The disappearance of Jana Koklich

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. Unspeakable as intended for mature audiences. If you are easily offended, then I'm not your girl. Listening discretion is advised. Hey, y'all, it's kJ here and I'm back. I've got a great episode for you today. What is going on? If you are watching me right now podcast, you'll see I have this ridiculous contraption on my thumb because I hurt my finger.

1:11 I hurt my finger and it's not a cool it's not a cool injury either. You would think I'd love to give you something awesome, but they said it was a texting thumb. As unsexy as that is. I'm like, for real, I text so much and I message so much that I've injured my thumb. So don't y'all tell me. I don't answer y'all's messages because it's true. I've got the texting thumb to prevent so ridiculous. All right, But anyway, I hope you're doing well. I hope your thumbs are just moving fluidly because mine sucks. But I'm gonna ask you to come with me today to California, California A and we're gonna be in the Lakewood north of Long Beach area, and this is where Bruce and Jenna Kochlic built their dream home. Jana was born on January first, nineteen sixty and in her family, she was an only child, but that was a perfect thing for their family because she was her parents absolute pride and joy. And as a young adult, her dream as she grew up was that she wanted to go to law school. She had been talking about this basically her whole life, that that is where she wanted to go and she wanted to be a lawyer. But that all changed when she met the love of her life, Bruce, and when they met and they decided that they wanted to get married and start their family, she abandoned those plans of becoming a lawyer and she decided, you know what, let's do something different.

2:33 I want to be with you, and I want us to build this empire together. And so Bruce had dreams that he wanted to build a real estate business, and he knew in his heart of hearts that Jana was the one. She was the one that could help him to succeed because she had what he lacked. Because Jenna, she really enjoyed being in the background. She liked doing the computer work and the paperwork and all of that, while Bruce was really more of the personal side of it. He really pulled in with the public relations and got people's attention, and he liked being the face of this duo, and y'all it worked. She wanted her husband, Bruce to shine, and she did her best to put him in the best light. And their business was real estate. It was with the Remax Company, and their beach office was located right there in California in a nice little area, and they were starting up. As well as doing their real estate, which they were doing really well at, they also were working on a little side hustle that they were trying to start up a computer software company. So they had a lot of things going for them and they worked really hard together to build this dream of not having just one avenue of cash flow of having multiple businesses that they could own and that they could manage. Now.

3:44 According to her colleagues, Jenna was a hard working woman, very hard working and described as meticulous too. She had a penchant for being punctual. She was always on time. She was always prepared and on task, and a very the book type of lady. Very professional, very prompt with her appointments, and downright just dependable. If you needed her, she was there. She was the one that you could count one. Now, let's talk about her for a minute. She stood five foot seven, one hundred and thirty pounds. She had long blonde hair with bangs. But her hair looked very consistent with that of like the late nineties. It had a little bit of poof to it, you know what I'm talking about, in those old school kind of like Barbie hairdoos with the longer hair kind of maybe had a little flip at the end and then the poofy little bangs. But she had blue eyes, very very very thick, full lips both top and bottom. She had very prominent lips, and I'd say that that was really her most prominent feature when you looked at her and they were natural. They weren't these duck lips of today.

4:49 These were very natural, thick, nice lips. She was not a very heavy makeup wearer, but she absolutely cared about her appearance. She wore makeup, but just more of a natural tone. And another thing about her is that she loved to work out, and she liked to work out consistently because she wanted to look her best. She always wanted to do the best that she could do and be the best that she could be. Bruce Kochlitch's information from his younger years. As I was looking for his stuff, it was a bit more sparse. I had a little bit harder time finding information on him. But I can tell you that in his adult life he was very successful in business, and he liked it that way too. It wasn't like he was kind of in the background about it. He was very proud of the businesses and the life that he and his wife had built together.

5:37 Jenna was a little bit shorter than Bruce. Bruce was obviously now taller than her. I'd say he's somewhere around five eleven. That's a guestimation. He's thin, and his features are all very narrow and pointed. He had a longer neck, very small eyes, his mouth was really really small, average average male haircut. He had brown hair, he would lightly gel it, and his front two teeth ever so slightly crossed in the front of one another. But when you look at him, he kind of looks like that guy that would work in technology or something really analytical. And I don't mean this meanly at all, but if you've seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite, Okay, not Napoleon, though, if you've seen Napoleon Dynamite, it's his brother. Do you all remember his brother? Love that dude, but he kind of looks like him, the brother in those movies. And if you haven't seen it, go look it up. I'm sure I'll put a picture on Facebook or something. But that's pretty much what he looked like. But they definitely fit together as a couple whenever you're looking at them. They had been married for eleven years at the time that this story took place, and their lives were very in tune with one another. They had similar goals and very similar interests, and that kept their love alive. And I guess you'd say that's a really good thing, because they spent most of their days all day together because they they worked together, they worked at the same company. They were very good with communication, They were dependent on one another, very codependent in their relationship. By day, they worked at

7:10 the business that they built and grew together over the years, and by night they were snuggled in together at their home. And their home was a beautiful one located in a very prime area on a golf course. So they were doing well. I wouldn't say that they were overly flashy people, but they lived nicely and nothing about them seemed super over the top. If anything, their lifestyle seemed very low risk and very average American way of life and living. And that's why it kind of came as a surprise when Bruce filed a missing person's report for Jenna on Tuesday, August twenty first of two thousand and one. Literally, I went and I looked. Literally the week I started my senior year of high school, to be exact. Bruce called Jen as friend that she called her ninni, And that morning when he made that phone call, he was like, Hey, have you seen Jana. I can't. I haven't spoken to her.

8:07 I can't find her. She had no idea where she could be what what can I do for you? Though? You know, her best friend was willing to help, to do anything to try to find her, and Bruce just really started crying and was like, you can tell me where my wife is. And it almost came across like maybe Nini knew something and wasn't wasn't telling him, but that just wasn't the case. She genuinely did not know where Jana was. But Jenna would normally show up at the office around nine ish in the morning, around nine o'clock, and their office was really close to their residence too, so it wasn't like there was a far commute for her to have driven. So the police arrived and they were now involved because no one could locate her. So they went and they checked the hospitals. They checked for any traffic accident reports that may have a woman that's un undetermined or or unnamed, but nothing. They couldn't find anything, and that's when a detective, her name was Karen Shanka.

9:03 Karen came in and she spoke to Bruce to establish a timeline to at least work off of to determine when when's the last time anyone had seen her? And he said it was Monday morning. He was that morning, he said, I kissed her goodbye at six am. We're partners at our real estate agency. She usually would get here between nine and nine thirty, but she just didn't show up after about ten fifteen, maybe somewhere around ten thirty. He started asking around the office when Jana never showed up, like, hey, have you seen her? Has anyone talked to her? Nobody had spoken to her, And that's when he said he called her best friend and Ninni hadn't spoken to her either. Now they did have a business partner too. His name was Chris, And whenever all of this was going down, before the detectives or the police got involved, Bruce asked Chris to come with him to go look for her because he was extremely nervous. And so Chris went back to the house with Bruce to go and try to check on Jim. And when they got there, everything really was in order, but the car, her purse, and her cell phone were gone. But the thing was that the house alarm was set. It really seemed like she got all her shit together. She got ready that morning, then she left the house, set the alarm, and then went missing.

10:18 So something had to have happened within that timeframe. And I know I've said this a million times, but most people that are called in as missing are usually back within twenty four hours. But this seemed like a very odd situation that may need more attention because of the situation and that she was definitely expected to be at the office and never made it there, So the questions kind of start coming to mind. You know, what was her mental state? Was she on any medication that may cause a problem, But none of that seemed to be an issue. None of that seemed to raise any red flags or or anything. So the police decided to back up even more and they wanted to trace her last known footsteps. So Friday, August seventeenth, Jenna went to an Eric Clapton concert with her best friend Nini, and they got home after midnight. Now they had planned at that time, she and Bruce had planned to have this relaxed weekend together, just the two of them, which is exactly what happened.

11:19 And then poof, Monday morning, she never makes it to the office after she kisses her husband goodbye, So, needing more to go off of the police wanted to get into the house and look around. Maybe there was something that Bruce had missed that the detectives would be able to pick out or to see, and Bruce says, no problem. He gives full consent to search the home and the police look in every nook and cranny from the trash can contents to the caller ID on the phone. I mean, they left nothing unturned. And it turned out that something was going on at the house okay, and both spouses were aware of this, but the had become a problem at the house. Neither spouse was wanting to answer it because they had been getting these creepy voicemails from a male voice and it was really upsetting to Jana. The messages would say things like you know me, you need to call me, and then it would hang up, and neither of them recognized the voice. They even had their friends and their family listen to it, but nobody that they knew, and nobody in their inner circle could identify this voice. They really were at a loss about it.

12:31 But it was very disturbing to Janna obviously was upsetting to Bruce, and so they weren't really answering the phone on the weekends because of that. So police took a listen, and they took notes, and they tried then to determine, Okay, are there any enemies that you as a couple may have, and this kind of evolved into something else. Okay, so when they wanted to know about the enemies, Jenna's father came into play here, not because he was the enemy, but because his name was Paul Carpenter, and he had been someone that was big in the state Senate. He was a state senator from California, and maybe they came to this conclusion that maybe someone had beef with him and had kidnapped Jenna to settle that beef or to hurt her father, because her father, Paul Carpenter, was very popular with the community that he served, but he had gotten tied up at some point in his career in some criminal activity. Now I'm not going to say that he was, you know, outslinging cocaine and you know, having hoes and all that. That's not the type of criminal activity that I mean. This is more like the people.

13:45 This is a quote that I found. People said that he played politics the way many people played poker, and that kind of said something to me that he was a risk taker. He had no trouble taking risks in all aspects of his life, and part of that was that he was on afraid to lose. He flat out did not fear loss, and that went both in his professional career and personally. He was willing to do a lot and risk a lot. So he was very charming to the people that he was supposed to represent politically. But he also at the same time had become a target of an FBI sting and they were trying to figure out it had to do with financial stuff. This is not something that should be shocking to all of us.

14:27 We all know that there's corruption in politics, and anyone who doesn't think there's corruption is nuts or not paying attention. So he would become the target of an FBI sting, and basically the FBI was contributing money to certain lawmakers in exchange for legislative favors. Okay, the way that it seems to always go when we always find this out our about our political people when it's all said and done. So when that happened, he did get caught up in it, for sure, and he was convicted in the nineteen nineties on racketeering charges extortion, and he got a conspiracy charge, but he would get off on a technicality. The jury, it would turn out, wasn't given proper instructions whenever they were deliberating the case, and so all of it ended up being nullified when it was all said and done because of that one technicality. But he was forced to leave office because of what had happened. Then, three years later, in a completely different case, it wasn't even part of the same one, he was convicted on eleven counts of obstruction of justice and money laundering. So there was a whole lot of bullshit going on with her dad. He may have been a great friendly handshaker and smiler and kissing the babies, but he was doing some dirty deeds behind closed doors. And he had illegally funneled seventy eight thousand dollars through a Santa Monica public relations firm, is what it all boiled down to. Now, Right before he was sentenced for this, he up and fled. He ran away.

15:57 Someone who was supposed to represent the people is illegally doing all this shit, and then he fled. He flees the country. Not only that he fled, he went to Costa Rica and his claim of the reason of why he went to Costa Rica was that he was suffering from prostate cancer and so he wanted to get better treatment. And before he left. This is almost comical because they would have fire and squatted me if I did this shit, but you know people in high places, I guess. But he before he left, I want you to know he did thoughtfully write a note and he wrote it to the judge in the case, and he said, I find my drive for survival stronger than my sense of obligation to your legal system. Like can you imagine. You know, many people are suffering behind bars with medical conditions. They don't write a letter to the judge. They're just like, screw you, and they put them behind bars. But now he's gonna leave, but write a letter first and say I don't really feel like serving my time. I'd rather go get my balls checked. Whatever. But it was true.

16:58 I will tell you that he may have actually been going to get treatment for prostate cancer, but he wasn't too sick to enter and win a national bridge tournament in Central America. Okay, so he was sick, but he wasn't that sick. And because of all of his activities and all the things that he was doing. He was eventually tracked down the US was able to find him after he spent I guess it was like a year. It was a little over a year, I think, but in Costa Rica. He spent time also in the Costa Rican jail once they got him, and then he was returned to California. Once he got to California, he was then sentenced to seven years in federal prison, but he was ultimately released in nineteen ninety nine. So I guess you could say that there were probably a lot of people that were pissed off that maybe didn't get their favors, but he sure as hell got their money, so they thought, you know, maybe this has something to do with that whole shebang that was going on. So maybe it was a revenge situation for that activity. Maybe the voice in the creepy voicemails was the kidnapper. But that's really all that police had to go on. Now. I also want to tell you that Jana's father also at one point was in the real estate industry as well as Jana, and so they both also dealt with the ugly side of the real estate industry or business. And what I mean by that is that they had to go deal with repo repose of properties where the payments weren't being made and such. So this was also looked at as a possible lead in that some of these repode properties

18:28 that Jana was dealing with were known to be in gang affiliated areas, and so this kind of branched out into a whole bunchho. We don't know what happened, but she's she's definitely in a position that she could have been pissing off a lot of people, or her dad could have. So Jana was the one who would actually get in her car drive and go collect the rent at these properties, and so maybe it was part of that situation. Jana was known to carry a gun and have that, I guess for protection, but they thought, well, may maybe maybe she got robbed whenever she was going to collect the funds. They know that she's getting all this cash payments from these people, maybe she was robbed. Well, this is what I want to say something to all my listeners on here. Owning a gun and carrying a gun and running your gun are all one thing, but a willingness and having a comfort to actually use your said weapon is another thing. And I consistently. I constantly see women specifically online that will say, oh, I have a gun in my purse for safety. Well, please be sure that if you're going to carry a gun for your safety, that you're also going to take a course put on by either your local law enforcement or somebody that knows what the hell they're doing, Because a gun in your purse is completely useless in a surprise attack.

19:53 You know, your gun should always be on your person. You should have your gun close to you where you can grab it immediately. If you're scared, you can use it. But if you're scared and you have it in your purse, all you're doing is opening up an opportunity for the bad guy to take it from you and use it against you. And I just really would like to push that and make sure people understand owning a gun and being comfortable and using it, shooting it, reloading it, and unjamming it in a situation that's life or death are very different. And at the time that I'm recording this, I want you to know that our local sheriff's office, if you're local to me, living in Compara sheriff's office is putting on a concealed carry course, and I would suggest it's a very good course. I went through it myself, even though I'd already been trained by them, but I went through it myself to check it out. Go do it, sign up, tell them kJ sent you. I don't care.

20:41 There's no kickbacks or anything for me, but I just want you to be safe and be prepared to actually use the weapon, not be afraid of it. Jana had the gun, but I don't know how comfortable she was with it. But regardless of whatever her comfort levels were, she hadn't returned and Bruce was still unable to locate her. All this time. Later that everyone's out and looking for her, Bruce and his family, including Bruce's stepbrother, tried to find her. That he gave lots of details to his family, his head in his hands, you know, sobbing even though he was completely totally devastated. He would tell anyone that would listen, everyone that would listen, this is what happened, Please help me find her. At one point, he even thought about hiring a helicopter, a private helicopter, and getting searchers out there to do an aerial search for her, if that would have helped but he did mention that her car was missing. Remember I told you the keys in the car and all that were gone. So police started being of the belief that if she was kidnapped at some point soon they would be receiving either a ransom note or a call in exchange for her return, simply based on not only her father's role in the community that this could have been, you know, a result of, but also her financial status because they were well off. I want to make it seem like they were just average joes.

22:01 They were well off. And so police waited and they monitored the phones closely to see would a demand call come in. But no calls would ever come in for a ransom, and no sightings of her were seen. Nobody was calling in saying hey, I see I've seen her, or I've spoken to her. So the political career retaliation theory was quickly ruled out. It just didn't fit any scenario and nothing would match and back that up. So in the meantime, the police decided, well, you know what, maybe we really need to focus on finding her car. If we can find her car, then the chances are that we could probably locate her. There were still a whole lot of people that still need to be vetted, and there was still people that they wanted to go check out to see that, Hey, would you would they have hurt Jana. But finding that car really became a central part of finding Jenna. Chris Bodison was going to be the business partner that they had in this software company that they were starting up. That was his whole angle in there in the relationship, and although this was not explicitly stated anywhere, people within their social circles really got the feeling that Jana wasn't a fan of him.

23:10 She didn't take to him very well. And he also coincidentally left town right after her disappearance. So police kind of wondered, hmm, would he have really benefited from Jana being gone? And what they found was, yeah, he actually would have benefited because with her gone, the business now would go from a three way split between Jenna, Bruce, and Chris to now just being Bruce and Chris because of the way that they had set up this business. So they obviously ran out and they had to have a word with Chris. They were finally able to locate him, and when he was speaking with them, he had an alibi.

23:52 He said, look, I've been hanging out for the whole weekend with my girlfriend. And they questioned him deeply on this and what was he doing, where were you and do you have this and that to prove this and that? And the truth was he did and he was eventually cleared after everything in the questioning was backed up and proven. So Chris was ruled out as someone that may have had something to actually do with her going missing. So whenever police went to go speak with Jana's bestI, Nini, they wanted to know what was Jenna like at the concert that y'all went to, because we know for a fact that she went to the concert with you. And Nini said she was happy. She was very happy. She also only had one glass of wine and they said just one glasser on the whole concert. She said, yeah, just one? Well, why why did she limit herself to one glass of wine during this hour's long concert? And Nini said, look, she had plans. She wanted to get home as early as she could and not stay out too late because she had an early gem appointment with her personal trainer and his name was Dean. She remember, I told you she really cared about her appearance. And she wanted to work out. So police wanted to go learn more about Dean, so they talked to him and he says, yes, I absolutely do know Jenna. I've been her her personal trainer for the last five years. They said, okay, well what was Janna like, what were y'all's relationships like, or you know, what did y'all do together? And he says, Jena was very punctual, she was a good client. She was always there, and she was always on time. And

25:23 he added, she's never missed an appointment. If she said she was going to be there, she was going to be there. But she missed one appointment for the very first time ever in all of the five years that they had worked out together, she missed her appointment on Saturday, August the eighteenth. That was the morning after the concert. So every Saturday morning around seven am, they would go and they would jog next to the beach. So police were like, well, that's romantic, go running off by the beach. I wonder if maybe there's more to this relationship than just this casual business workout trainer relationship. So maybe there's a fair an affair going on. Maybe there's a relationship problem that we have going on here, Well, some changes in recent time would actually lend themselves to that theory. Jana, like I told you, liked her appearance, but she had really, really, really been working on her appearance right before her disappearance.

26:27 Not only was she working out constantly, but she was losing weight and she also had gone and gotten her teeth done. She went and got veneers. So, hmm, she's wanting to look better. Who is she wanting to look better for? Kind of becomes the question. And another one of Jana's friends, her name was Connie. Connie also trained with Dean, So they went to investigators went to talk to Connie and say, hey, what was their relationship like, what did you see whenever y'all were working out, or what is Dean like whenever he is training with you? And Connie said that she never, ever, on any occasion, ever saw Connie and Dean flirting with one another. She said there was never any sexual tension in the air.

27:12 There was never any hint of anything that she ever saw that would say that the two were more than just a client instructor relationship. She said that Dean was a very professional and calm individual, that the relationship that she always saw was very professional and by the book. So police kind of went, okay, well, that doesn't sound like a screaming relationship or affair. So they really went in to screen Dean's alibi for whenever Jannah went missing, and they found again all of his statements seemed to pan out. There was absolutely zero evidence of anything inappropriate between the two of them relationship wise. There were no texts or calls or anything like that. She just really wasn't the type of woman to cheat. She was not the type of woman that would run off or have a secret lover. And this was what everyone who knew her backed up. She just was not that type of woman.

28:11 She was loyal and she followed the rules, and that included relationship rules. So when they talked to Dean, they said, did you talk to her? I mean, did you even see or what happened? He said no, He said, actually I called her cell phone when she didn't show up, she didn't answer. I then called her house phone and she didn't answer at the house either, And he said, look, really, honestly, did kind of concern me because I've never not had her show up. But I'm in no position to do much else. I mean, I'm just her personal trainer. I'm not gonna go show up at her house. So he said, I just went about my day, but it did kind of make me wonder why she never called and never showed. Well, it turned out Jenna also had another appointment that day.

28:55 She had a massage that was booked for two pm, and she was gonna go get that massage with her BESTII. Well, she no showed for the massage as well. So when that had happened, Niini called both Janna's phone and she called Bruce's phone looking for Jenna, but neither of them answered the phone. So police asked Bruce about that. They're like, well, hang on a minute. She was supposed to have all these appointments, she didn't show up for those, and you know, it's kind of curious that neither of you answered the phone whenever her best friend was calling. But again he said, no, we were supposed to have this relationship weekend together that we agreed we were going to focus on one another, and we agreed we were not going to be using our cell phones during this weekend because we wanted to just throw out all the craziness of the world. And just focus on one another and spend our time together.

29:47 So while this is admirable and I think that's great for a relationship for y'all to invest in one another, police kind of took issue with one part of that, and their problem was this, Okay, great, let's say that y'all want to focus on one another and really rekindle or whatever have a loving relationship that weekend. That's awesome. The problem the police had with it is that they were both in the real estate business, and anyone who sells real estate knows that your entire livelihood revolves around leads that you get from phone calls, and those phone calls tend to be heavier on the weekends because that's when people are off, that's when they're searching for houses, that's when they're driving around seeing the signs and calling the real ters. So it wasn't, you know, this obvious red flag flying, But the police really did find that curious that you'd be willing to throw out your entire livelihood potential to spend time with one another. On top of the fact, she nos showed for two appointments, so a more detailed questioning into Bruce's whereabouts were necessary for them to get a more specific timeline for what Bruce was doing. So he says, sure, I'll lay it out for you. He said that month day morning, I went and I looked at several properties that I needed to check out. He said. Then before all of that was done, before I got back to the office, and he said, I got to the office around eight thirty. This was some early morning running that I did, he said. After he got to the office, he did a little bit of work and then he went and he attended a

31:18 funeral that was verified from nine point thirty to eleven AM. When the funeral was over, I went back to the office. By eleven I was already trying to call her. I had called the house all the coworkers said. He was pretty shook up. He couldn't find her. That's when he and Chris went to the house to look for her and didn't find anything except her car and all the things she would likely need for the day missing. So they went and the police spoke to the coworker Chris again, and they were like, dude, tell us what happened. Step by step when you got to the house, he said, we pulled up, he said, we went in the house, and they said, when you went in the house, Bruce said that the alarm was on. Did you see him deactivate the alarm? And yes, the alarm was on. I personally watched him undo the burglar alarm before either of us went further into the house. He said, they're just I was with him the whole time and he was never out of my sight. And the police were like, well, damn, you know, they're thinking that there really wasn't any time for him to have committed the crime of doing something to her, disposing of her and then have all these I mean, his whereabouts were very much accounted for. Police did find out though, through their questioning, that the couple had a housekeeper and that she kept a very regular and a very time oriented schedule when she was there, and she had been their housekeeper for the last nine years.

32:43 So she been housekeeping here for a hot minute. It wasn't like this was her first rodeo and she didn't know these people, so they wanted to speak with her one on one. Her name was Consuelo, which I thought was so cute and charming. Consuelo the housekeeper. So when they speak to Consuelo, she come across as very truthful and very fond of Jana. She said that my boss is kind, She's always friendly to me. We have a great relationship whenever we are around each other. She couldn't think of anything that was out of the ordinary in the home, and nothing that seemed strange between the couple and she had been doing their laundry and cleaning their house for nine years. The only thing, as they kept going, there's nothing out of place, nothing that you can think of.

33:31 The only thing that she could even muster up as even saying it was different, was that she said, well, you know, I did always, or I do always change the bedding in the master bedroom on tuesdays. Those are the days that I changed the bedding. I've always done that the entire time that I've cleaned this house. The only thing that she could think of, after she sat there and really racked her brain, was that the week prior, whenever she made the bed, she said that she had put sheets on the bed that were these white and black sheets, and they had cursive writing on them. The words incursive were things like happiness and love and just these really happy words that might be incursive on the sheets, but on the week of Jana's disappearance, which would have been Tuesday, August fourteenth, she changed the sheets, but she noticed that they weren't the same ones that she had put on the week prior. So she did think that was kind of strange. Usually it's the same sheets she's changing that she put on the week prior. Also, she said there was only a full size flat sheet on the bed when she went in to change the bedding.

34:43 And okay, I'm gonna tell y'all right now, and I bet you there's some women with me right now. No offense to the dudes. But as soon as she said there was only a flat sheet on the bed, I thought to myself, A man did it? A man is involved with this bed change, because no woman that I know is. Maybe it's where I'm from and how I was raised, but where I'm from, you better have a fitted sheet on that damn bed. My grandma would roll over in her grave, or she would blow around in her ashes, however you want to call it. But she would die if she thought that I put just a flat sheet on a bed. Ain't no way. So when I heard that flat sheet, hands down, a man did it. A man put that sheet on that bed. How many of y'all agree with me? Y'all got to talk to me on this one. But right there, I knew man changed the sheets done. The thing too, was that it was a queen size bed and that one full sheet that was laid over the bed on top was a full size sheet. Those are man signs. Okay, in nine years.

35:42 They had never changed their own sheets in nine years, so this really caught her attention. And then when she went to go do the laundry, she didn't see the sheets in the laundry room either what she expected. You know, maybe someone threw up, maybe someone had an accident, you know, may maybe spilled some wine on the bed, but they weren't in the laundry room either. She also noticed when she was cleaning the bathroom that a towel was missing from the master bath. So I guess they had a set number of towels and she couldn't find one of them. Okay, well, maybe that got thrown out because it got stained with the wine. I don't know, but that's kind of was another thing she noticed that was missing. So the police were kind of now wondering if maybe someone had come into the home and taken Jena. But Jena was taken as well as these items that they couldn't find. Maybe she was hurt and maybe they were covering up the evidence by taking it with them outside of the outside of the bedroom. Whoever it was that did this. But referring back to what Bruce said in his questioning, the house was locked, the alarm was on, there was no force to entry to the house. There's no kidnapper in America that's gonna go set the alarm when they leave the house. So on August the seventh of two thousand and one, Jena had now been missing for a seventh than full days and the police really had no solid leads.

37:03 They knew that she drove a nineteen ninety six white Pathfinder and guess what it was found. It was called in and found on a place called California Street. There was no purse, no gun, no cell phone in the car, none of that was there, which were the very items that Jana would never have left without. So it's like, Okay, the car is here, Jenna's stuff isn't here. Did she take it with her and leave the vehicle here? But when they searched the vehicle, they did find an item in the back in the cargo area, and it was a very simple item. It was a feather. They found one feather in the back of the car and looking at it, the detectives felt like that might have been a pillow, a feather from a pillow, which going back and looking at the records, they would find that a pillow was also missing from the master bed. There was also in that trunk a very large stain that appeared to be blood next to where the feather was laying.

38:10 So you don't have to be a friggin genius at this point to know that this is not good what they have found. So police felt at this point that they were no longer looking for Jana alive and that this was more likely to be a body recovery situation. So on August thirty first, a search team of over one hundred and forty people was created to search this area near where the vehicle was. And it was a petroleum field because where this car was parked it wasn't a good area of town, but the oil fields and the wells and all of that were in this area. And in that area there was also a bunch of really deep holes that from oil exploration, and that would seem like a really likely place that they possibly whoever these people were, could have dumped a body. So they searched for a very long time with all these people, but they ended up finding nothing. But sixteen days after Jana had been gone, this would have been September, the fifth police conducted another search of the couple's home, and this time when they went into the house, they came armed with luminol. And luminol we all know that's basically the spray that whenever you spray it down, it will react with the hemoglobin in blood, and even if it's invisible to the naked eye, it's going to light up like a Christmas tree if there's been blood in that area.

39:32 They didn't find any, but they only found they didn't find a bunch of blood. Let me put it that way. They did find one single drop of blood one and it was found on the master bedroom floor and it was near the bed, which they swapped well, needing some DNA or something that they could compare this blood too. They went into the bathroom and they found Jana's hair brush, which they took the hair for comparison, and lo and behold, once it came back from the left. That blood droplet, just one tiny blood droplet, did match that of janis Now I'm gonna tell you this, that doesn't mean shit. That could have been menstrual blood. Sorry, she could have been undressed putting on her pajamas in the bedroom and a drop of blood fell out. It could have been from a small cut on her leg from shaving and it dripped down on the floor. But the fact that when they went and looked in the back of the car and they swabbed that stain in the back of the car and they sent that to the lab, that too, came back as a match for Jana's blood. So the amount of blood found in the back of that car led most people to think that she was injured and or more likely dead, and that her dead body had been placed in the back of her very own vehicle.

40:45 So maybe one drop alone doesn't mean much, but we now got a whole lot of blood in the back of her own vehicle. So Bruce was now really the only person to have seen her alive the entire weekend. So the police decided to go back to Bruce and really focus on him, and they said, all right, man, you've given us all this information. We appreciate all of your help, but we would really like to give you a polygraph test or a light detector test to sort out some of the things that you have said. And he readily agreed, no problem, let's do it. He did ask, though, when he got there, could he have the questions ahead of time? Well, no, that would go against any type of policy, because part of the polygraph is that we don't want you to be prepared and able to calm yourself down or anything. We want to get your genuine response that your body gives whenever a lie is detected and your blood pressure goes up and your sweating goes up in all of that, well whenever, he asked to have the questions ahead of time, and he was denied.

41:44 He then came back and said, look, I spoke to my attorney and the attorney said that I do not need to take this polygraph test. It would not be in my best interest. He did, though, to decide to do something, and I want to tell you what that is. He didn't want to just sit back and wait for days to continue to pass and his wife's body not be found, so he didn't take the polygraph test, but he did call a local TV station and hold a press conference, and in that press conference, he offered up a one hundred thousand dollars reward for Janna's safe return. And I listened to those interviews. He was very genuine, he was very concerned, and he was offering up a whole lot of money to get his wife back. And there's got to be somebody who knows something was really with the idea that he was going off of. And this press conference got a lot of attention in the community.

42:40 Everybody by now knew about this case, and a whole lot of people wanted to have a good outcome. She was a good woman and here's her husband pleading and offering up a ton of cash to bring her home. Well, it did get a lot of attention. But this attention also included a couple of women in the community, and they all called in because they had had some information after that award that reward money was put up. They decided to come forward because they all had very similar stories. It was kind of interesting. All of them said that Bruce had asked them out on a date recently. One lady we even went in to be super specific. She worked at the bank where he went. So he went in and asked her out on a date while he was doing a bank transaction. Another lady worked at an escrow office, and he asked her out on a date. Now, she was quite frank when she said, I wasn't interested at all. She was kind of like whenever he asked her out on the date. And then one day a neighbor of Bruce and Janis found a note on her vehicle.

43:52 It was early morning time, and that note asked her if her granddaughter would be interested in going out on a date with him. It wasn't until all of these women saw his face on TV though, that they made the connection to the missing wife situation, and they all realized, well, maybe we should call in. I'm not saying they called in for the money. I'm just saying they did make the connection between the face and being asked out. But one hundred thous hmm, maybe they called in on that regard to you know. So every one of them, though, said we want to tell this story because this woman is missing. And they also all said we denied him a date because every one of them said that he was creepy, every one of them. So if you're catching the vibe here I'm trying to give out about this guy.

44:44 None of them really liked him, so clearly he wasn't quite the grieving spouse that he was once thought to be. Well, Jana had a friend named Jan. Jana's friend Jan got to thinking about a conversation that she had with Jana about wanting a family really bad. She was thinking about her friend being missing, how horrible this was, and was kind of reminiscing over some of their last few conversations. And one of the last conversations they had, Jana said she was super excited because they were going to be adopting a baby. They had filled out the paperwork already, and when the two women had the conversation, both of them were very excited about this big change. Jana wasn't able, for whatever reason, to have a baby of her own, and so she was so excited that her and Bruce were finally going to bring this baby that she had wanted for so long into their home. This was about a month or two, I guess before her disappearance. But a month before she disappeared, Jana was out to eat again with that friend Jan, and she asked, Hey, how was the adoption going, How are you excited? Did y'all find a baby? Is there someone that y'all linked up with?

45:49 And Jana surprisingly snapped back at her real quick and said, there's not going to be an adoption, and that snapback wasn't mean though, it was almost like a sex add defensive snap back towards her friend. And so the friend kind of looked over and got the feeling that Bruce was the one that had put a stop to this whole adoption situation, even though Jan really wanted that, and Jan also knew that Bruce had not always been a really good husband to Jana. This is one of those things that we all put out a face for people, right, we all put out an image, But your really really close friends know more about you than the average bear would know. And that's where these friends kind of came into play. Jenna had shared with Jan that she had caught Bruce asking other women out in the past, but they always worked through it, and they worked through these hard times and they were gonna make their marriage work. Jana, though, had become increasingly tired of this mundane marriage and the divide between the two spouses just had continued to widen.

47:03 Jenna wanted a family, and Bruce wanted to chase the money and build a financial empire. And they really had come to an impasse about what they were going to do now in their lives, and they weren't getting along about it. Come to find out, here's the bell ringer right here. Each of them each held a one million dollar policy on the other spouse. So talking to the neighbors, that's where they were verified that letter that was found on the car talking about the cops went and did that. The cops also found out when talking to the neighbors that one of them heard a fight between Bruce and Jenna on Saturday morning and it was loud, like the neighbor was able to make it out what was going on.

47:47 And then the neighbor said, and then it sounded like maybe they were moving furniture or something. It just got to where there was like this rumbling type of noise. Well, this was now October of two thousand and one. Jena had been gone now for two months. No one had heard or seen from her. This is when a caller calls in and says that I saw a white pathfinder parked on California Street. But it was parked in front of a home about a week before Jannah went missing. So they asked the caller, Okay, well what about it. The car was in a different spot, and the caller says, yeah, and I saw a white person get out dressed in a white dress shirt and it stood out. This person looked really suspicious and that's why it kind of stood out to the collar. As the caller started putting the timeline of this woman going missing, and then that pathfinder and all of it started coming together. So the authorities did discover that missing car of Jenna's parked in a vacant garage and that car was in the twenty four hundred block of that California avenue. This is the one I mentioned earlier, and this was in the Signal Hill area of Long Each, California. Now why do I bring this up because this is a predominantly black neighborhood. This is not a mixed neighborhood or one where you would see white people really walking around. And the caller specifically said that he saw a white person get out of

49:17 that car and that the car had been parked on the street. So police decided to put together a few lineups to see if the caller could id the man that he saw walking away from the vehicle. One of the lineups had the personal trainer in it, Dean. One of the lineups had Bruce the husband in it, and then the other one had the business partner, Chris in it, So all of them were in different lineups, and all three lineups were shown separately to this person. And it's important to note this is a good strategy by the police because if they had put all three of the men that were potential suspects Dean, Chris the coworker, and Bruce the husband, if they had put them all in the same lineup, then that would leave reasonable doubt I guess in the eyes of a jury if they looked at this, because if three people were suspects and three of them were in a lineup of six people, well then you could argue, well, of course he picked one of the people you think is a suspect. It was a fifty percent shot. But what they did was they broke it up to where it was one out of six, then one out of six, and then one out of six.

50:29 So it really made the chances less that this person would pick someone that could have possibly been a potential suspect if you didn't realize that. I just wanted to point it out. So they split them up into these three different lineups to decrease that odds of being picked substantially, And after looking at all three lineups separately, the caller picked none other than Bruce as the man that he saw walking away from the vehicle. And this would have been the Sunday that the two of them were supposedly home alone having the couple's weekend. So what it kind of looked like was that maybe Bruce took the car purposefully went and left it in a poor, impoverished, traditionally black neighborhood with the windows down and the keys left in it. Because the reason I say that is that later on some people that lived in the neighborhood said, well, you know, we saw some neighborhood kids taking a white pathfinder around for a joy ride that same weekend. So I mean, what do you think happened. The white man brings a car, drops it off in a neighborhood where no white people live, the windows are down, and the next thing you know, you see kids in the neighborhood have taken it and they're driving around having the time of their lives and it it's not rocket science to say, hmm, that's probably what happened. So they go and they canvass the area and they talked to some teenagers and the teenagers say, yes, we did. We found the suv. It was unlocked and we thought it was abandoned. They said, okay, when did you find this car? They said it was about eight o'clock on August the twentieth. So the boys

52:03 said that the car's front windows were rolled down, which went along with what the police suspected. They said they found a purse in it, and that purse had Jana's wallet in it. They found her cell phone, they found her keys, and they found a gun, and all of it was in plain sight, right there for these for these kids to see. So they said, we kind of rifled through all of her personal belongings and then we threw the bag out. They said, okay, well where did you throw it out? They said, well, we threw the bag and the phone on top of one of these apartment buildings that they pointed out. They said, we sold the gun and then we took the car for a joy ride. I mean, hell, we found a free car. So they were very open and upfront and honest about what they had done with the stuff. They didn't realize though, until a week later, that the news was showing the very car they're joy riding in, and they realized, oh shit, this might be linked to some type of murder, and so they took the car and parked it, and then they came forward with all of their evidence because they didn't want to be tied to a murder, like, look, we didn't have shit to do with this woman, if she's dead. We just found the car and all the stuff in it. And according to some local reports that I read, there was a local minister who advertised to that local community, if you will return the gun, I'll give you one hundred dollars reward. It'll be anonymous if I can just get the weapon. And I thought, man, what a great use of our clergy to say, no questions asked, I'll give you one hundred bucks. Just give me the gun back so we can figure out what happened to this lady. Bruce's own step brother also was

53:38 kind of starting to cock his head up and kind of squint at what his brother had told him about what was going on he said, you know, my trust and my belief in Bruce kind of started to feel really misplaced because a lot of things that were now happening sure did seem a lot more than coincidence. So here was the timeline now that they came up with. On August eighteenth, into the morning of the nineteenth, around one thirty ish in the morning, Jenna returned from the concert. Then early Saturday morning, that's when the neighbors said that they heard arguing and during that exact same time as when Bruce claimed that they were sitting down reading and watching some TV. Then on Sunday he says, oh, yeah, we went out for a walk too. Bruce says, we went out for a walk, we talked to some neighbors, blah blah, blah blah blah. Well, the police go back out and they start talking to the neighbors again and they're like, did you speak with Bruce and what were all conversations about. But none, none, zero of those neighbors could ever remember speaking to him. Matter of fact, they were very adamant we never spoke to Bruce. And they added that it was really weird because after the first time the police talked to the neighbors. Bruce was out walking and he was making conversations with the neighbors that he normally didn't make conversation with, and was like, yeah, remember when I spoke to you on Sunday, And multiple neighbors were thinking themselves, I didn't talk to you on Sunday.

55:08 I never saw you on Sunday. So the police say, okay, well, what were the neighbors wearing, Bruce, whenever you went out and you talked to him on that Sunday, And wouldn't you know, Bruce couldn't tell them what anybody that he spoke to was wearing on that Sunday, even though he was adamant he had spoken to multiple neighbors. So Bruce's whole thought was that there must have been a carjacking or a kidnapping. Maybe the voicemail person was involved. But all of this was investigated and all of it was deemed to not be part of what it was going on. None of the evidence was backing that up. Bruce was the only one with a motive for Jenna to be gone. To be gone, their marital assets would have all been his.

55:51 There's a million dollar life insurance policy. And then to boot, he had the ability to be with all of these women that Obviously Bruce didn't seem to be grieving Jana being gone or his wife being missing, because the whole time that Jenna's missing, he did not take any part in the search for her. He allegedly, by the way, I'll say allegedly, but you read through the lines here, actually visited prostitutes. He went and visited prostitutes throughout his marriage too. He had been busted doing this, and he did not support Jana's wish to adopt a child because that would have tied him to her permanently after her disappearance.

56:34 He then solicited those multiple females and acquaintances for sex, which they denied him for the dates. And something else I found that blew my mind that I never saw in majority of reporting was what if I told you he also asked his own eighteen year old niece to have sex with him. You know what I'm saying, This dude has way more problems than just not being a good husband. And then if she was missing, he wouldn't have a kid to look out for because he didn't want to adopt a kid anyway. Divorce would have made him split it all, murder would have given it to him all. And police were really honing in now that he seemed to be the strong one with the motive, and this was their belief. The police believed that he killed her Saturday morning. They believe he killed her Saturday morning in her bed, possibly while she was asleep. So they think that he shot her in the head. And they may have had their fights, but she trusted him enough to have enough regard for her in her life to not kill her. But she was dead wrong, painfully wrong.

57:41 She went to bed Friday night with plans for the next morning of working out and going to get a massage with her friends and laying next to her the man that she married and that she loved and they took vows to love each other for the rest of their lives, but also the same man who would callous planned to end her life. All she had to do was fall asleep first. This is the most this is the ultimate betrayal. He shot her, and with her brain decimated, he then wiped up the headboard with a towel from their bathroom and then he threw it on top of her, rolled her up in their marital bed sheets, her bloody pillow included remember her pillow was missing, and then he stuffed her in the back of her own car, and her body would remain in that garage for a day or two for that weekend basically, and that's why they were able to find that large bloody spot. The reality is kind of gross, but the reality of it is that police believe and investigators believe that this was purge from her decomposing body. Basically, your body starts decomposing the minute that you die, and eventually your body's going to release the fluids where it's laying, and so her body released those fluids in that puddle in the back of the vehicle. And then Sunday he started up that car where her dead body had been wrapped up and laying for two days, and he dumped her body somewhere unknown before he left the car in a bad neighborhood, hoping and praying to frame someone who would steal it. And

59:15 you know, it was kids that picked up that car, and damn it, they weren't right to take that car, but he was willing to set up people kids in hopes that they would steal that car so that he could wash his hands of this, and he easily could have walked home because where the car was found was only four miles from their house. If piece of shit had a picture in the dictionary, Bruce's face would have been plaster right there underneath it. All Jennah wanted, y'all was a family. She wanted a baby, and he couldn't even give her that basic desire of a woman. No wonder all the other women were repulsed by him. He's not a good man. The woman who was dedicated to him in all ways, worked with him, built a successful life with him. All he did was reject her, deny her a baby, and then destroy her in hopes of finding a different wife when he got tired of the first one. I read that Jenna did all the paperwork, all of the hard work in the office, the taxes, the mundane in and out paperwork of business, while Bruce ran around being the face and the personality of it all.

1:00:30 And that's fitting because hard work was below him, just a facade of greatness. That's all he could do. It took his wife that he humiliated over and over again, access prostitutes while he was married to her, treated her like a piece of trash, She's the one doing the hard work, putting the backbone in the whole business, while you're over smiling and you sound like her fucking dad is what he sounds like. And the DA felt like this was more than enough evidence to warrant an arrest, and Bruce was arrested for them of his wife, Jana, and how financially well off were they all, he could have divorced her and still lived a good life. You know how I know that because he was able to post a one million dollar bail when it was set he posted it himself. And then on February eighteenth of two thousand and three, his trial took place. And the biggest issue, as I'm sure you can realize, is Jana's body was never found. It was still missing at the time of the trial, and this makes it circumstantial at best this case, and usually whenever there's no body, the stats are really low in bodyless crime convictions. People want to have a body, and Bruce really seemed to enjoy the fact that Jana was never found. He came across as very confident in court. He wanted to testify on his own behalf. Do you know how stupid you have to be to testify on your own behalf in this type of case. I know I just said it was circumstantial, but how confident do you have to be with the evidence that is against you to this point? But incredibly,

1:02:04 the deliberation went on for six days, and if you know anything about a trial, that is not a good sign for the prosecution. Six days that means we've got a lot of doubt that they're working through. And when the jury returned, they announced that they were hopelessly hung and a mistrial was declared. But do not fret. I'm not here to give you bad news. I'm here to give you justice news. Because the DA decided that he would not walk away from this case, he decided that he would try him again, and eight months later, still convinced that Jana was killed by her husband, this DA decided to take that case on again. He was convinced that Jana was murdered and that someone that someone being her husband, should be held accountable. The issue that the juror seemed to feel in the first trial wasn't if he did it, but why he did it. So in the new trial, the DA decided to take a whole new angle. At the prosecution, and he focused more on the facts and less on the motive, and the jury seemed to understand it when it was laid out that way, because they came back in less than one day with a guilty verdict. And this is good to hear, okay, But I want you to know that listening to Jana's mother's defeat in the media interviews and in the victim impact statement, saying things like I wish I could have

1:03:35 her body to do a proper burial is heartbreaking. A conviction is great, but think about her mama, who doesn't even have her daughter's body, doesn't even know where her final resting place is. One thing she says, She said, you took my daughter, and alongside that, you also took her father's desire to live, because y'all, for all her father's faults, her father loved her and whenever she went missing, he stopped having the will to even live, to seek treatment, to even go on because his baby girl was dead. And you have to still be able to empathize with that as a daddy. Janna's mother, though, to me, is the ultimate loser in all of this. You can't just help but shake your head and just pity for this woman.

1:04:21 She's dealt with a lot. That's a strong woman for all that she's been dealing with. He was given fifteen years to life at sentencing, and he spent his days now at the California Institution for Men. And I want you to know he has been up for parole multiple times since twenty seventeen, and he has been consistently denied the opportunity. His most recent denial was in twenty twenty one. And I say, good, sit your ass right there where you deserve to be. Only a selfish, heartless, pompous coward would kill the woman that he vowed to love and cherished forever and stuff her in the back of her own car to rot until he could find it safe way, in his eyes, to go and dump her. And I also think of the calculated attempt that he did to frame someone by placing the car in a high crime area.

1:05:10 To think that some teenagers could have possibly been framed and charged with Jenna's murder because they stole the car, which I again will tell you is bad. You don't steal a car, but they didn't kill her, their dumb kids stealing a car. And to know that he thought that through. A grown man thought that through and was willing to let some I would argue disadvantaged teams just by the likes of where they come from. To take the fall for something he did is just unconscionable. The path of destruction that this man leaves in the wake of anyone in anywhere that he touches. All of these years to have passed, y'all, and Jenna's body has never been found. It is twenty twenty five, and somewhere she lay unclaimed but certainly not unloved, And that man will not say where he dumped her body. Her mama, her daddy, and her sister deserved closure to this and they never got it. It is the ultimate disrespect, the ultimate when a daddy hands over the hand of his daughter to another man to honor and to cherish and to take care of her, and then he turns around and he murders her, dumps her body, and then refuses to even tell you where it is. You're a fucking piece of trash.

1:06:27 The level of disrespect that you were showing that family. Jannah wanted to be a mama. She wanted a normal life with a child to raise as her own, and that opportunity was stripped from her. She was a kind person, she was a benefit to society. So we all lost, is my argument. When she was killed, a best friend was lost, a daughter was lost, a sister was lost, and a mama to a parentless child needing to be adopted was never a adopted It was a loss. No one deserves this and all over nothing. And considering Bruce's legitimate nerd status and his inflated self confidence, I'm beyond unimpressed that divorce and murder were the only two options that he could come up with, and then he chose murder, Like, dude, you're a walking douchebag and you chose murder as your option.

1:07:26 I mean, hell, I'm just gonna tell you, I don't get it. Because he was way too busy being rejected by women to have the audacity to go around and kill one.