and then Ashley takes off her scarf, which she sets down on the counter as well. And I know this because there was also a camera that was in their kitchen. Now, the whole house was not rigged with cameras. I don't want it to seem like that. It was basically just put on the back door, and the camera had originally been bought for Heath's mother, but she lived out in the country. The Wi Fi was a problem and she never ended up being able to use it, so they decided to take that camera and just use it at the house. I guess if someone were to break in or there was a problem, hey, we'll know who walked into our house. And then when they get in there and set their stuff down, Ashley then asked Carly, hey, will you go let the dogs out? Those two beautiful Golden retrievers that she loved so much. Heath's job usually kept him a little bit later than Ashley and Carley, like I mentioned, and so he typically would get home between five and five thirty. Ashley was needing some stuff

27:30 from the grocery store and was texting with Heath saying, Hey, I'm I go to Kroger I believe it was Do you need things from the store, and they were texting back and forth. He said yeah, he wanted some like junk, junk food type stuff, mountain dew, chips, whatever, just the normal crap we eat. And then a little bit later Ashley texted and she asked direct quote, what time will we be home, honey, And that text came out at four fourteen pm, and he said I'll be at work for a little while, and then she sent back a th up. So around five pm he pulls into the driveway and he parks at the furthest point towards the end of the driveway to the backyard. So when you pull up their driveway, it goes straight back to the fence where the backyard is, and then you can turn left into their carport. So he pulls up to the furthest point at the end of the driveway. He's driving a blue truck, and then there's another car parked right next to where he parks the truck, as well as Ashley's SUV in the open garage where they had gotten and pulled in earlier. He gets out of his truck and he walks to the carport door, which leads directly into a laundry room which is adjacent to the kitchen.

28:38 So you open the door from the garage, walk into the laundry room, then open another door and you're stepping right into the kitchen. So he opened the garage door, entered the laundry room, kicked off his work shoes right there, and then he grabs the door knob and he turns to open turns the knob to open the door, which would lead directly into the kitchen. He only got it open about three or four inches before he saw a a muzzle flash go off in his face and then boom about a foot from his head. The gun goes off. Now, it had been a beautiful day, y'all, the bright blue sky.

29:20 It was now the late afternoon when Rankin County dispatcher Kevin Collins answered a call that came to his console, and when he answered, a very distraught which sounded like adult female was screaming over the phone and needing help and needing help. Now. She was so distressed, in fact, that she couldn't even think of her own address as she was trying to say where she was. And this is common, y'all, when people are under extreme amounts of duress. Sometimes you can't even think of the most basically, Sometimes it's hard to down nine one one, and you've been trained since you were a kid to down nine one one. Sometimes you can't think of, you know, basic things, your name. Almost so Luckily we have systems in place nine one one, that the dispatchers are able to locate you and where you're calling from, even if you can't announce it to them.

30:05 So dispatcher Collins verified the call as coming from two to one four Ashton's way. Now here's that call. But I want to make a note here. There are no edits, there's no cutdowns of the call, and so you're just gonna hear pure agony in her voice. But don't be confused, but this is not a woman. The voice you're hearing is actually the extremely distressed voice of mister Heath Smiley, screaming for help.

31:01 Can give me say? What does she at? Heard? Is you? Fourteen? Fourteen? Okay, ma'am stay at her phone, or ma'am stay on the phone with me. Just calm down. What's your name? What every college? I mean? Okay, come down? When did you get your name again? College? Eight? Smiley? Sir?

31:41 Alright, sir? What's your what's your phone number? You call 'em me from. Rover? Does she hit you? Uh? Yeah? I got hitting me back a little bit. I'm like, uh okay, so did you. Graze your neck? This? Sir? Alright? And what's her name? Now? You do work with Carly Gregg. Carly Gregg? Why does she still have a doing home? I took her farmers. She ran to your farmers ran.

32:23 D uh? I didn't I have to do? She didn't turn me something that I couldn't understand. I walked the door. See that time. I don't know what's going on. Which way is you want off to? She ran into the backyard. You won't play the way over up there? Ran into the backyard and went over your fence. Alright? What is she? Uh? Alright? What does she wear? Uh? Te Sarry ground u uh gray shirt and the James gray shirt and James about how tall is.

33:12 Uh? Huh five two? About five to two? All the colored hair. Uh uh bright. Brownish short got broundish, just shortened hair. I go and show the fire moment there was just screaming, and I know what they do. You don't just drive the time. People the world. Okay, just tell me how I when we got and we got everybody here. For uh. Shoes? What killed her?

33:56 She killed her? Mom? Time? I come about what. Works the mon Tell me. Works? Sir shirt? Stir, sir tell John w D sir? I wait.

35:06 Wait, sorry for you, sir wo okay, your. Address is two one five correct, there wasn't more to one four? Say your address is to one poor? Okay, sir, where is your where's your wife? She's said on no more of my daughter's step daughter's moon. She's on the floor in your stepdaughter's room, and. Uh uh, what's your wife's name? Actually smiling astually smile.

35:58 Where are you? Probably is sir? I need you speak with me? Okay? Can you go out? Can you go outside the house and speak to me? Okay, okay, Now whether you keep probing going on with your is it your step. Daughter or the step daughter? And I don't know what's go long The step doctors don quick a little.

36:41 While time to work out from rob and not the direct. Okay, and you say you're you're bi passmen is shot. I don't know. What I'm gonna let you. Take with me. I'm okay, okay.

37:26 Now, look, I know that was along. That was a seven minute call, but I don't want to cut it down. I wanted to be able to hear it in its entirety so you can kind of understand the circumstances of what was going on. But police arrived within seven minutes to take over the situation, which by the way, is average. So they flew there. So Hunter Lewis, he was a patrol deputy and he had been on the force for nine years. He was the first officer to respond to the scene. He jumps right out of his vehicle. He runs straight up to the front door and he tries to get into it, but it's locked, and so he's banging on the door to be let in, and he can hear someone screaming from the inside, and he hears dogs barking. So he's knocking, knocking, knocking on the door. You know it's me, it's the police. Open up. And then finally Heath comes to the door and he unlocks it.

38:10 He comes out and then eventually just falls to the ground on the porch. Once he saw the cop. He was shirtless. He was wearing navy pants and socks with crocs on. Remember he had kicked his shoes off when he walked into the house. I'm guessing he just threw his crocks on at some point between the phone call and the officer arriving. So the officer sees him, but he still has to go in and kind of figure out what's going on in the house, considering that the nonm on one call said that his wife had been shot. So he runs into the house and he's looking around and he eventually goes into one of the back bedrooms and he does in fact find Heath's wife, Ashley, laying on the ground. She's flat on her back, her arms are crossed over her chest, and she has a towel over her face, a red towel to be specific, over her face. So it was kind of odd that her arms would be crossed over her back. No one normally falls like that, but that's where they were. They were crossed over. So Deputy Lewis removed the towel to see what was going on, and he saw once he moved the towel that Ashley was clearly deceased with multiple bullet holes in her face. He did check her pulse just in case, but there was none. You know, gunshot wounds to the face usually are pretty deadly, and that was going to be the case here. That he looked around the room and there was no sign of like a massive struggle or anything. There was blood spatter on the TV in the room as well as the blood pooling

39:40 around Ashley's head, and he laid the towel back over Ashley's face when he went back outside. Heath then advised him, this was my step daughter. My stepdaughter shot me and then she ran. So the deputy radioed out to all units that fourteen year old Carly Gregg was the suspect in this shooting, and he then further explained, look, when the shot went off, I grabbed the gun. I wrestled the gun from her and it's on the counter in there. There's still one bullet in the chamber, and oh my god, you know I've been shot. So fourteen year old Carly Madison greg was the culprit in a double shooting of her own parents. You know, how could this be? And if it's true, it's pretty freaking crazy that a fourteen year old would shoot their parents. So detective arrived on scene.

40:33 Detectives came, and it's a nice home. It's a white house. It's got reddish brown brick, it's got white posts in the front, a real pretty neutral gray door, and it's in a middle class neighborhood. The inside of the home is neat and orderly. Everyday life obviously happened in the house, but the home was well kept the walls were painted in light colors. The sun was kind of beaming in through the windows, and the home honestly looked in if you didn't know what horrors awaited just inside the adjacent room to that living room. So there's officers arriving, they're going throughout the house and checking it out. And something that stood out to me when I was there's bodycam. When I was watching the body cam is that when the officers were processing the scene, there was one officer who showed up who obviously pulled rank. He had rank over everybody, and he comes in and they're kind of talking about what to do, and he was instructing every other officer what he wanted them to do while they were searching the home, and he said, I want the whole home searched for possible weapons. But then he said very politely searched. And this may not mean anything to anyone else, but I guess this is my nod to law enforcement and the care that they try to show when they're invading in people's lives in the middle of a tragedy, that he would say I want it very politely searched, meaning don't destroy these people's homes. But you've got to go clear it. The Smilies were nice people.

41:56 They had the same problems as all of us, but now things had taken a deadly turn. What was going on? So the medics arrived within minutes as well as you know, when the deputies did, and they end up bloating Heath onto a gurney and the officers kind of continue to question him while he's being carted off, and Heath explained that when he opened the door, the gun went off. He just instinctively grabbed the gun as it went off, and it continued to go off. He said, it shot two more times. He wrestled it from Carly and it he finally got it away from her, and he said, you know, I never felt the round when it hit me, but it had gone into his shoulder, his right shoulder, the trap muscle and y'all very close proximity to his head, super close, but he never felt it. Likely the adrenaline, but he was confused and he was scared in the moment, and he couldn't understand why Carly would have shot him.

42:50 He says, she was screaming out of her mind. He said, you know, she looked scared. She looked like she had seen a demon and the look she had was a look that he said he had never seen on her face before. And he just described it as as just utterly terrified and so unsure of what was going on, and wrapped up in the moment of just being shot and Carly acting insane, he thought in his split second mind that there must be an intruder in the house. Carly thought that he was the intruder coming back for her, and so he shot her when he accidentally mistake, you know, mistook her for the bad guy coming back. That's kind of what he deduced in his mind in that split second. So he was asked, you know where would Carly have gotten this gun from? He said, well, that's our gun.

43:34 It's normally kept on Ashley's side of the bed between the mattress and the bedframe, and there were some cubbies there that they had built for storage, and he said, it's been there for years. So why did Ashley have that gun? I'm sure you want to know. Well, number one, it's America and you can have a fucking gun if you want one. But number two, she had the gun because she was terrified of her ex husband and she wanted it in case he showed up. She was very scared of him. But they had a her guns too. There was an unloaded shotgun, a Camo shotgun in their closet. He had. Heath had an ar again, it was unloaded. It was in the closet. They had another gun in the safe. And this wasn't something that Carl wouldn't have been aware of. They would shoot guns together, the parents went and they would go, you know, practice shooting. Carly never really showed interest in it at all. I know Heath had tried to take her one time. She wouldn't.

44:24 It just wasn't for her. So once he took the gun from Carly, he said he then went through the house to clear it because he was looking for an intruder. He thought someone else was there when she had shot at him, though, she said. He said she fell backwards towards the kitchen island, like where her mom's bag was, and she fell back onto her butt, and she was screaming like a wild woman. And then she got up and tore off out of the house. So he just turned around and locked the door behind her when she took off, and he said, I just went through the house to go clear it, and he said, Carly looked clearly off. The way she was acting was not what I had ever seen before. So he opened the gun.

45:06 It was a revolver. He popped the gun open. He looked in the cylinder and he said it still had one live round in it, but it was a seven shot weapon. Only three shots had been fired at him, and he knew the gun had been full, so that left four shots unaccounted for, but not for long, because as he was going through the house, he saw Ashley's phone on the counter, and then he saw another phone next to it, kind of as he went by, he went and cleared their bedroom closet, He went in their bathroom, He went into a spare room that they had, which was a room where they had like workout equipment and just like spare stuff. And then he finally went into Carly's room, and that's to his shock where he found Ashley laying on the ground. He said again her arms were crossed over her chest, and he said, there was a towel on her face. He quickly checked her pulse.

45:56 He moved the towel. He said, I could see that she had been shot in the right side of her face. That's when I freaked out and I dialed nine one one. After all of this information was given, that's when Heath really started to go into shock. The ambulance took him and they took him to Baptist hospital Er. Now, before he was rolled off, he was and it's very clear, with very shaky hands, he was able to pull his wallet out and get his license for the police officer. Although he was horrendously distressed and wounded, he was able to give his license to the officer so they could id them I d him at least. The officers then did the cliche thing you see in the movies where they taped off the house from the cop car to the trees, and then the search was on where was carly So Sheriff's Office investigator Tyler Burnell was on scene, and the reason he had come on scene so quickly was that when he heard the nine to one dispatch go out, the dispatcher was asking for any units that were working the north end of the county to respond to a possible disturbance with a possible shooting. So he lit up his unit lights and sirens and he went straight that direction, and the dispatcher continued to update him while he was flying to the scene. So he gets there just as Heath was being loaded into the ambulance.

47:09 He was trying to get updated on the situation, so he got quickly briefed by other officers. He then immediately grabbed his camera and then he grabbed his gloves so that he could go into the house and start assessing the scene. Yes, investigators do wear gloves. They're trying to avoid the touch DNA while they're documenting the scene. Even y'all, even when you just speak, you know, DNA comes out of your mouth and lands on things. So it's important that they wear gloves. And he started photographing the scene like they do from the outside in. So whenever a scene is being photographed, it's usually taken in a three hundred and sixty degree like overlapping pattern so that they can try to get everything in a continuous photo, if that makes sense. And so his first picture was of the front of the house that included the mailbox. And sometimes you'll see when they take photos, they'll get a front shot of the house to id it and you can see, you know, the address if it's on the home.

48:00 And then another photograph was taken of the two phones that Heath had mentioned that were on the table. There was a white one and a black one, and that white phone was later determined to be Ashley's and the black one was determined to be Carly's, and they were right next to one another. He also photographed other things like the other guns in the home, and also he found four boxes of thhc vatepins in the home. So the photograph that was rather interesting though to everyone, came from the kitchen where, amongst other items like there was a dog kennel and some other things, there was a white USB chord hanging like a USB style cord hanging down, but it was unknown what it was plugged into because there was nothing there, but it clearly had been plugged into something up on the wall. They would later realize that that was the camera that used to be there.

48:54 That was the chord that used to be plugged into that wise security camera system, but it was gone. The camera wasn't there. He also took photos of the multiple gunshot holes in the sheet rock, including one in the laundry room into the wall, and it's next to like a yellow bag, and it follows along with exactly what Heath had said was happening, that these shots were being fired and you can see them kind of wildly as they go through the wall in a kind of upward trajectory. Two of the rounds went actually straight through the walls ended up in the outside of the car port. One of them actually hit Ashley's the rack on the top of Ashley's car and it just obliterated. Another one just kind of lost velocity and fell and landed and rolled near the vehicle. And after he photographed it all, he drew up a rough sketch of the home, which is typical they'll use so that when they go to court or if there's a court case, that it's very clear as they're in their report where they're going and what they're doing. About that same time, units police units were being sent out and they were canvassing the area and all were looking for that fourteen year old Carly who had fled on foot, and presumptively, since she was on foot, she couldn't have gotten that far. I mean, we're only talking seven or ten minutes after the initial call to nine one one. So officers showed up in droves immediately checking the scene. Some are processing, some are searching. Heath had said Carly ran out the back door, but officers still weren't certain if anyone was still in the home or not, because they hadn't been able to clear the house,

50:25 and they didn't okay, did she come back in? And is she hiding? Is she gonna, you know, ambush us at some point? Maybe she's under a bed. So the radio chatter was a buzz the entire time. It's giving out Ashley's description, and officers are making tactical decisions because they can't just run in their balls to the wall. They still have to assume that there's a bad guy in the house. And so the officers continue throughout the home and they're piecing things together and something else I wanted to say, and it's these tender moments, these small things that maybe don't matter to a lot of people, but they matter to me. The officers, when they're on body cam talking about the scene, they continued to refer to Ashley not as the dead woman in the room. They referred to Ashley as mom. And in every conversations that's how they addressed her. They would say things like, hey, Mom's in that back room, and you know that's mama, we're looking for daughter, and something in it was just tender, and it was like all of these men, these you know, muscular manly men and their uniforms and their guns and all that. They behaved so fatherly on the scene. And if you've never experienced something like this, it's interesting to listen to and to watch if you want to really hear the caliber of people that are on these scenes.

51:38 So an officer was patrolling and was searching for Carly and he turned onto a street I believe it was called Farmington Street, and as he turned, he kind of looked to his right, he had a canine in the back. Canin's name was Voodoo. Shout out. That's a Southern thing. I like it. But the Voodoo was kind of whining and looking out of the window, and so he kind of just turned to his right just by chance, and there he saw a girl matching the exact description of Carly, just standing there. And so she was soaking wet too, which was weird. So the officer jumped out, even blocked traffic. He didn't stop say hi, by kiss my ass, nothing, He just jumped out of the car and he ran up to her and he said were you just involved in a shooting over there? And the little girl says, yes, yes, and I'm sorry. She was wet, by the way, because she had climbed down into a sewage drain, a storm drain at one point, trying to hide, and that's ultimately why she had been wet. Now, something I do want to point out to you is when the officer said, were you just involved in a shooting over there? And she said, yeah, I'm sorry. She never once asked about her mom. She did say, is my stepdad okay? But I don't feel like she was really caring about her stepdad.

52:52 She obviously didn't care to ask about her mom. But logically, to me, it's because she knew her mother was dead. She had just blown her brains out, she put a rag over her mother's bullet riddled face. I mean she I'm pretty sure she knew the answer to that already. Why would she ask? To me, it seemed like she asked about her stepfather and was he okay because she wanted to know she had killed him or not because that would affect the story that she might would give. Now that's just in the moment, that's how I feel. But kind of seemed like that was what was going on. So he grabs her, he puts her, takes her into custody, and he puts her in the back of his unit, and he takes her right back to the house. And so they confirm her identity, and then the officer promptly does a GSR test or a gunshot residue test on her hands, so if she actually was the one that fired the weapon, this test would prove it. Meanwhile, at the hospital, Heath had arrived and like I had told you before, his gunshot wound was through and through. They checked him out. It was such a clean shot through that all they really did was put gaus on it.

53:51 There was no stitches or anything necessary. And once he was checked out and they just saw that one shot, he was then eventually no, you know, it takes hours at the hospital, but he was eventually cleared and allowed to go home. Now, considering his entire life had just changed in the literal blink of an eye, it's almost pitiful how he was released from the hospital and by the time he got home, the police had already cleared out and he returned home to an empty house where just hours before, his family once lived and they loved together there and now he was just alone in the silence.

54:32 And the reason I bring that up is, I remember when my friend Heidi was murdered. I didn't want to believe it, and I immediately jumped in my car. I flew down the interstate. It took me twenty two minutes to get there, and I turned into our neighborhood. I made the turns, and I just remember making a rite and pulling up in front of her house, and I could tell something was different the second that I pulled up to it. Most notably, all the doors were open on her house, and I I knew. I just knew instantly that it had to be true, because why would all of the doors on her house be open. I later found out it's because a swat team had to come in, And that's a story I'm going to tell another day. But you just knew looking at the house that life was different and I was just a friend.

55:22 I just can feel for him pulling back up. I can imagine him walking into the home where the remnants of his wife's just gruesome murder remained. I mean, her body was gone, but you know, he walked back in that room and saw that blood on the wall and on the TV and on the ground. So the night came and went, and at some point the next day, Heath decided to go look at the video camera footage of the garage. And he didn't know what he was looking for. He just went to go look to see if maybe there was something that might help in the investigation of what the hell had just happened at his home. And what he realized quickly was that the police had missed that camera. They didn't even know that camera was there.

56:03 So to his. Surprise, it caught all the footage of that afternoon, and so he called the police immediately and said, hey, y'all miss this. There's an SD card, right and if you want to come get it, you can have it. I'll give you its contents and you can kind of see what all I was saying went on. Now, much to his horror, he had on video the visual of him walking into the home, and it also caught the audio of the shots fired. And you just hear this guttural screaming ah ah, and then you hear Heath yell, what's the matter. So instead of me just explaining it to you, I've got it. Right here for you. I'm gonna play it.

56:48 It is home audio, so it's not the best quality, but I want you to give it a listen yourself. You heard that. And then when reviewing the tape, he'th wanted to save the video, right, He didn't want anything to happen to it, so he copied it to his computer, which, by the way, it was a brand new computer that he had. It was the first time that he had ever done a transfer of the video or a video on that computer, and in his effort to copy and paste the video into the computer, he accidentally clicked cut and paste, which kind of rose raised suspicions of the investigators when they got there, because it just looked odd, you know, had he tried to edit the video in some way? Why did he cut it? But the reality after it was all said and done, was that it was the new computer. He hadn't worked it yet, and so he just didn't realize that he h had cut paste instead of copy paste. But he had not edited the video in any way. And the police realized, you know, this was just a genuine mistake, but they did kind of chastise him and say, you know, man, next time, don't touch anything. Just call us because you know you could be charged with tampering with evidence since you were trying to make a copy of this anyway, which we understand you want to copy, but you need to let us do the investigation and not touch anything. Well, Heath

58:19 took that personal and he was like, I'm trying to be helpful, and now you're making it seem like I've done something wrong or that I may be in trouble. And so he went and he did retain a lawyer at that moment. He also then started tearing his house completely apart looking for that kitchen camera, but y'all, he couldn't find it, and he couldn't understand where it was because police didn't have it either. And he even went to the extent of digging through all of the clothes. He even looked in the shoes in the house to see if maybe the SD card was in shoes. He dug through every piece of their trash trying to see did to get thrown away because their trash was coming on Friday before he threw the trash out, but he couldn't find it, and the police were adamant, we don't have the camera. They had even searched the yard for it.

59:01 Police couldn't find it anywhere. All they knew was that white cord was still hanging by the dog kennel, but no one knew where the camera was. Days went by, and you know, whenever a tragedy happens, people will bring food in droves to come help you out, especially when you just lost your wife and now your stepdaughter has been arrested and taken into custody. I'm sure people were just, you know, so concerned for him. Well, after the days went by, the fridge was so full that he decided, I need to clean some of this out because there's you know, it's too much. And so as he's pulling things out and throwing them away, lo and behold, if he didn't look in the very back of his refrigerator, behind some food and some water bottles, there was the missing camera from the kitchen. Now he's no idiot. He was scared to death. He didn't even touch it. He shut the fridge. He called the police because after that computer incident, he didn't want any trouble. And they came and they picked up the camera from the refrigerator, which by the way, isn't that crazy. If you remember in the episode where the it was believed that the dad killed the boyfriend, they found the wallet and all that stuff, remember days later in his refrigerator if you even know what I'm talking about. But I'm not going to do a spoiler alert alert in case you're a new listener, you can go back and you'll hear it whenever you you know, you get to it. It's the Zachari Anderson case.

1:00:29 So the police got the video and they loaded the card into the computer and what it showed is both horrifying in action, but emotionally it's traumatizing too. It's like a train wreck and you just can't stop it, but you can't stop watching either. You want to scream so bad when you're watching this video, you know Ron, Ashley, Ron, You want to scream at her so bad, but you can't, and the reality of what's to come can't be stopped, so you just sit and you just watch as it unfolds. So they press play and you see both Carle and Ashley enter into the house and like I told you, Ashley sets down her bag on the ground on the counter.

1:01:12 She takes off her scarf and then she turns and she asks Ashley to let the dogs out, which Ashley immediately does. Ashley, then, knowing the layout of the home from that detective's drawing, Okay, you walk into the kitchen, Carley's room would have been to the right of the camera. Ashley in Heath's room would have been to the left. Well. When Carle goes outside and lets the dogs out, she comes back in the house for a second, and Ashley has taken a right and gone back to where Carle's room would be, and you see Carlely kind of pacing a little bit. She keeps fidgeting with her bangs, like trying to fix her bangs. It's almost kind of like a little fidgety nervousness of the bangs. And Carley then went back outside with the dogs. And after that happens a little while later. Ashley comes back from the back and she's texting on her phone. You can see it happening, and she walks to the back door. She opens the blinds on the back door and then she kind of peeks out and you can tell she's glancing out and seeing what Carly is doing. And she then returns back to the bedroom again. She does come back out and goes back in a couple more times, but ultimately she ends up back in Carly's room. And then at one point she comes back out of where Carly's room would be, and she's holding something in her hand, which looks like a grouping of vape pins, if you know what they look like, and her body language looks as if she's trying to make sure Carle is still outside, because she kind of peeks out the back door again, and then

1:02:42 she quickly returns back to Carly's room, and my mom spidy senses are telling me she was searching that room because remember she had confronted Carly at school that day. So Carly then comes back into the kitchen and the dogs have come in with her, and she slowly kind of walks towards her room and then quickly turns back towards her mother's room and walks with purpose back into her mother's room. Then a few seconds later, she appears back in that kitchen doorway, and she leans in and kind of peeks around to the right trying to see like looks like she's looking to see if her mother is in the kitchen, but she's very clearly also holding something behind her back out of the view of the camera, and then once she notices that the coast is clear, she continues forward back towards her room, and the whole time the dogs are wagging around, They're wanting her attention, you know, being doing what dogs do. And then bam, that first shot goes off and you hear Ashley scream in this high, this high pitch, just just like totally freaking out scream, and then two more shots follow boom, and then another one boom, and then absolute silence. Carly then appears back in the frame of that camera in the kitchen, and she's clearly hiding something behind her back, so she kind of keeps her face to where the camera is and she goes and she sits down on

1:04:13 a stool at the counter, and then you hear this heavy clank on the barstool and it definitely sounds like metal or something metal heavy hitting the barstool when she sets it down. And then you see her pick up Ashley's phone and she starts texting the lighter of the two dogs. Body language when you're watching the camera is everything, because you can tell that that dog knows that something is wrong. It's ears or pinned back. It just looks very nervous, very kind of afraid of what's going and unsure. And then Carly sets that phone down and starts singing this weird like little tune. And then she goes back into the room where her mother's dead body was laying.

1:05:00 She's cool, calm and collected the entire time, There's no rushing about her or anything like that. She then fusses at the dog she can hear in the back, fussing and telling them like, no move, no, no, get back. And then she returns back into the kitchen, where she whistles and says something to the effect of come on, guys. It's like, come on guys in this sweet little animal calling voice, and puts the dogs back outside. The video is chilling, just as heartbreaking as it is, and then it almost is angering at how just calm she is. So as police are viewing this video, Ashley Smiley is in a morgue. She's already been taken. Her body was collected in a white sheet. She had been transported to the Medical Examiner's office for an autopsy, and that autopsy was set for March the twenty sixth, So Ashley her body was X rayed. Then they got her in there and they had to her up from all the blood and everything and the tissue and brain matter and all of that. So she's laying on a cold slab, you know, being observed by doctors. They had to wash all that off of her for a better inspection. And once they washed her body, they originally believed that she had been shot twice, but they then realized under this further examination that she actually had three gunshot wounds to the head. Now, two of those shots had been fired from a distance and had entered her head, but there was a third

1:06:30 shot and that third shot struck her under the chin at close rain And I want you to look at me if you're watching me podcast. If you're not, you can watch me podcast on Patreon dot com. You just search my show. But it was under her chin. That under the chin shot also had that stippling on the skin. Stippling is basically when the gunpowder goes off and it doesn't have time to burn off like and spread, so it burns whatever's in front of it. In order for that stippling to occur like it, you would have to have made this shot within thirty six inches or less. That's the typical range for you to get that stipling. So there was a bullet in her brain and then one had rested in the back of her neck. The one in her chin was a close up shot. And I am telling you that was the final shot to guarantee her mother's death. That was an execution shot, to ensure the death of the woman who gave birth to her, cared for her, and loved her her entire life. Unbelievable.

1:07:36 So Carly Gregg was charged with the first degree murder of her mother and then the attempted murder of her stepfather, and she had been transferred to a juvenile detention facility to await trial. So in the meantime, well, what I just punched that? Sorry, I am so animated. I just punched the carer. Whoopsie. You want to leave that in, We'll leave it in for y'all. Y'all can hear the drama? I'm animated today? All right. In the meantime, while all of this is going on, a gentleman came forward with his daughter and said, look, we need to speak to y'all about the shooting of Ashley Smiley. So this teen that came forward with her dad. His name, her name was Brooke, and what she came to say was eye opening and disturbing. So Brooke was a classmate of Carly's.

1:08:27 They went to school together, and her father said, we have to come forward because I believe my daughter was an absolute witness to this murder. And she was actually there. So police are like, wait, what excuse me? She was there. So they interviewed Brooke, and Brooke said that the afternoon that all of this went down, Carly had spoken to her on FaceTime and said, hey, I need you to come over. It's an emergency. So her dad, Brook's dad dropped her off, like he had done a billion times before they were friends, dropped her off around five o'clock at Carly's house and she went up and she knocked on the door. When she knocked on the door, she said.

1:09:08 Carly opened the door and greeted her with the statement do dead bodies make you squeamish? And Brooke said I don't think so, and so Carley says we'll come on inside, brings her to the back into her bedroom and promptly shows off her mother's dead body to her friend Brooke. She tells her I shot her three times, and when my stepdad gets home, I've got three rounds waiting on him. That's a quote, by the way. So Carly then asks her friend do you want to wait outside or do you want to stay in here with me? And her friend's like, I think I'll go outside. So Brooke goes into the backyard and about that time, Heath pulled up into that driveway. Remember I've told you already what happened when Keith got there, and that's when Brooke said she heard the three gunshots when she was hiding in the backyard.

1:10:06 And next thing you know, after the three shots went off, she saw Carly run into the backyard where they both ran around the side, scaled the fence where the truck was parked, where Heath's truck was parked, and they took off running down the driveway, and Brooke and Carly then split at the end of the driveway. Carly ran one way, and then Brooke was scared out of her mind and ran to another friend of the neighborhood's house in the other direction. So the police are like, holy shit, is this on camera footage? Because remember Heath found the camera footage that had given it to them, and so they run straight to that footage and guess what it was.

1:10:47 So at five oh three, you see Heath pull up in his truck. He parks at the end of the driveway to that blue truck. Like I mentioned, he gets out, he forgets something, so he leans back into the truck to retrieve whatever it was. I couldn't tell what it was. And then, like if you're watching it, you can see in the background there's a neighbor standing there. He's got like a big black dog and he's doing something with the dog in the backyard and he walks up, he goes inside. You hear the three bangs that and you've already heard the audio of that. And then, sure enough, if you keep going forward in the video, you see Carly jump that fence right next to Heath's truck. She tears off driving running down the driveway, and then you see the friend just a few seconds later jump that same fence. Carly was wearing gray sweatpants and a blue t shirt that says Nirvana on it, and then that friend that jumped the fence. She's a very tall, large black female, teen female. She's got short natural hair and she's wearing blue jeans and a gray hoodie, and she is running as fast as she can move her body.

1:11:44 The teen was telling the truth, and what she added next was even like creepier. Carly hadn't just called her on FaceTime. She had reached out to five or six friends on FaceTime and was texting them asking them to come over. She even told one of the friends that she was in trouble and she had direct quote fucked up. So the friend the other friend was like, uh, maybe you need to call nine one one. I'll call nine one one if you're in trouble, and Carly was like, no, do not call nine one one. And that's whenever Brooke ended up coming over now. Of course, looking and realizing what's going on now, she didn't want that friend to call nine one one because she hadn't shot Heath yet.

1:12:27 She didn't get to finish her plan. That's why she didn't want to call nine one one. Another thing that came up that was interesting to detectives was that Heath had mentioned that when he and Ashley were texting back and forth, remember that he needed food from the store. The last text he got he said it didn't sound like Ashley's normal way of speaking. And so police had downloaded the text messages and the you know, the call history from Heath's phone, and they went back and they compared Heath's phone records to the camera tapes that they now had, and y'all, Heath's gut instinct was correct. Ashley had not texted him that last text. It was Carly pretending to be her mother after her mother was already dead.

1:13:16 When she had walked into that kitchen, That's when Carly when she texted, it was on Ashley's phone, not Carle's phone. So in that kitchen video, which there is, and i'll i'll I have a link. I'll post it on on Patreon for you so you can go watch that body cam if you want. You can google it to if you're if you're inclined. But on that kitchen video, you see Ashley find those boxes with those vap pens. She carried it from Carly's room to her room and then she goes back to Carle's room. That's when Carley comes back inside, goes to her parents' bedroom, grabs the three fifty seven magnum from the room. She concealed it behind her back. She went back in the room, shot her mother very caw, I mean, just boom boom boom. Then she re entered that kitchen, hid the phone behind her back, and when she's sitting on the stool, she was texting from Ashley's home, asking Heath, when will you be home? Y'all?

1:14:12 She was setting him up the entire time. Once he said no, I'll be a little bit later, and she confirmed that. That's when she started calling her friends and inviting them over between the shootings to come see her dead mother. It is diabolical and it's evil, and it's calculated. So I know we're all wondering had something happened to Carly that maybe the world didn't know about. Was she being abused? Was she being molested? Was anything like that going on? Everyone wanted answers, and I'm sure you would too. So here's some insight that I've got from her therapist, which she was seeing every single week up until the shooting, a very consistent meeting with this therapist. Carly told her therapist that she was upset with her mother because her mom accused her of living quote, a double life. Her mom said to her that the face that she was showing the world and then the devious things that she was doing behind their backs. Was a dual life. And y'all, I'm gonna just stand on business with her mother. It sure seems like mama was right. Ashley also, I think, was very in tune with her daughter. And something about Carle that was interesting to me was that Carly seemed to have a very inflated sense of self in my personal opinion. Number one, she lied to her therapist about being a valedictorian, which she was not. Remember, she held herself in this high esteem because she skipped the fourth grade.

1:15:44 The therapist notes also said that Carle felt like she was smarter and quicker than the peers of her same age, and so Carly had told the therapists she found herself snapping at her friends at school and her you know, co students because they weren't smart enough and they felt she felt like they didn't appreciate the teacher's teaching as much as she did, because she really liked school and she wanted to learn. She also did tell her therapist, you know, her therapist, that she was questioning her purpose in life and that when she became stressed that she was cutting herself and she also mentioned atheism and how she didn't really believe These weren't the exact words I'm ad libbing here, but she really kind of had this you know, is atheistic a word. I don't know, if I just made it up, whatever.

1:16:31 Go with it. But she really had this thought that, you know, maybe atheism was for her, but I don't know if that's correct, because little girl, there's a difference between being an atheist and an agnostic. If you don't believe in anything, you're agnostic. Atheism is kind of like the antithesis of believing in something either way. The therapist also noted that in their last few meetings together, Carly had started wearing a lot of black clothing and it just was kind of different from what she had been wearing, and that Ashley was saying she was starting to feel socially outcast. Harley also identified to the therapist that she was able to act happy in front of others, but she was really good at just faking it and putting on a good face forward, which tells me she's a good actor. She can put on the face that she wants to put on, and that will become important in a minute. She also talked to her therapist about the fact that she loved to read and that her newest muse was the book called Crime and Punishment, which the therapist thought was cool because it's considered a classic until you start thinking about what Crime and Punishment is about. And that book follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of this impoverished, you know, student who plans to kill this old woman with a hatchet, and then she does, or he does. The guy kills the woman with a hatchet, and then the rest of the book is basically this character processing his actions after

1:18:03 he does it. He's found guilty and he's sent to an insane asylum. He only spends eight years there, but the whole premise is that he just doesn't feel like what he did was wrong, and I think that matters. There were notes also made by the doctor that Carly was telling the doctor that Carly felt like she herself may have autism and maybe might be on the spectrum, but the doctor was very confident that she was not on the spectrum. And her mother, who was a teacher and we're trained to kind of identify these types of things, also did not feel that she was on the spectrum. Carly added too that she was less caring about her mother's discipline didn't really matter. And this was interesting too.

1:18:46 Remember how Carly was a gamer. Well, she liked to play a video game called Skyrim, and this is a game about like elves and cabbages and buckets and vampires. It's very violent. But guess that's what her screen name was in the game, lazy assassin. Alrighty, then, so while awaiting trial, I want to tell you what was going on while in jail. Carly's in jail or in the juvenile facility, and obviously they have set up mental health care for her, but Carly just chose not to meet with the mental health staff because she was just saying, look, it's not helpful, and so I don't want to go.

1:19:27 They can't help me with anything, so I don't want to go. But eventually the jail staff starts noticing that Carley's crying a whole lot, like a whole lot for I think three months straight, she's crying a lot. So that's whenever a psychiatrist was brought in to evaluate her. And this is where it starts getting even more and more evil for me. Again, you can have your own opinion. It's America, start your own podcast. But I'm just going to give you my opinion. And I don't think she was crying because of her I think she was crying because she was the realization was set in that her mother was dead, not that she was sad about it, but that she was going to be incarcerated and she wasn't able to leave. Now, remember how I told you she had been seeing that therapist weekly for a while, the one that she said openly she liked and she did well with. Well, now that Carly's in jail and she's starting to realize, holy shit, my life might be on the line. Now when she's seeing this new psychiatrist that's been brought in, which by the way, he wasn't brought in until October twenty excuse me, August twenty ninth, to evaluate her. Now, this is how she's presenting herself to this psychiatrist. He only sees her like one time versus the woman who saw her for a long period of time, and that's important to me. All of a sudden, now she's telling this psychiatrist she's been hearing voices for years, voices are in her head. He also had looked at

1:20:58 some of her journaling that Ashley had done, and in her journal about a week before she kills her mother, she did write a line that says, I think I'm having a psychotic break. He also noted that in that she had a sketch book where she would draw, and he said that at one point he did see her handwriting change and that she had started scribbling and wrote help me, help me on one sheet of paper. She also confided in this psychiatrist that her mom got mad at her, and when her mother got mad at her, it was very hurtful to her. It wrecked her emotionally because her mother would speak in short sentences and get this raise her voice, the horror. Thank god, we all grew up in households where our mothers never raised their voice. Write, Jimothy, you never got fussed that. Did you talk to the people? Jimothy?

1:21:53 You never got in trouble one time? Did you? Y'all? Jimothy is lying? Did your mom ever yell at you? Jimothy, there you go, and have you killed anyone yet? And you haven't killed your mother? Correc same, I was yelled at in my household, never killed my mom. Then again, We're not Carly, but she was just very emotionally wrecked by her mother raising her voice. She also said that she saw her father beat her mother and that was very harmful to her. This doctor assessed through his brief interaction with her that Carly was a follower and not a leader, and his example for this was that one time at school she was dared to drink hand sanitizer and she did it. So this clearly proved that she was a follower. I mean to me, you would have to be a leader to go shoot your mother, murder her and then call all your friends to come see it.

1:22:48 But hey, I'm just a spectator in all of this. She also said that she had been unhappy to the psychiatrist from a very young age. That she had been hearing voices, specifically male voices, and that this male voice had a quote elitist attitude, letting her know that she was better than everybody else. So she began cutting herself when around the age of twelve, is what she told this doctor, and she said that it relieved anxiety. So he's like, this is clearly a maladaptive response to the fact that her parents found her texting on her iPad and she wasn't sleeping well because she was so disturbed by her mother's reaction to things, and so when she was put in therapy. He also mentioned that she at one point had been put on zoloft. The zoloft didn't work, and so she was moved up to fifty milligrams from the twenty five miligram she was on, and then in March she had complained to her original therapist, so she was switched to five milligrams of lexapro because she felt numb on the zoloft. So, if you're following me, he's kind of looking at the old medical history and he's kind of coming up with this consensus, this news psychiatrist that hadn't met with her much, that all of this medication probably played a role in why she made a decision to shoot her mother. He says she was so anxious because she wanted to please her mother. But the fact that Carly continued to lie about things tells me that I don't buy that. I think that this is

1:24:20 kind of a pity party going on between her and this psychiatrist, because she's now locked into oh shit, I murdered my mother. She was saying oh, I lost my sister and that's been really hard for me. Oh, by the way, my biological father is bipolar. And whenever that psychologist heard that, the new one, the new psychiatrist, excuse me, you know, he brings up that there's a high level of inheritance with parents who may have bipolarism, and so she too could have bipolarism. And then it comes to the conclusion that when she had her nipple pierced, this must have been in a manic state. She wouldn't have normally done that, and so he believed that she should have been diagnosed with what he called bipolar two. But none of that was ever brought up in any other therapy until after she was arrested. That just says a lot to me. So once she's arrested and she's gone into this jail setting and she's been there for a while, they not only uped her lexapro, but they started giving her ambilify, which is an antipsychotic drug. And she says, oh, as soon as I started taking the anti psychotic drug, the voice has stopped. And ever since I've been locked up, I'm fine. The medicine made me do. It is basically what Her argument was, but I think that she was smart enough to figure this out. She was trying to have this play in her favor, and that's why it was never brought up before. I don't know how you feel,

1:25:51 but that's how I feel. She also was on a high enough level of this anti psychotic medication that this psychologist or psychiatrist that just saw a couple of times felt like, you know, maybe she was manic whenever she killed her mother, and then she crashed into a super hot, you know, a super low when she was put in jail, and then she started feeling better by summer, and that explains why she did what she did and thought the way that she thought. But I want to tell you something. His assessment is again based solely off of self reports that Carly made to him and then medical forms, but he didn't look at everything in totality, in my personal opinion, and so his ultimate finding was that he believed that the action she had that day that she shot and killed her mother were out of her control. She blacked out and did not remember what she had done and could not discern right from wrong. So fast forward going into court, and her defense team basically doubles down on what this psychiatrist said, and they just really pushed forward this thought that whenever Ashley would get mad and speak in those short sentences and raise her voice, that it just destroyed Carly. And that also one time, right before the shooting, Carly had cut her hair really short, like that it used to be long, and you know, ponytails and stuff like that, and her mom had asked her because she felt like she was going through a crisis.

1:27:21 You're not trying to be a boy or anything, are you, Like, You're not having an identity issue here, because Ashley didn't really like the haircut, according to Carly. Now, I want to bring up a couple of things to you that was not mentioned by the psychiatrist to the psychiatrist, nor did the defense team bring it up, but detectives found and this will be interesting to you. First off, her journal entries that were referred to by that psychiatrist, they never once brought up the fact that there was a very consistent theme of enjoying dark and deadly characters. For example, she wrote that her favorite movie or favorite character in Pinocchio was the bomb that was dropped on the church and killed people. And then she also wrote that one day she hopes to be famous for making an atomic bomb, and this is a direct quote. She also said it's okay to be evil and you don't need family. She also wrote when contemplating the meaning of life and comparing the elements like water, fire, and ice in her writings, she said, I choose fire because it's powerful, beautiful, and it's deadly. So this is where I am on this case that's been so prominent in the news today. Carly never had a history of losing her memory before the murder,

1:28:54 only during it and after it. Carly never heard voices or told a doctor, a psychiatrist, her therapist, or anybody about voices before the murder, only after it. She also apologized, remember when that deputy picked her up and put her in handcuffs, when he put her in when he took her into custody. Yet the psychiatrist is saying she didn't know right for wrong, and she didn't know she killed her mom. So why did you apologize, Carly? You're not psychotic. She claimed she couldn't remember killing her mom, but then when she was talking to that psychiatrist, she also claimed that she had continuous nightmares and she just kept hearing gunshots. Okay, well, then which one is it? Carly? Do you not remember any of it? You blacked out and you don't know what happened? Or are you having nightmares because you keep reliving the fact that you murdered your mother and you remember it. Why would you have nightmares of something you can't remember? Because she's lying. She claimed that she woke up irritable, and she remembered everything ab about the day of the murder except the moment she was killing her mom. Yeah, fucking right. She also texted a friend and told him directly, remember don't call nine one one, and she said, I fucked up. Why would you do that? If you're blacked out and you're in a state of just psychosis and you don't know what you're doing. Seems kind of odd to me. What did you fuck up?

1:30:25 Then? Direct quote? By the way, you know that? And Carly also told that psychiatrist that almost immediately as soon as she started taking that lexa pro originally by that first therapist, that it had a huge impact on her life, almost immediately. And I'm sorry, I'm going with life experience here, and I don't buy it because something has to be in your system for weeks before it has this ultimate impact. That's why they tell you that depression medication doesn't work immediately and you have to keep taking it for weeks. So bullshit. It did not happen immediately. Carle Gregg is a fourteen year old calculating murderer because she was called out on her dual life by her mother and she wasn't getting her way. Her mother was in the way of her doing whatever she wanted to, and so she eliminated her mother as well as try to eliminate her stepdad.

1:31:19 Something that happened after this murder too, is a no contact order was placed between Carley and her stepdad, Heath. Now this would have been something that was done like automatically, most likely by the judge in order to, you know, effort, in an effort really to protect Heath from any further violence or any harassment from Carly, but considering he was the only remaining involved parent Carly had, he did ask the court to lift that order and they soon would begin communicating in jail, and a lot of people online and a lot of people on social media have called him out for this and said that they think it's weird and that if you know, just a whole lot of speculation as to why would you support her after she almost killed you and he almost she almost killed you and and did kill your wife. Well, this is gonna be an unpopular, you know, opinion, but I'm gonna stand on it, and I don't care. I see such pain in that man's eyes whenever he testified it's pain.

1:32:24 I don't see anger. I see pain whenever he has to identify Carly and Court as the person who shot him. You have to go see it yourself, and you can make your own decisions in life. But I will tell you this. I have a stepdad myself who has been a nothing but constant supporter of me my entire life. And he supports me not because he has to, but because he loves me. And I promise you if I went batshit crazy and did something evil or stupid, that man would not leave me. And I'm telling you that he wouldn't. Why because he loves me, and I know it in my soul. I'm not falling into the popular thing that the stepdad is in some way part of this, and I will not speculate as to why he did what he did. He suffered an insurmountable loss in his family.

1:33:13 In the end, Carly Gregg was convicted of the murder of her mother and the attempted murder of her stepfather. And just so you know, the state had offered her a forty year plea deal, which would have let her out when she was still in her thirties, but because she's an entitled elitist thinker, she declined it. She rolled the dice, and she lost, receiving life in prison without parole. And y'all, I know, by number okay, that she's a fourteen year old kid, But in this case, I think the sentence is justified, considering they gave her an option to a plea deal and she refused it. So welcome to the adult world, kiddo. That's all I can tell you.

1:33:56 And if you think I mean, oh, well, because given a fuck doesn't really go with my outfit day