Jason Neal | Updates

Fred Grabbe Resurfaces

Jason Neal — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some cases stay with you long after the verdict, and the Grabbe murder — covered in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 1 — is one of them. Charlotte Grabbe vanished from her family’s farm near Marshall, Illinois, in July 1981. It took years, a private investigator, a witness’s confession, and a now-famous “murder tree” before her husband, Fred, was finally convicted of strangling her, burning her body in a steel drum, and dumping the remains in the Wabash River.

When Volume 1 went to print, the story ended roughly where readers expected it to: Fred Grabbe, paroled in 2022 after nearly four decades behind bars, an old man quietly released back into the world. What I didn’t expect was for him to start talking.

In April 2025, the popular true crime podcast Crime Junkie devoted a full episode — “MURDERED: Charlotte Grabbe” — to the case. Its most striking moment wasn’t a retelling of the old facts. It was that the show’s team tracked Fred down and interviewed him in person at the retirement facility where he now lives as a free man. Asked directly about Charlotte’s death, he denied it. Asked about the abuse that defined their marriage, he denied that too. Two separate juries found him guilty; Fred, all these years later, still insists he killed no one.

The renewed attention also pulled a darker thread back into the light. Fred’s surviving daughter, Jennie, has long believed her father may be connected to as many as six other deaths — a suspicion repeated over the years but never tested in a courtroom, and one no prosecutor has ever charged. The killing of her brother, Jeff Grabbe — shot and dumped in the water off the California coast in 1988, before he could testify at the retrial — remains officially unsolved. The episode was released, in part, as an appeal for information: Fred is now 86 and reportedly in poor health, and the people who have spent their lives chasing the truth know they may be running out of time.

There’s something deeply unsettling about a man convicted twice of murdering his wife spending his final years comfortable, free, and unrepentant — calmly telling an interviewer that none of it happened. Charlotte’s body was never recovered. Her daughter is still asking questions more than four decades later. And the man at the center of it all has, so far, kept whatever he knows to himself.

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A Detective’s Call About Harvey Glatman

Jason Neal — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most of the case updates I write here follow a familiar shape — an appeal, a parole hearing, a conviction overturned or upheld. This one is different. Harvey Glatman, the “Lonely Hearts Killer” whose crimes I covered in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 2, has been dead since 1959, executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin. There is no new ruling to report and no parole board to second-guess. And yet his name still surfaces.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a cold case detective in Colorado. He had read the story I’d written on Glatman and had questions about it. He was working the case of a woman who went missing in Colorado during the years Glatman lived in the state, and he wanted to talk through what I had found.

It makes sense that Glatman’s name would come up. Before he became California’s “Glamour Girl Slayer,” he spent his formative years in Denver. He served time in a Colorado prison for a string of assaults on women, and he completed his parole there before heading west. His shadow has hung over Colorado’s unsolved cases for decades — most notably the murder of Boulder’s “Jane Doe,” identified in 2009 as eighteen-year-old Dorothy Gay Howard, a young woman investigators still believe Glatman may have killed. So when a Colorado detective comes across a woman who vanished in the 1950s, Glatman is a name worth ruling in or out.

That was exactly this detective’s goal. He didn’t tell me he was convinced Glatman was responsible — quite the opposite. He wanted to eliminate him as a suspect if the evidence allowed, and confirm him if it didn’t. That is careful, honest police work, and I was glad to help. I sent him everything I had gathered when I first researched the chapter.

I never learned whether any of it made a difference. My honest guess is that it didn’t — Glatman may simply have no connection to this particular woman, and the answer lies somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere there is a family that has spent a lifetime waiting for an answer that never came. If a folder of old research can help a detective close one door, or open another, and move that family even slightly closer to the truth, then the hours I once spent inside Harvey Glatman’s terrible story were worth far more than I realized when I wrote it.

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Grant Amato and the Ghost Adventures Murder Plot

Jason Neal — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Grant Amato — whose case I covered in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 8 — murdered his parents and his brother Cody in their Chuluota, Florida home in January 2019, after his family tried to cut off his obsessive online relationship with a Bulgarian webcam model. A jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, and he was sent to prison for three consecutive life terms. That seemed to be the end of the story. It wasn’t.

Amato’s public defenders filed an appeal in August 2019, arguing in part that the trial judge should never have allowed evidence about a stolen gun. It failed. On May 4, 2021, Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal affirmed his convictions and sentences without a written opinion, finding no error worth discussing.

The far stranger development came later — and it carries an unsettling echo of the original crime.

In 2024, Amato’s case was dramatized in the Paramount+ true crime series Ctrl+Alt+Desire. Somewhere along the way, a woman named Victoria Goodwin saw Amato in a true crime documentary and began writing to him in prison. Victoria was married to Aaron Goodwin, a longtime cast member of the paranormal reality show Ghost Adventures. According to a Las Vegas police arrest report, the letters turned romantic, and investigators say the two fell in love.

By October 2024, they were allegedly planning a murder. Using a contraband cell phone, Amato is accused of messaging a third party to arrange the killing of Aaron Goodwin, while Victoria shared her husband’s schedule and tracked his location through Apple’s Find My app. She set aside $11,515 to pay for the hit. One of her messages reportedly read, “Am I a bad person? Because I chose to end his existence. Not divorce.”

The plot collapsed when corrections officers seized Amato’s phone. Victoria Goodwin was arrested in Nevada on March 6, 2025; Aaron filed for divorce six days later. In April she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, and on June 5, 2025, she was sentenced to between 36 and 90 months in prison. Aaron told the court he would “never feel safe again.”

To date, Grant Amato faces no additional charges over the plot. He remains at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, still serving the three life sentences he received for killing his family.

There is a grim symmetry to it all. Amato’s undoing began with a relationship he built with a woman he had never met in person — one who told him she loved him, and whom he believed without question. Years later, from a prison cell, he became the object of that same kind of fixation: a stranger who knew him only from a screen, certain she was in love, and willing to arrange a murder to prove it.

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Joshua Webb Update

Jason Neal — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Few cases in True Crime Case Histories ended on as uneasy a note as Joshua Webb’s. He’s the man from Volume 14 who, on Mother’s Day in 2017, beat and decapitated his mother, Tina Webb, inside their home in Colton, Oregon — then drove to a grocery store in nearby Estacada, walked in carrying her severed head, and stabbed an employee. The chapter closed on a fear shared by both victims’ families: that Webb might one day be released if doctors decided his mental illness was sufficiently controlled. That fear has now been partially realized.

In June 2018, Webb pleaded guilty except for insanity and was committed to the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, under the jurisdiction of the state’s Psychiatric Security Review Board. The commitment was described as being “for life” — but Oregon’s insanity statutes don’t work like a prison sentence. The board, not a judge, decides where a patient is held and at what security level, and the law requires a hearing whenever the hospital’s clinical team believes a patient can be safely managed somewhere less restrictive.

That request came in the summer of 2024. Hospital staff testified that Webb had been stable for years, took his medication willingly, avoided conflict with other patients, and had earned privileges that included work in a greenhouse on the hospital grounds. On October 9, 2024, the board granted him a conditional release, approving his move from the state hospital to Lifeways McNary Place — a 16-bed secure residential treatment center in Umatilla. It’s a locked facility, staffed around the clock, but a clear step down from Salem.

The decision came over strong objections. Lawyers for the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office and the Oregon Department of Justice pointed to Webb’s lack of demonstrated remorse, the brutality of the crime, and reports that he had been watching television programs about serial killers — including John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer — while at the hospital. As a condition of the release, the board imposed restrictions on his media consumption.

It’s worth being clear about what this is and isn’t. Webb has not walked free. He remains in a locked, supervised facility, still under the board’s jurisdiction, still required to take medication and follow a treatment plan. But it’s exactly the kind of incremental step the families dreaded back in 2018 — the first loosening of a system they were told would hold him for life. For Tina Webb’s family, and for the grocery store employee who survived that day, it reopens a wound that was never going to fully close.

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Mark Twitchell Admits He Killed for the Thrill

Jason Neal — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years, Mark Twitchell stuck to a single story. The aspiring Edmonton filmmaker – better known as the “Dexter Killer” – always insisted that the 2008 death of Johnny Altinger had been self-defense, a movie stunt that spiraled out of control inside his rented garage. In March 2026, sitting before the Parole Board of Canada, he finally let that story go.

I covered Twitchell’s case in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 2: the fake dating profiles, the hockey mask and stun baton, the “kill room” modeled on his favorite TV show, and the deleted laptop file in which he described becoming a serial killer. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 25 years.

This spring, Twitchell applied for a series of escorted absences from prison – short, supervised visits to see his parents in Edmonton. The proposed outings would have kept him under the constant watch of two armed correctional officers, with no contact with the public. On March 12, the board turned him down.

Its reasoning had less to do with Twitchell than with the people he left behind. While the board agreed he had made genuine behavioural progress and would be a “manageable risk,” it said it also had to weigh “the possible psychological impacts on the victims from you visiting the city in which they reside.”

What stood out most, though, was what Twitchell admitted along the way. He told the board he had begun to wonder “about the mysteries of what the experience of killing would be like” – that curiosity, not self-defense, had planted the seed. It was about as close as he has ever come to confirming what investigators argued at trial all along: that Johnny Altinger was lured into that garage to die.

Now 46, Twitchell is serving his sentence at the medium-security Bowden Institution in central Alberta, having started out in a maximum-security prison in Saskatchewan. He has married for a third time behind bars and says therapy has made him “an entirely different person.” He will not be eligible to apply for full parole until 2033.

He may well be a changed man. But at the hearing he also said, “I don’t deserve to be forgiven. But I would really like a shot at redeeming myself.” For now, the board has decided that shot will not include a trip back to the city where Johnny Altinger’s family still lives.

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Daniel Wozniak Update: Off Death Row

Jason Neal — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Wozniak was sentenced to death in 2016 for one of the coldest, most calculated double murders I’ve ever covered — a struggling community theater actor who killed two people to bankroll his own wedding. Nearly ten years later, that death sentence is still technically on the books. But death row, the place, is gone.

I covered the murders of Sam Herr and Julie Kibuishi in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 14. When the book was published, Wozniak was at San Quentin State Prison, his execution indefinitely on hold under Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 moratorium. The chapter ended with the assumption that he would simply stay there. He hasn’t.

In July 2021, Wozniak was quietly moved out of San Quentin and into Salinas Valley State Prison — a lower-security facility — as part of a pilot program for condemned inmates. He was later transferred again, to a state prison in Vacaville. The program allows death-sentenced prisoners to leave their isolated cells, hold prison jobs, and put a portion of their earnings toward victim restitution.

Then the entire system was dismantled. Beginning in February 2024, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation started emptying San Quentin’s death row — once the largest in the country — and folding condemned inmates into the general population at prisons across the state. By the end of May 2024, the unit stood empty. Its tiers of cells are being repurposed as Newsom converts San Quentin into a rehabilitation center.

Wozniak is still, legally, a condemned man. His sentence has not been overturned, and his automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court remains unresolved. In April 2026, the court granted his attorney yet another extension to file it. But in every practical sense, a punishment that a jury handed down in record time has quietly softened into something closer to an ordinary life sentence.

For Sam Herr’s father, Steve, the transfer news landed hard. He told the Orange County Register that he heard about his son’s killer’s improved circumstances not from prison officials, but from one of Wozniak’s own acquaintances. “It was a kick in the stomach,” he said.

It’s a familiar ache in cases like this one. A jury delivers the harshest sentence the law allows, the families steel themselves for the long fight to see it carried out — and then the ground shifts beneath them. Wozniak will never walk free. But the death sentence that was meant to define his punishment has, for now, become little more than a line on paper.

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Jessica Wongso "The Coffee Killer" Released

Jason Neal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Wongso, the woman I wrote about in True Crime Case Histories — Volume 3 who was convicted of poisoning her friend Mirna Salihin with a cyanide-laced Vietnamese iced coffee at a Jakarta café in 2016, walked out of Pondok Bambu Women’s Prison on August 18, 2024 — a free woman, at least physically. She had served roughly eight years of her twenty-year sentence.

The Indonesian Justice Ministry granted her parole based on “good behavior,” citing a total of 59 months — nearly five years — of accumulated sentence reductions. Smiling and waving to reporters as she climbed into a waiting car, her first words to the assembled press were that she was “hungry and craving some sushi and fresh drinks.” Her own celebrity attorney, Otto Hasibuan, admitted he was caught off guard by the sudden release. Jessica will remain under parole supervision until March 27, 2032.

A lot of what made her release possible — both legally and in the court of public opinion — traces back to the 2023 Netflix documentary Ice Cold: Murder, Coffee and Jessica Wongso, which dropped in September of that year and quickly became one of the most talked-about films in Indonesia. The documentary cast doubt on the conviction, highlighted the chaotic media circus around the trial, raised questions about the autopsy (which Mirna’s family had limited for religious reasons), and suggested the Indonesian justice system had used Jessica as a convenient scapegoat. Indonesians split into camps almost overnight, and a wave of online sentiment shifted toward the idea that Jessica had been railroaded.

Jessica has used that renewed attention. In October 2024, just two months after her release, she filed a second judicial review with the Supreme Court — her legal team claimed to have “new CCTV footage” from the Olivier Café that allegedly showed the original courtroom evidence had been misleading. She has continued to maintain her innocence at every opportunity. Her lawyer told reporters that even though Jessica was now physically free, she still wanted to use the appeal to prove she never committed the crime.

That appeal didn’t go anywhere. On August 14, 2025, the Indonesian Supreme Court rejected her second judicial review. It was the same outcome as her first review back in 2018. The conviction stands.

So where does that leave things? Jessica Wongso is out of prison, twelve years early, but she is still — legally and officially — the woman who poisoned Mirna Salihin. She’s also become something rarer in the years since the trial: a true-crime celebrity, a Netflix subject, and a kind of Rorschach test for what people believe about Indonesia’s judicial system. For Mirna’s family, particularly her father Edi Darmawan Salihin — who has been the most vocal voice for her conviction since day one — the early release was a gut punch.

Whether you came away from the original story convinced of her guilt or with lingering questions, one thing is hard to dispute: Mirna Salihin has been dead for nearly a decade, and the woman convicted of killing her is now ordering sushi.

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Jennifer Pan Update

Jason Neal — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Pan, whose murder-for-hire plot against her parents is the subject of a chapter in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 5, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in her mother’s death on March 18, 2026. The plea closes one of the longest-running chapters in modern Canadian true crime — more than fifteen years after the staged 2010 home invasion that left Bich Ha Pan dead and Hann Pan gravely injured in their Markham, Ontario home.

The plea is the result of a long appellate climb. Pan was originally convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder in 2015, along with three co-accused: her ex-boyfriend Daniel Wong, who arranged the hit, plus Lenford “Homeboy” Crawford and David Mylvaganam — two of the gunmen who entered the house that night. But in May 2023, the Court of Appeal for Ontario overturned the first-degree murder convictions, ruling that the trial judge had failed to instruct the jury on a third possible scenario: that the plan was to kill only Hann Pan, with Bich Ha Pan’s death being a tragic but unintended consequence. The attempted murder convictions stood.

The Crown appealed, and on April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed the order for new murder trials in a 7–2 decision. Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote that there was an “air of reality” to the theory that only Hann had been the intended target — enough that the original jury should have been allowed to consider it.

Rather than face a second jury, Pan accepted a manslaughter plea. The agreed statement of facts acknowledges that while she did not plan her mother’s killing, she should have known her mother might be home when the killers arrived — making her death an objectively foreseeable consequence of the plot to murder Hann. Pan received a life sentence, but is now eligible to apply for parole, having already served more than fifteen years.

Her co-accused followed similar paths. Daniel Wong was convicted of manslaughter in a separate trial. Lenford Crawford pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. David Mylvaganam, the last defendant to be sentenced, was given a life sentence on April 8, 2026 following his own manslaughter conviction. All four are now eligible for parole. The fifth man, Eric “Sniper” Carty, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy back in 2015, died in his cell at Kent Institution in 2018.

For the family that survived, the legal redefinition probably matters less than what was lost. Hann Pan, who barely survived being shot in the face, has cut off all contact with his daughter. He once said at sentencing that he felt as though he were dead too. A manslaughter conviction means the courts now formally accept that Pan didn’t want her mother to die. It doesn’t change the fact that Bich Ha Pan walked through her own front door that night because her daughter unlocked it for the men who killed her.

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Alyssa Bustamante Update

Jason Neal — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alyssa Bustamante, the woman I wrote about in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 2who in 2009 lured nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten into the woods near St. Martins, Missouri, and stabbed her to death simply to know what it felt like to kill someone, was denied parole in July 2024, following a hearing on the 8th of that month — fifteen years into a life-plus-thirty-year sentence that everyone involved had once believed would keep her behind bars for decades longer.

The hearing happened at all because of a 2021 Missouri law, Senate Bill 26, which made most juvenile offenders eligible for parole after serving fifteen years. The bill carved out an exception for first-degree murder, but not for second-degree murder — the charge Bustamante had pleaded down to in 2012 to avoid a mandatory life-without-parole sentence. Even the bill's own sponsor, State Representative Mark Sharp, later said his legislation was never intended to help cases like hers, and that he would personally oppose her parole.

Elizabeth's family found out about the hearing through an automated phone call. On Mother's Day. Her mother, Patty Preiss, told reporters she would attend anyway. "I will relive my pain for them if it means it could make any difference at all," she said. "There is very little I can do for my daughter now but show up."

She and her husband, Gary Bemboom, did show up. They sat through it. And what they sat through, according to Bemboom, was Bustamante describing — in her own words, in front of them — exactly how and why she killed Elizabeth. He said she included details that had never been allowed in at the original plea hearing in 2012. That detail is worth pausing on: because Bustamante took a deal and there was never a trial, the family had been spared most of the gruesome specifics for twelve years. The plea hearing focused on the legal mechanics and the diary entries, not on a step-by-step account from Bustamante herself. At the parole hearing, with no judge and no rules of evidence to filter anything out, they finally got that account. From the woman who had killed their daughter. Who was now asking to be let out.

Bemboom called it "another day of grieving." "All of the hurt and pain was thrown back in the family's face," he said afterward. "It was a devastating day for all that were there." The Missouri Department of Corrections has not disclosed what Bustamante actually said, and the family has chosen not to share specifics publicly. The hearing was closed.

Elizabeth's family had also been lobbying the Missouri legislature for a fix. They got one — Senate Bill 754, which closes the loophole and makes juveniles convicted of second-degree murder ineligible for the early parole hearing. The family had asked that it be called "Elizabeth's Law." Governor Mike Parson signed it on July 9, 2024. Exactly one day after Bustamante's hearing. One day too late.

Bustamante's next parole hearing is currently scheduled for 2029, though Cole County prosecutor Locke Thompson has said he hopes the implementation of SB 754 pushes any future hearing well past that date. Even if she's eventually granted parole on the life sentence, she still has to serve her consecutive thirty-year term for armed criminal action, which would put her earliest possible release somewhere around 2059, when she'd be sixty-five.

Bustamante remains at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in northwest Missouri. She's now thirty-two. Elizabeth Olten would have turned twenty-six this past December.

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Jessica Ridgeway Case Update: Killer’s Mother Breaks Her 13-Year Silence

Jason Neal — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2025, Mindy Sigg — the mother who turned her own son in for the murder of ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway — spoke publicly for the first time since the 2012 case I covered in True Crime Case Histories — Volume 4. Austin Sigg has been serving a life sentence in an undisclosed out-of-state prison since 2014.

In a lengthy CNN interview, Mindy described the moment her seventeen-year-old walked into her bedroom in late October 2012 and told her he had something to say. Before he could finish, she somehow already knew. “Is this about Jessica?” she asked. He confirmed it and called himself a monster.

The thirteen years since have not been kind to her. She described panic attacks, suicidal ideation, and a yearslong unraveling after fleeing the home she had shared with her son. She fell apart one afternoon in the DVD section at Target, convinced everyone around her recognized her. A harassing voicemail playing back her own 911 call once landed in her inbox. She credited ketamine therapy with finally helping her where conventional treatment had failed.

Mindy and Austin have not spoken in years. The break came when the FBI asked him to participate in criminal profiling research and he refused — a choice that angered his mother and convinced her she would never get a truthful answer from him about anything.

Perhaps the most striking part of the piece is the response from Jessica’s family. Sarah Ridgeway, Jessica’s mother, told CNN she has never blamed Mindy, and that by turning Austin in rather than shielding him, Mindy likely saved other children he might have gone on to harm.

Mindy has never spoken with the Ridgeways but says she would if given the chance. Her message to them: she would trade her own life for Jessica’s if she could.

It is a small mercy in a case that, as anyone who has read the full details knows, contains very few of them.

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Brittany Killgore Update

Jason Neal — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A California appeals court has shut down the latest attempt by Jessica Lynn Lopez — one of three killers convicted in the 2012 torture-murder of 22-year-old Marine wife Brittany Killgore in Fallbrook, California — to overturn her conviction.

Killgore’s case, which I covered in True Crime Case Histories — Volume 5, remains one of the most disturbing crimes I’ve ever written about. Lured from her apartment under the pretense of a Hornblower dinner cruise, Brittany was instead taken to the Fallbrook home of Marine Staff Sergeant Louis Ray Perez, where she was restrained, tortured, and strangled by Perez, his live-in “slave” Jessica Lopez, and his polyamorous partner Dorothy Maraglino. All three were convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, torture, and attempted sexual battery in 2015, and each received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Lopez’s most recent appeal hinged on California’s 2019 felony murder reform, which narrowed murder liability to defendants who actually killed, intended to kill, or were “major participants” in the underlying felony. In 2023, San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Kearney rejected Lopez’s petition, ruling she still met the standard for murder under the revised law. She appealed.

In August 2025, a three-justice panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeal sided with Kearney. The justices concluded Lopez was either a major participant in the kidnapping and torture or had aided and abetted the killing itself.

Lopez had argued that her infamous seven-page confession letter — the one she wrote at the Ramada Inn in 2012 alongside multiple knives, an empty bottle of Chambord, and self-inflicted cuts on her neck and wrist — was “patently fabricated” at Maraglino’s direction. The appellate panel wasn’t buying it, writing that the appeal “offers no supporting reasoning or logic” to conclude the letter’s contents were “inherently improbable or physically impossible.”

Lopez also argued that Killgore wasn’t tortured at all, and that she herself hadn’t participated in the kidnapping because Brittany was already restrained by the time Lopez arrived home. The panel dismissed both claims, citing medical examiner testimony and details Lopez had included in her own confession letter.

Perez, Maraglino, and Lopez are all still serving life without parole — exactly where the jury sent them a decade ago. For Brittany Killgore’s family, that means the legal system, for once, held the line.

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Candace Hiltz Update

Jason Neal — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote about the murder of seventeen-year-old Candace Hiltz in True Crime Case Histories — Volume 4, the case had been cold for more than a decade. The lead detective, Robert Dodd, had been convicted of mishandling evidence found in his abandoned storage locker. The Hiltz family was convinced the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office had either bungled — or actively covered up — the investigation. And no one had ever been charged with Candace’s murder.

That last part is still true. But the case has shifted in a direction almost no one expected.

In November 2021, Oxygen’s Cold Justice dedicated a 90-minute season finale — titled “Small Town Conspiracy” — to the case. Veteran prosecutor Kelly Siegler and investigator Abbey Abbondandolo spent weeks in Fremont County working alongside Detective Peter Rasmussen and Undersheriff Derek Irvine, and what they found significantly complicates the story I told in the book.

A few of the key findings:

The deputy who came to the Hiltz home days before the murder — the one Candace accused of taking bribes from local meth cooks — was identified on camera as Sgt. Trace Hall. Hall acknowledged he was there to ask Dolores about Jimmy’s involvement in a burglary, but he flatly denied taking any bribes. The Cold Justice team ultimately concluded there was no substantiated evidence that any deputy had a motive to kill Candace or her dog.

Forensic firearms expert Chris Robinson demonstrated that a single shooter could plausibly have fired all the rounds — using a .410 shotgun, a .45 Long Colt revolver, and a .22 — eliminating the long-held theory that the autopsy required two or three assailants. Robinson also concluded that the same .22 used to kill Candace was likely the gun used to kill the family dog, Jackson.

Most striking of all, a small bone fragment that had been recovered fifteen years earlier from the wooded area where Jimmy Hiltz had been camping — and that had simply been sitting in evidence ever since — was finally sent for DNA testing. It matched Candace.

After reviewing everything, Det. Rasmussen and Undersheriff Irvine took the case against Jimmy to the District Attorney. According to Siegler, the DA “likes the case” but wasn’t ready to move forward. As of this writing, no charges have been filed.

Dolores Hiltz rejected the conclusions. She remains convinced her son did not kill her daughter and that the truth lies somewhere inside the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office. Given how badly that office mishandled the original investigation — and given Robert Dodd’s behavior with the evidence — it’s hard to blame her for not trusting them now.

Whether or not Jimmy is ever charged, the storage-locker fiasco still casts a long shadow. The bloody axe, rope, and other items recovered from Dodd’s unit were never properly tested for DNA in time, and a 2020 ruling noted that “potential relevant evidence in criminal prosecutions was lost.” Whatever those items might once have proven about Candace’s killer, they likely never will.

For Candace’s family, that may be the most painful part of all. Nearly twenty years on, they’re no closer to a courtroom than they were the day she died.

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Jason Neal — Fri, 3 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Tommy Ragan Update

Jason Neal — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Tommy Ragan, the man I wrote about in True Crime Case Histories - Volume 4 who was convicted of the 1977 murder of thirteen-year-old Bruce Kim in Centralia, Washington, died in custody on May 14, 2025. He was 81.

His death came at a particularly strange moment in the case's legal history. In April 2024, Ragan had filed a motion to vacate his conviction, citing a 2004 Washington State Supreme Court ruling that invalidated second-degree felony murder convictions based on assault as the predicate felony. Because Ragan's conviction rested on exactly that premise, a Lewis County Superior Court judge vacated his guilty plea in December 2024.

Rather than let the matter drop, the Lewis County Prosecutor's Office refiled charges in January 2025, this time charging him with first-degree aggravated murder — the original charge from 1977. His arraignment was scheduled for May 19, 2025. He died five days before it.

Ragan had remained in Washington state Department of Corrections custody throughout — he was serving a life sentence on an unrelated case — so he never walked free. But he did die without the murder conviction on his record, which is a deeply unsatisfying outcome for anyone who knows the full details of what he did to Bruce Kim. A legal technicality that had nothing to do with his guilt or innocence effectively wiped the slate clean on one of the most savage murders I've ever written about.

Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer addressed the outcome directly: "We are obviously disappointed that the defendant died without the conviction on his record, but are comforted by the fact that there is no doubt the atrocities were committed by the defendant."

It's cold comfort. Bruce Kim's family deserved a conviction that would outlast the man who killed him. Instead, the legal system — through no fault of the prosecutors who fought to refile charges — denied them even that.

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