October 5, 2023 • 37 mins
Shannon Green remembers her baby brother Jarrod as the kid who was always laughing and smiling with a mischievous sense of humor. She said Jarrod was a little bit naive, someone who always trusted others and would do anything for a friend.
In 1993, Jarrod graduated from Searcy High School in Arkansas. Eventually, he moved out of his parents house, started junior college and got a job at the Walmart distribution center. But then, in 1994, the problems started. Jarrod started getting involved in drugs and using methamphetamines. Within a shockingly short period of time, he was showing signs of addiction. Then, on September 30, 1994, Jarrod Green disappeared. His family continues to search for him.
If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
On September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, twenty year old Jared
Green was scared. His sister, Shannon, who was three years
older than Jared, remembered her baby brother as the kid
he was always laughing and smiling, who had a mischievous
sense of humor. Jared's middle name was Devlin, so they
called him the little devil.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I've used this expression before. He was like light and
life and laughter. He was always making jokes. He had
a really infectious laugh. He was always getting into trouble.
My mom called him like a little monkey because he
was climbing on stuff when we were kids and he
jumped off the top bunk bed knocked himself out. But
(00:58):
he was constantly doing silly stuff like that. If there
was a mischief to be had, he was going to
be in the middle of it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
But his humor was always fun, never cruel. Shannon said
that Jared was always a little bit naive. He was
someone who always trusted others and someone who would do
anything for a friend. Jared had a high IQ, Shannon said,
genius level, so he was always smart, but as a
kid he struggled to focus. Jared was diagnosed with ADHD,
(01:30):
so their parents put him on Riddlin. Though the Riddlin
did seem to help Jared focus at school, his parents
believed that it was stunning Jared's physical growth, which meant
that Jared was always small for his age, so he
ended up being held back a year at school. Even
though Jared eventually caught up physically and grew to be
almost six feet tall, he always had kind of a
(01:51):
slim build. In every picture I see of Jared, he's
got this boyish face. He's got brownish blonde hair, and
blue green eyes. He's smiling in every single picture, which
goes with what Shannon said about him. She said he
was full of life and always the life of the party,
just a joy to be around. Jared graduated from Sersey
(02:11):
High School in nineteen ninety three, and because he'd been
held back a year when he graduated, he was actually
nineteen years old. He continued to live at home after
high school. Eventually he moved out of his parents' house
and started junior college in bb He got a job
at the Walmart distribution center, but then in nineteen ninety four,
Jared's problem started. He started using methamphetamines and his family
(02:37):
says that within a shockingly short period of time, Jared
was showing signs of serious addiction. Jared's dark time began
some time after fall semester started at college.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
By the beginning of October, it was all over.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making
my true crime podcast, Talent Gone, I've learned that there's
no such thing as a small town where murder never happens.
I have received hundreds of men messages from people from
all around the country asking for help with an unsolved
murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If
(03:13):
you have a case you'd like me and my team
to look into, you can reach out to us at
our Hell and Gone Murder line at six seven eight
seven four four six one four five. That's six seven
eight seven four four six one four or five. When
(04:13):
I announced this new podcast, multiple listeners reached out to
me about Jared Green's case.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I'm just calling in for justice for Jared. You might
have heard podcasts before, but.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
There was a group of us that already.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
I'm calling in about the case of Jared Green. He
disappeared from Sarcy, Arkansas on September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I had actually heard from Jared's sister, Shannon Green, a
while back, and I knew this was one of the
first cases that I wanted to cover. At first, Jared's
family wasn't exactly sure what was going on with them.
Shannon said they were pretty clueless because she said her
parents had never dealt with that type of drug abuse before.
They did not know the signs to look for, and
(05:01):
they didn't know how quickly this kind of thing could
escalate or had to dangerous.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It was not long after he graduated high school, when
he was about nineteen, and that's when my mom found,
like I think she found pot in his pants pocket
that she was doing the laundry and she found it,
and it was a really fast kind of transformation when
he started doing that. That was when it was this
(05:26):
deep decline and the change in him became just obvious.
I dropped out of grad school and moved back home
because my parents were kind of like, we don't know
what to do, and I was so upset about it.
He was over eighteen. We couldn't force him into a
rehab It was terrible. We didn't know the extent really
of what. We were just so naive. I've said this before,
(05:49):
but like my parent you know, we were not exposed
to anything. My parents they they went to church. We
didn't drink, we didn't were We didn't you know, there
was all this very kind of sheltered life. We didn't
even know what was happening. I certainly had no idea
of the depths of the corruption and the drug scene
in Sursey. We had no idea about that at the time.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
In nineteen ninety four, Jared was living at home, working
at the Walmart distribution center, and going to school.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
He quit his job at Walmart.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Shannon said that at first his family thought this was
because his job was interfering with school, but the truth
was that Jared was using drugs and had gotten much
more heavily into them. Jared moved out of his parents'
house and in with a guy who lived down the
street from his family. The apartment that he moved into
was across the hall from a guy named Brandon Wheeler.
(06:40):
Now Brandon Wheeler was someone Jared knew from high school.
Living with Brandon Wheeler was his roommate Robert Webb. In
nineteen ninety four, Robert Webb was turning eighteen years old
and still a senior at Sarcey High School, Jared, Robert,
and Brandon all started hanging out. Brandon Wheeler was a
big guy. He was white, around two hundred pounds and
pretty stocky. Robert Webb was pretty much his physical opposite,
(07:05):
a lightmail and much smaller, about five foot one and
around one hundred and thirty five pounds. By the way,
in case it's not obvious, I'm giving physical descriptions of
these guys because they will become very important later when
it becomes clear that some of the people in this
case are using multiple aliases. These guys were all young,
but they were already moving into drug dealing, and police
(07:27):
suspected that Brandon and Robert were dealing drugs for some
very dangerous people.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Brandon was always like, he wasn't popular in school. He
was everybody thought he was kind of odd. I had
no idea until really when he moved into that apartment
that like Brandon was involved in the drugs, And still
we still didn't know what the drugs were like this
was it was still a mystery at this point. My
(07:56):
parents really still didn't know. I definitely didn't know what
was going on. He didn't tell us. He would hint
at some things. He would co about things, and my
mom would try to talk to him, but he didn't
want to tell us what would happen.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Jared and his roommate got evicted from their apartment, so
he moved back home with his parents. Robert and Brandon
ended up renting another house together in Sirce, North, Little Rock.
Brandon's parents lived in Surse, a few miles from while
he was running the house with Robert. It's important to
remember that when I talked to Shannon about her brother,
she's telling this story in hindsight, so it comes in pieces.
(08:35):
But one thing she does remember vividly is how fast
this all happened.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
She says that.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Once Jared started hanging out with Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb,
his descent into drug use was quick and extreme. What
she didn't know at the time was that Jared had
allegedly moved from just using drugs into helping Robert and
Brandon deal them. She later heard that he might have
been possibly involved in some other way, either in selling
(09:02):
or possibly cooking.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
What I've heard is that Brandon and rob claimed that
he owed them seventy five hundred dollars and that they
would never let him pay them back. I do remember
him saying that he could never be free because they
would never let it be free. And I don't know
what the money was for. I assume it was probably
(09:27):
drugs that he was supposed to have either sold or
transported for him. I don't think he actually, I don't
think he ever dealt I don't know for sure. All
I know is what people around him have told me
that he didn't, but he was connected with people that
were and I think that someone had mentioned that they
(09:50):
were trying to introduce him because he was smart, that
they thought, well, he could be a cook, and that
that is, you know, one of the things that I've
heard that that that's kind of what they were planning
for him.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
When Jared came back home after getting evicted, Shannon said
her brother had lost lots of weight. She also said
he was extremely paranoid. She said that her brother was scared.
Shannon describes how her brother's life started to fall apart
once he moved back home.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
We could tell he was really like, he had lost
a ton of weight, He didn't look right. He was
extremely paranoid. I remember that one time I was on
my way out the door to church, I had got
a runner in my hose and I had to turn
back into the house to go go change. And I
came in like just busted to the front door, and
Jared was standing at the top of the staircase with
(10:42):
a gun drawn and like shaking because he was paranoid
about somebody coming in after him. And so there was
a lot of that where we were all kind of
on tender hooks, like we didn't know where he was.
He would go out and stay out until all hours,
and I stopped sleeping because if I didn't hear our
garage store open, I couldn't be comfortable because I was
(11:05):
afraid something was going to happen. Like we didn't know
what he was into. We didn't know what he was doing.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
One of the most important questions in this case that
came up later was how much of this paranoia was
just the paranoia that goes with drug use, especially Matthews,
and how much might have been legitimate fear for his life.
That will become crucial later Jared asked his parents for help.
He told them that he needed to get out of town.
(11:33):
Then Shannon said, Jared did leave town for about a week. Now,
where Jared went during that time remains a mystery, and
it's something we're going to revisit. Shannon believed he was
going to see about a job in Tennessee, but then
after Jared came back, Shannon put a timeline together with
her dad to try and track his movement, and later
Shannon's dad found receipts from Jared's trip. They found out
(11:56):
he had actually been gone longer, close to two weeks,
and that he had actually visited Houston, Texas and Tuckerman,
Arkansas to see family, had been around to several places
they never knew about, and then one day, out of
the blue, Jared said he was coming home. At that point,
Shannon said he seemed to be more relaxed. He said
(12:17):
that everything was okay. He had been telling family and
friends that he owed Brandon and Robert a lot of money,
But after he came home, according to Shannon, it seemed
like whatever issues he had with these guys, he had
worked them out and made things right. So Jared returned
home after that trip out of town, but he wouldn't
(12:38):
be home for long. So this brings us to September thirtieth,
nineteen ninety four, the day Jared disappeared. On that day,
Shannon said, Jared woke up at around eight thirty am
and left the house for a while. He came home
later that afternoon and told his family that he had
been shooting skeek, which Shannon said would not have been
(13:00):
out of character for him. He brought back the skeet
shooting thrower and the rifle that he used and left
them at home. Then Jared made some phone calls that afternoon.
He left the house at around eight pm. That night,
he told his parents that he was meeting a friend
at the Sarce Country Club. Then he walked out the door,
out the driveway, got into his car, and drove off.
(13:24):
That was the last time Jared's family ever saw him alive.
Shannon later told reporter she has this flashback of Jared
walking in front of a TV and walking out of
the house, but she said that she was working at Hastings,
a local grocery store, at the time, so she can't
really remember whether the night she's thinking of was that
(13:44):
night or possibly another night. Either way, Jared never came
home for the next few days. His parents kind of
agonized over what action to take because they were torn.
They wanted their son home, but they were also worried
that calling the police could bring Jared unwanted attention, maybe
get him into trouble if it turned out he was
(14:05):
holed up somewhere involved in drugs. And at that stage
in Jared's life, it was not uncommon for Jared to
leave for a couple days, possibly to go stay with friends.
But when days went by and his family never heard
from him, they began to suspect that something was very wrong.
As you may know from listening to this podcast, one
(14:26):
theme that I go over over and over again is
the timeline, and in the beginning, police had very little
information about Jared's timeline. We do know that he was
planning on meeting his girlfriend that night. Now his girlfriend's
name is also Shannon, so to avoid confusion with Shannon, Jared's.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Sister, we're going to refer to his sister as.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Shannon and Jared's girlfriend as s Jared's girlfriend later told
police that she did talk to Jared that night. She
said when they spoke on the phone, Jared seemed irrational
and he wanted his girlfriend to leave town with him.
She said he was disturbed because he was acting really
out of character, so she told him that she was
going out with some girlfriends instead. She said that Jared
(15:10):
was super upset, crying, and that after she didn't go
with him that night, she never saw or heard from
him again. Over the next few days, Jared's family began
to get more and more worried.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
So he went missing on September thirtieth, and he was gone.
And like I said before, like he would he would
go for overnight, go to Jonesboro, whatever, go stay with
his girlfriend. He wouldn't come home. He was, you know,
twenty years old, so he wouldn't always tell us he would,
you know, he would usually call or he'd usually show
up home the next day. So when he didn't come
(15:44):
home the first night, we weren't we were scared because
of what we knew was what was going on, but
we weren't fannicked. But when when you know, the next evening,
we don't haven't heard from him. And I was working
at Hastings of the time, and his girlfriend and she
hadn't seen or heard from him, and so that really
(16:05):
that was really scary. It's like, okay, wait a minute,
something is not right. So then we started calling people,
you know, we called the Wheelers, called Brandon and he
was like, no, we haven't seen Jared. Don't have any
idea where he's at. The normal panic that you go
through when someone goes missing, and you're like, okay, where
could they be? Don't overreact, this is you know, he's
an adult, He's probably somewhere. But when we still hadn't
(16:27):
heard on that third day, the panic had started to
set in. My parents were super scared because they didn't
want to get Jared in trouble, and we're afraid that
if they told the police what he was involved with,
he would go to jail. And so they were debating,
you know, what do we do. How do we best
help our son? Do we call the police? But you know,
(16:47):
they were just scared to death.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Then a few days after Jared went missing, one of
his friends, a guy named Mitchell Johnson, told Jared's family
that he saw Jared's car at the Walmart supercenter. Jared's
family had no idea that his car was sitting abandoned
at the Walmart supercenter and that it had been there
for days. Mitchell said that when he saw the car,
(17:10):
he pulled up and waited twenty or thirty minutes to
see if Jared would come out, but he said when
Jared didn't come out, Mitchell left the parking lot.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
On October fifth, another.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Friend of Jared's, a guy named Jason, came to the
family home. Now Jason knew Jared from high school. Jared
had started going to Sarcey High in the eighth grade,
so he and Jason became friends. They also hung out
with another guy named Greg. According to the case file,
in the fall of nineteen ninety four, Jason was going
(17:41):
to college in Jonesborough. He lived with he and Jason's
mutual friend Greg, and during that time period they all
hung out together. Jared would come over to their house
and he would hang out with Jason and Greg pretty regularly.
Jared shared with Jason the fact that he was scared
of Brandon Wheeler and Rob Webb. He said he owed
a lot of money to Brandon Wheeler. Now I have
(18:04):
not seen the entire case file because technically this is
still an open case. However, Jared's sister Shannon, was able
to get some of the investigator's notes and she has
shared some of those with me. So those are invaluable
because I can see some of the steps that police
took and how frustrated some of the investigators were when
they were trying to make progress on this case. The
(18:26):
investigators at the time talked to some of Jared's friends,
and what they figured out was that Jared was telling
people Brandon Wheeler gave him a pretty large quantity of meth,
maybe around a kiloh to sell. But something went wrong
with this drug deal. Either the sale got messed up
or Jared did some of his own supply. Whatever the cause,
(18:48):
the end result was that Jared owed Brandon Wheeler around
seventy five hundred or eight thousand dollars and Jared couldn't
pay it back. Jason said that Jared owed him money too.
He said that he had given Jared around six hundred
dollars so that Jared could score some drugs a few
weeks earlier, but right before Jared went missing, Jason said
(19:10):
he needed his money back. So this is interesting because
we have yet another person who potentially was in a
monetary dispute with the victim at around the time he
went missing. Jason told Shannon, Jared's sister, that he started
calling Jared and asking him for his money back. He
said Jared didn't respond, and there was another crucial fact here,
(19:31):
which is that when Jared borrowed that money from Jason,
Jared gave Jason his gun as collateral and Jason was
supposed to hold the gun for him. After weeks of
not hearing back from Jared, Jason, who was still holding
Jared's gun, said he got a call out of the
blue on September thirtieth, the night Jared went missing. Jason
(19:54):
was the friend who Jared met at the Sarce country Club.
Jason later told police that he went to meet Jared
at the country club because he was concerned about his friend,
but also so understandably, he said he wanted to get
his money back. At first, it seems like he thought
Jared had called him because he wanted to return the money.
(20:15):
They arranged to meet at the country club on September thirtieth,
somewhere between around nine and ten thirty pm, but Jason
told police that after he showed up, Jared admitted he
didn't have his money, but he did tell Jason he
needed his gun back. Jason said Jared was scared that night.
He said Jared told him he was going to meet
(20:36):
Brandon Wheeler. He knew that he owed Brandon money and
he hoped to straighten situation out, but Jared told him
he wanted that gun for protection, so Jason told police
that he agreed to that. He said that he gave
Jared's gun back to him and kept Jared's wallet as collateral.
Jason said he continued to reach out to Jared over
(20:56):
the next few days. Jason explained to Shannon that Jared
told him that if he didn't have his money back
in a certain amount of time, that he Jay could
go to Jared's parents and ask them for the money.
So he said, on October fifth, that's what he did.
He showed up at Jared's family home and went in
to talk to his parents about getting that money back.
(21:17):
That same day was when Jared's father got the tip
about Jared's car being the Walmart parking lot, so Jared's
father drove over there to Walmart, and that's when he
found Jared's car. The door was unlocked and there was
no sign of foul play, but Shannon said her family
knew immediately Jared never would have left his car just
(21:38):
unlocked like that and walked away from it voluntarily. Over
the next few days, Shannon said she and her family
looked everywhere for Jared. They called all his friends, they
called the Arkansas State Police, and they called the FBI.
It turned out they had a relative who was in
the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA. He told them the
DEA authorities would not be looking very hard at a
(22:00):
twenty year old who was a legal adult and had
the right to voluntarily disappear. And unspoken in all this
is the fact that because Jared was known to have
a drug habit, that also played a role in the
authority's decision not to look for him as hard as
they would perhaps some others. Shannon described, while Jared sometimes
(22:22):
would drop out a site for a couple days, he
would never sever contact with his entire family. Jared also
took pride in his car, so it made no sense
the car would be left there abandoned like that.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
That is not like him. He did not walk away
from that car, didn't leave it there like that. But
of course that's when the police were like, whatever, you know,
they really didn't. That's when the non investigation started.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Just hearing this set of circumstances in which Jared's car
was found. My instinct as an investigator is that someone
probably staged this crime scene, that someone else drove the
car there. Otherwise, why would Jared's keys be left there
under the seat of the car. Do you think the
car was driven there by somebody else?
Speaker 1 (23:08):
I think so, because number one, my brother would never
ever leave his windows down his son news open. Ever,
he didn't even do that in front of our house.
Certainly weren't going to do that in the thing.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
But we don't know who whoever did wanted that car
to be found in that parking lot.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, I'm certain, or they wanted somebody to take it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
If Jared met someone in that parking lot and got
into a car with them, either voluntarily or otherwise, the
keys would not be stashed under the seat like that.
They would be on him. And then after that, even
stranger things started to happen after Jared's family found his car,
(23:49):
Weird things started happening. On October ninth, Shannon's family got
a strange phone call. A few days after Jared went missing.
Someone called the police and pretended to be Shannon and
Jared's dad. Shannon says the mystery caller told police they
should stop investigating Jared's disappearance. This mystery caller said the
(24:10):
family wanted to try and investigate on their own. Shannon
said this never happened. She stresses her father never gave
up on looking for Jared. She said her dad was
constantly calling police to ask for case updates, as well
as bringing in any new evidence that he found. By
this point in the investigation, according to Shannon, pretty much
everyone police talked to about the case mentioned these two names,
(24:33):
Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb. Police talked to Greg, Jason
and Jared's mutual friend. He admitted that the story police
had heard from some other people was true. He said
he and Jared had gotten a kilo of meth from
Robert and Brandon. Also, the name Mitchell Johnson came up again.
Now remember he was the guy who found Jared's car
(24:54):
abandoned at the Walmart supercenter. He told police that he
had taken Jared to North Little Rock, supposedly to pick
up a large quantity of drugs. He also said that
he knew about the death. Jared had talked to his
dad about Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb, so Jared's dad
told police the same thing. A lot of other people
said that Jared was scared of these guys. He said
(25:16):
Jared had told them a sort of cautionary tale about
another guy who owed Brandon and Robert a lot of
money and couldn't pay it back. Jared told his father
that this person who owed the debt had been kidnapped
and blindfolded and taken to a remote location and basically
been beaten and tortured. Eventually, Jared said that person was released.
(25:38):
I've gone through some of the case file documents that
Shannon shared with me. I can't share everything, but with
her permission, I'm going to go back through the events
that followed September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, the day when
Jared went missing. I would invite Helen Gone listeners to
listen closely because there are a lot of names here.
We're going to move away from Jared and his family
(26:01):
and go to North Little Rock to try and figure
out what was going on with Brandon Wheeler and Robert
Webb around the time when Jared went missing. On November ninth,
nineteen ninety four. I can see from these case file
notes that one of the officers from the task force
was interviewing people connected to the house that Brandon and
rob were renting together in North Little Rock. In my opinion,
(26:23):
I think that that house is key to this case.
The officers talked to a woman named Becky Alston, the housekeeper. Now,
what she had to say was very interesting to me, because,
as many of you might know, I really think that
people who clean someone's houses are definitely clued into a
lot of their darkest secrets. Becky had only been doing
(26:45):
that job for a couple months. Robert Webb and Brandon
Wheeler rented that house from their landlord, a guy named
Larry Williford and North Little Rock. They asked their landlord
if he knew of any good housekeepers, and he was
the one who recommended Becky. At the time, this seemed
like a win win for both parties. The guys got
a good housekeeper at a very reasonable right, and for
(27:06):
the landlord it's probably reassuring a trusted housekeeper can kind
of keep an eye on the property and also make
sure that two young guys living there won't completely trash it.
Becky charged seventy five dollars a week, and she said
Brandon and Robert would always give her a tip. Typically
they would give her one hundred dollars, always in cash.
Becky said she had a good relationship with these guys.
(27:27):
She said Brandon and Robert were always very cordial and
nice to her, But they were in an odd situation
because two very young guys. Remember Robert Webb was only
seventeen or eighteen years old, a senior in high school
at the time when all this was going down. With
a pile of cash would raise a lot of red flags.
(27:48):
The story that Brandon and Robert told their landlord and
Becky was that they were from wealthy families and they
were studying to be lawyers in Little Rock. But then,
of course Becky started to notice that Robert and Brandon
never seemed to go to class, so she kind of
was figuring out that their cover story wasn't true. This
is all, by the way, pretty much verbatim from the
investigative report from the case file. It was around August
(28:12):
or September of nineteen ninety four when Becky said things
were starting to change. She said that there was a
crawl space in the upstairs area where the guys would
throw dirty clothes in. She said sometimes she would get
into that crawl space to pull the dirty clothes out
so she could try to wash them, and when she did,
she found a stash of guns up there, she told police.
(28:35):
During this time, she was noticing more and more guns
which the guys were obsessed with. Apparently they would sit
around and watch videos of guns and people shooting all
the time, and not just hunting guns. These were things
like uzi's and semi automatic weapons, including one that Becky
said had a silencerr Now, we don't know what they
(28:56):
were doing with these guns, or whose they were, or
if they were planning to sell them or keep them
for that matter, but just using common sense, if a
gun has a silence on it, that's not something these
guys are going to use for deer honey.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Becky said that.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
They always dressed very nicely, not like college kids. They
were wearing suits that looked expensive. She said they would
always carry concealed weapons when they left the house. There's
something else that's a little bit unusual here. Becky said
that she was the one who paid Brandon and Robert's
utility bills for them, the electricity bill, the phone bill,
(29:33):
the water, et cetera. Becky said typically the guys would
give her cash and she would make the actual payment.
From the interview with Becky, it seems like around September,
Robert and Brandon started to become a little bit quieter,
a little bit more paranoid. Both Robert and Brandon had
cell phones. Remember this was back in nineteen ninety four.
(29:56):
That was also something that was very unusual for a
teenager to have at the time. They also had a
landline phone. When Becky was discussing how paranoid they were
with the pl she said, every time the landline would ring,
they would look at the caller ID and then never answer.
Then they would call the person back and demand to
know who they were and why they were calling. It
(30:17):
was just a very paranoid atmosphere. Then another really odd
thing happened. In late September of nineteen ninety four. Becky
said that she was cleaning the apartment and she saw
a California driver's license with the name of Lance Wells,
but it had Robert Webb's picture on it. She said,
(30:37):
when she went back a few days later, the ID
was gone. At this point, I should back up and
we should explain a little bit more about what was
going on at the time with methamphetamines in the state
of Arkansas. At the time, meth was exploding in Arkansas
and around the South and the rest of the country.
A lot of the myth at the time was coming
(30:59):
from these super labs in California. They were controlled mainly
by the Mexican cartel In the earth only nineties, the
drug selling operations in Arkansas were evolving. According to a
report by the Department of Justice. Instead of drug dealers
using eighteen wheelers and these really elaborate operations, they started
using a lot of regular passenger cars that had hidden traps.
(31:21):
They would put the drugs in gas tanks or they
would have these hidden compartments. Then the dealers would use
regular people to transport the drugs from California to Arkansas
and beyond. So, thinking about these scenarios, Brandon and Robert
would definitely fit the bill. Two young, ordinary looking guys
who probably looked like they were on a road trip
(31:42):
would be the perfect people to carry these drugs. When
police were putting all this together, they showed Becky a
picture of Jared Green, and Becky said she recognized Jared.
She said she had seen him there in the apartment
with Brandon and Robert at least three different times. Becky said,
when Jared was at the house, and this is an
(32:02):
exact quote from the statement, she said, quote observed numerous
needle marks on his arm and stated that he was
wearing blue jeans and a short sleeved shirt. He appeared
to be very strung out and looking bad.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
End quote. So we know that.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Jared Green owed Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb money, potentially
a lot of money, and that these guys, according to police,
were drug dealers. But again, we have to go past
local rumor and we have to figure out exactly what
everyone was doing around the time Jared Green went missing.
And this is where the timeline gets very interesting. On
September twenty second, just over a week before Jared Green
(32:41):
went missing, Becky said, Brandon Wheeler told her he and
Robert Webb were leaving town. That they were going to
check on Robert's father, who they told her lived in
California and was really sick. Then, on the twenty seventh
of September, Robert contacted Becky again. He said they were
back in Little Rock. He asked if she could come
over and clean the house. On the twenty eighth, of September.
(33:02):
She went there on the twenty eighth and said neither
Brandon or Robert were home at the time. On September
twenty ninth, at around six am, Becky said she got
another call, this time from Brandon Wheeler. He asked her
to take care of their two dogs. Becky said that
this was not uncommon. Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb had
two large dogs. When they were out of town. They
(33:25):
kept their dogs in the garage. Normally, when the guys
would take a trip, which normally they told her was
to California, they would ask her to come in and
give food and water.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
To their dogs.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
So presumably, if they're asking Becky to feed their animals
on September twenty ninth, they were making a plan to
leave town. Of course, we know September thirtieth, the next
days when Jared went missing, and after that day, Becky
said she never saw Brandon or Robert again. Becky also
described the atmosphere at that house. She said she would
see young women there, a lot young women who appeared
(33:58):
to be from around late teens to early twenties. She
said the guys would sit around and watch videos about guns,
which they seemed to be obsessed with and that she
saw other evidence of what could reasonably be construed to
be drug use, things like alcohol paths with drops of
blood on them. Police also talked to Larry Wilford, Robert
and Brandon's landlord. The landlord said that when they wanted
(34:22):
to become tenants, they gave him a similar story to
the one they'd given Becky. They said they went to
the University of Arkansas Little Rock, that they were going
to be lawyers. They were from San Francisco, California, and
they had wealthy parents. They wanted to pay in cash.
Larry agreed to rent these guys the house for eleven
hundred dollars a month, plus a fifteen hundred dollars deposit.
(34:42):
He did get a little suspicious because when he went
to do the tenantcy agreement, he wanted to talk to
Robert's parents.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
He said.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
When he drew up the tenancy agreement, he faxed it
over to someone who he was talking to, someone who
was claiming to be Robert Webb's father. But the landlord
said when he called that person back later with additional questions,
he said he was never able to contact them again.
So of course we can't be sit, but it seems
almost certain this was not Robert Webb's father. Much more
(35:09):
probably it was either Brandon or Robert or one of
their friends pretending to be his dad so they could
get into this apartment. I found something else on the
report that may or may not be interesting, but I
think is worth bringing up. So the landlord said Brandon
and Robert paid two thousand dollars to have the pool repaired.
They also had a satellite dish installed for around twenty
(35:30):
two hundred dollars. They only ended up staying at the
property for a few months, so I think the fact
that they put all this money into it right away
maybe should have been a red flag. The landlord said
that things seemed to be going well for a while
until late September. That's when the electricity got cut off
(35:50):
because Brandon and Robert hadn't paid their bill now around
that point, the landlord told police. Once the electricity got
cut off, and because they were all so late in
rent at that point, he started to get more concerned.
In the first week of October, Brandon and Robert came
to the landlord's house. They gave him a cashier's check,
(36:12):
for twenty two hundred dollars and said that was to
cover the rent for October and November. But at that
point something seemed to have unsettled the landlord and he
told them he was not going to rent to them anymore.
The next time the landlord said that he heard from
Robert was on October twenty first, when Robert called the
landlord to say that he and Brandon were moving out
and returning to California. Then the very next day, on
(36:35):
October twenty second, nineteen ninety four, police raced to the
scene of that rental house because it turned out that
just hours after Robert and Brandon were evicted, the house
was on fire. We'll have more on Jared Green's case
next time on Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder
(37:02):
Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced
by Gabby Watts. Music is by Ben Solee, and this
episode was scored and mixed by Miranda Hawkins. Executive producers
are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowling. If you
have a case you'd like me and my team to
(37:23):
look into You can reach out to us at our
Hellingonge Murder line at six seven eight seven four four
six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four
four six ' one four five
Speaker 3 (37:43):
School of Humans
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
On September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, twenty year old Jared
Green was scared. His sister, Shannon, who was three years
older than Jared, remembered her baby brother as the kid
he was always laughing and smiling, who had a mischievous
sense of humor. Jared's middle name was Devlin, so they
called him the little devil.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I've used this expression before. He was like light and
life and laughter. He was always making jokes. He had
a really infectious laugh. He was always getting into trouble.
My mom called him like a little monkey because he
was climbing on stuff when we were kids and he
jumped off the top bunk bed knocked himself out. But
(00:58):
he was constantly doing silly stuff like that. If there
was a mischief to be had, he was going to
be in the middle of it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
But his humor was always fun, never cruel. Shannon said
that Jared was always a little bit naive. He was
someone who always trusted others and someone who would do
anything for a friend. Jared had a high IQ, Shannon said,
genius level, so he was always smart, but as a
kid he struggled to focus. Jared was diagnosed with ADHD,
(01:30):
so their parents put him on Riddlin. Though the Riddlin
did seem to help Jared focus at school, his parents
believed that it was stunning Jared's physical growth, which meant
that Jared was always small for his age, so he
ended up being held back a year at school. Even
though Jared eventually caught up physically and grew to be
almost six feet tall, he always had kind of a
(01:51):
slim build. In every picture I see of Jared, he's
got this boyish face. He's got brownish blonde hair, and
blue green eyes. He's smiling in every single picture, which
goes with what Shannon said about him. She said he
was full of life and always the life of the party,
just a joy to be around. Jared graduated from Sersey
(02:11):
High School in nineteen ninety three, and because he'd been
held back a year when he graduated, he was actually
nineteen years old. He continued to live at home after
high school. Eventually he moved out of his parents' house
and started junior college in bb He got a job
at the Walmart distribution center, but then in nineteen ninety four,
Jared's problem started. He started using methamphetamines and his family
(02:37):
says that within a shockingly short period of time, Jared
was showing signs of serious addiction. Jared's dark time began
some time after fall semester started at college.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
By the beginning of October, it was all over.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making
my true crime podcast, Talent Gone, I've learned that there's
no such thing as a small town where murder never happens.
I have received hundreds of men messages from people from
all around the country asking for help with an unsolved
murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If
(03:13):
you have a case you'd like me and my team
to look into, you can reach out to us at
our Hell and Gone Murder line at six seven eight
seven four four six one four five. That's six seven
eight seven four four six one four or five. When
(04:13):
I announced this new podcast, multiple listeners reached out to
me about Jared Green's case.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I'm just calling in for justice for Jared. You might
have heard podcasts before, but.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
There was a group of us that already.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
I'm calling in about the case of Jared Green. He
disappeared from Sarcy, Arkansas on September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I had actually heard from Jared's sister, Shannon Green, a
while back, and I knew this was one of the
first cases that I wanted to cover. At first, Jared's
family wasn't exactly sure what was going on with them.
Shannon said they were pretty clueless because she said her
parents had never dealt with that type of drug abuse before.
They did not know the signs to look for, and
(05:01):
they didn't know how quickly this kind of thing could
escalate or had to dangerous.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It was not long after he graduated high school, when
he was about nineteen, and that's when my mom found,
like I think she found pot in his pants pocket
that she was doing the laundry and she found it,
and it was a really fast kind of transformation when
he started doing that. That was when it was this
(05:26):
deep decline and the change in him became just obvious.
I dropped out of grad school and moved back home
because my parents were kind of like, we don't know
what to do, and I was so upset about it.
He was over eighteen. We couldn't force him into a
rehab It was terrible. We didn't know the extent really
of what. We were just so naive. I've said this before,
(05:49):
but like my parent you know, we were not exposed
to anything. My parents they they went to church. We
didn't drink, we didn't were We didn't you know, there
was all this very kind of sheltered life. We didn't
even know what was happening. I certainly had no idea
of the depths of the corruption and the drug scene
in Sursey. We had no idea about that at the time.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
In nineteen ninety four, Jared was living at home, working
at the Walmart distribution center, and going to school.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
He quit his job at Walmart.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Shannon said that at first his family thought this was
because his job was interfering with school, but the truth
was that Jared was using drugs and had gotten much
more heavily into them. Jared moved out of his parents'
house and in with a guy who lived down the
street from his family. The apartment that he moved into
was across the hall from a guy named Brandon Wheeler.
(06:40):
Now Brandon Wheeler was someone Jared knew from high school.
Living with Brandon Wheeler was his roommate Robert Webb. In
nineteen ninety four, Robert Webb was turning eighteen years old
and still a senior at Sarcey High School, Jared, Robert,
and Brandon all started hanging out. Brandon Wheeler was a
big guy. He was white, around two hundred pounds and
pretty stocky. Robert Webb was pretty much his physical opposite,
(07:05):
a lightmail and much smaller, about five foot one and
around one hundred and thirty five pounds. By the way,
in case it's not obvious, I'm giving physical descriptions of
these guys because they will become very important later when
it becomes clear that some of the people in this
case are using multiple aliases. These guys were all young,
but they were already moving into drug dealing, and police
(07:27):
suspected that Brandon and Robert were dealing drugs for some
very dangerous people.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Brandon was always like, he wasn't popular in school. He
was everybody thought he was kind of odd. I had
no idea until really when he moved into that apartment
that like Brandon was involved in the drugs, And still
we still didn't know what the drugs were like this
was it was still a mystery at this point. My
(07:56):
parents really still didn't know. I definitely didn't know what
was going on. He didn't tell us. He would hint
at some things. He would co about things, and my
mom would try to talk to him, but he didn't
want to tell us what would happen.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Jared and his roommate got evicted from their apartment, so
he moved back home with his parents. Robert and Brandon
ended up renting another house together in Sirce, North, Little Rock.
Brandon's parents lived in Surse, a few miles from while
he was running the house with Robert. It's important to
remember that when I talked to Shannon about her brother,
she's telling this story in hindsight, so it comes in pieces.
(08:35):
But one thing she does remember vividly is how fast
this all happened.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
She says that.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Once Jared started hanging out with Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb,
his descent into drug use was quick and extreme. What
she didn't know at the time was that Jared had
allegedly moved from just using drugs into helping Robert and
Brandon deal them. She later heard that he might have
been possibly involved in some other way, either in selling
(09:02):
or possibly cooking.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
What I've heard is that Brandon and rob claimed that
he owed them seventy five hundred dollars and that they
would never let him pay them back. I do remember
him saying that he could never be free because they
would never let it be free. And I don't know
what the money was for. I assume it was probably
(09:27):
drugs that he was supposed to have either sold or
transported for him. I don't think he actually, I don't
think he ever dealt I don't know for sure. All
I know is what people around him have told me
that he didn't, but he was connected with people that
were and I think that someone had mentioned that they
(09:50):
were trying to introduce him because he was smart, that
they thought, well, he could be a cook, and that
that is, you know, one of the things that I've
heard that that that's kind of what they were planning
for him.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
When Jared came back home after getting evicted, Shannon said
her brother had lost lots of weight. She also said
he was extremely paranoid. She said that her brother was scared.
Shannon describes how her brother's life started to fall apart
once he moved back home.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
We could tell he was really like, he had lost
a ton of weight, He didn't look right. He was
extremely paranoid. I remember that one time I was on
my way out the door to church, I had got
a runner in my hose and I had to turn
back into the house to go go change. And I
came in like just busted to the front door, and
Jared was standing at the top of the staircase with
(10:42):
a gun drawn and like shaking because he was paranoid
about somebody coming in after him. And so there was
a lot of that where we were all kind of
on tender hooks, like we didn't know where he was.
He would go out and stay out until all hours,
and I stopped sleeping because if I didn't hear our
garage store open, I couldn't be comfortable because I was
(11:05):
afraid something was going to happen. Like we didn't know
what he was into. We didn't know what he was doing.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
One of the most important questions in this case that
came up later was how much of this paranoia was
just the paranoia that goes with drug use, especially Matthews,
and how much might have been legitimate fear for his life.
That will become crucial later Jared asked his parents for help.
He told them that he needed to get out of town.
(11:33):
Then Shannon said, Jared did leave town for about a week. Now,
where Jared went during that time remains a mystery, and
it's something we're going to revisit. Shannon believed he was
going to see about a job in Tennessee, but then
after Jared came back, Shannon put a timeline together with
her dad to try and track his movement, and later
Shannon's dad found receipts from Jared's trip. They found out
(11:56):
he had actually been gone longer, close to two weeks,
and that he had actually visited Houston, Texas and Tuckerman,
Arkansas to see family, had been around to several places
they never knew about, and then one day, out of
the blue, Jared said he was coming home. At that point,
Shannon said he seemed to be more relaxed. He said
(12:17):
that everything was okay. He had been telling family and
friends that he owed Brandon and Robert a lot of money,
But after he came home, according to Shannon, it seemed
like whatever issues he had with these guys, he had
worked them out and made things right. So Jared returned
home after that trip out of town, but he wouldn't
(12:38):
be home for long. So this brings us to September thirtieth,
nineteen ninety four, the day Jared disappeared. On that day,
Shannon said, Jared woke up at around eight thirty am
and left the house for a while. He came home
later that afternoon and told his family that he had
been shooting skeek, which Shannon said would not have been
(13:00):
out of character for him. He brought back the skeet
shooting thrower and the rifle that he used and left
them at home. Then Jared made some phone calls that afternoon.
He left the house at around eight pm. That night,
he told his parents that he was meeting a friend
at the Sarce Country Club. Then he walked out the door,
out the driveway, got into his car, and drove off.
(13:24):
That was the last time Jared's family ever saw him alive.
Shannon later told reporter she has this flashback of Jared
walking in front of a TV and walking out of
the house, but she said that she was working at Hastings,
a local grocery store, at the time, so she can't
really remember whether the night she's thinking of was that
(13:44):
night or possibly another night. Either way, Jared never came
home for the next few days. His parents kind of
agonized over what action to take because they were torn.
They wanted their son home, but they were also worried
that calling the police could bring Jared unwanted attention, maybe
get him into trouble if it turned out he was
(14:05):
holed up somewhere involved in drugs. And at that stage
in Jared's life, it was not uncommon for Jared to
leave for a couple days, possibly to go stay with friends.
But when days went by and his family never heard
from him, they began to suspect that something was very wrong.
As you may know from listening to this podcast, one
(14:26):
theme that I go over over and over again is
the timeline, and in the beginning, police had very little
information about Jared's timeline. We do know that he was
planning on meeting his girlfriend that night. Now his girlfriend's
name is also Shannon, so to avoid confusion with Shannon, Jared's.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Sister, we're going to refer to his sister as.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Shannon and Jared's girlfriend as s Jared's girlfriend later told
police that she did talk to Jared that night. She
said when they spoke on the phone, Jared seemed irrational
and he wanted his girlfriend to leave town with him.
She said he was disturbed because he was acting really
out of character, so she told him that she was
going out with some girlfriends instead. She said that Jared
(15:10):
was super upset, crying, and that after she didn't go
with him that night, she never saw or heard from
him again. Over the next few days, Jared's family began
to get more and more worried.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
So he went missing on September thirtieth, and he was gone.
And like I said before, like he would he would
go for overnight, go to Jonesboro, whatever, go stay with
his girlfriend. He wouldn't come home. He was, you know,
twenty years old, so he wouldn't always tell us he would,
you know, he would usually call or he'd usually show
up home the next day. So when he didn't come
(15:44):
home the first night, we weren't we were scared because
of what we knew was what was going on, but
we weren't fannicked. But when when you know, the next evening,
we don't haven't heard from him. And I was working
at Hastings of the time, and his girlfriend and she
hadn't seen or heard from him, and so that really
(16:05):
that was really scary. It's like, okay, wait a minute,
something is not right. So then we started calling people,
you know, we called the Wheelers, called Brandon and he
was like, no, we haven't seen Jared. Don't have any
idea where he's at. The normal panic that you go
through when someone goes missing, and you're like, okay, where
could they be? Don't overreact, this is you know, he's
an adult, He's probably somewhere. But when we still hadn't
(16:27):
heard on that third day, the panic had started to
set in. My parents were super scared because they didn't
want to get Jared in trouble, and we're afraid that
if they told the police what he was involved with,
he would go to jail. And so they were debating,
you know, what do we do. How do we best
help our son? Do we call the police? But you know,
(16:47):
they were just scared to death.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Then a few days after Jared went missing, one of
his friends, a guy named Mitchell Johnson, told Jared's family
that he saw Jared's car at the Walmart supercenter. Jared's
family had no idea that his car was sitting abandoned
at the Walmart supercenter and that it had been there
for days. Mitchell said that when he saw the car,
(17:10):
he pulled up and waited twenty or thirty minutes to
see if Jared would come out, but he said when
Jared didn't come out, Mitchell left the parking lot.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
On October fifth, another.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Friend of Jared's, a guy named Jason, came to the
family home. Now Jason knew Jared from high school. Jared
had started going to Sarcey High in the eighth grade,
so he and Jason became friends. They also hung out
with another guy named Greg. According to the case file,
in the fall of nineteen ninety four, Jason was going
(17:41):
to college in Jonesborough. He lived with he and Jason's
mutual friend Greg, and during that time period they all
hung out together. Jared would come over to their house
and he would hang out with Jason and Greg pretty regularly.
Jared shared with Jason the fact that he was scared
of Brandon Wheeler and Rob Webb. He said he owed
a lot of money to Brandon Wheeler. Now I have
(18:04):
not seen the entire case file because technically this is
still an open case. However, Jared's sister Shannon, was able
to get some of the investigator's notes and she has
shared some of those with me. So those are invaluable
because I can see some of the steps that police
took and how frustrated some of the investigators were when
they were trying to make progress on this case. The
(18:26):
investigators at the time talked to some of Jared's friends,
and what they figured out was that Jared was telling
people Brandon Wheeler gave him a pretty large quantity of meth,
maybe around a kiloh to sell. But something went wrong
with this drug deal. Either the sale got messed up
or Jared did some of his own supply. Whatever the cause,
(18:48):
the end result was that Jared owed Brandon Wheeler around
seventy five hundred or eight thousand dollars and Jared couldn't
pay it back. Jason said that Jared owed him money too.
He said that he had given Jared around six hundred
dollars so that Jared could score some drugs a few
weeks earlier, but right before Jared went missing, Jason said
(19:10):
he needed his money back. So this is interesting because
we have yet another person who potentially was in a
monetary dispute with the victim at around the time he
went missing. Jason told Shannon, Jared's sister, that he started
calling Jared and asking him for his money back. He
said Jared didn't respond, and there was another crucial fact here,
(19:31):
which is that when Jared borrowed that money from Jason,
Jared gave Jason his gun as collateral and Jason was
supposed to hold the gun for him. After weeks of
not hearing back from Jared, Jason, who was still holding
Jared's gun, said he got a call out of the
blue on September thirtieth, the night Jared went missing. Jason
(19:54):
was the friend who Jared met at the Sarce country Club.
Jason later told police that he went to meet Jared
at the country club because he was concerned about his friend,
but also so understandably, he said he wanted to get
his money back. At first, it seems like he thought
Jared had called him because he wanted to return the money.
(20:15):
They arranged to meet at the country club on September thirtieth,
somewhere between around nine and ten thirty pm, but Jason
told police that after he showed up, Jared admitted he
didn't have his money, but he did tell Jason he
needed his gun back. Jason said Jared was scared that night.
He said Jared told him he was going to meet
(20:36):
Brandon Wheeler. He knew that he owed Brandon money and
he hoped to straighten situation out, but Jared told him
he wanted that gun for protection, so Jason told police
that he agreed to that. He said that he gave
Jared's gun back to him and kept Jared's wallet as collateral.
Jason said he continued to reach out to Jared over
(20:56):
the next few days. Jason explained to Shannon that Jared
told him that if he didn't have his money back
in a certain amount of time, that he Jay could
go to Jared's parents and ask them for the money.
So he said, on October fifth, that's what he did.
He showed up at Jared's family home and went in
to talk to his parents about getting that money back.
(21:17):
That same day was when Jared's father got the tip
about Jared's car being the Walmart parking lot, so Jared's
father drove over there to Walmart, and that's when he
found Jared's car. The door was unlocked and there was
no sign of foul play, but Shannon said her family
knew immediately Jared never would have left his car just
(21:38):
unlocked like that and walked away from it voluntarily. Over
the next few days, Shannon said she and her family
looked everywhere for Jared. They called all his friends, they
called the Arkansas State Police, and they called the FBI.
It turned out they had a relative who was in
the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA. He told them the
DEA authorities would not be looking very hard at a
(22:00):
twenty year old who was a legal adult and had
the right to voluntarily disappear. And unspoken in all this
is the fact that because Jared was known to have
a drug habit, that also played a role in the
authority's decision not to look for him as hard as
they would perhaps some others. Shannon described, while Jared sometimes
(22:22):
would drop out a site for a couple days, he
would never sever contact with his entire family. Jared also
took pride in his car, so it made no sense
the car would be left there abandoned like that.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
That is not like him. He did not walk away
from that car, didn't leave it there like that. But
of course that's when the police were like, whatever, you know,
they really didn't. That's when the non investigation started.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Just hearing this set of circumstances in which Jared's car
was found. My instinct as an investigator is that someone
probably staged this crime scene, that someone else drove the
car there. Otherwise, why would Jared's keys be left there
under the seat of the car. Do you think the
car was driven there by somebody else?
Speaker 1 (23:08):
I think so, because number one, my brother would never
ever leave his windows down his son news open. Ever,
he didn't even do that in front of our house.
Certainly weren't going to do that in the thing.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
But we don't know who whoever did wanted that car
to be found in that parking lot.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, I'm certain, or they wanted somebody to take it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
If Jared met someone in that parking lot and got
into a car with them, either voluntarily or otherwise, the
keys would not be stashed under the seat like that.
They would be on him. And then after that, even
stranger things started to happen after Jared's family found his car,
(23:49):
Weird things started happening. On October ninth, Shannon's family got
a strange phone call. A few days after Jared went missing.
Someone called the police and pretended to be Shannon and
Jared's dad. Shannon says the mystery caller told police they
should stop investigating Jared's disappearance. This mystery caller said the
(24:10):
family wanted to try and investigate on their own. Shannon
said this never happened. She stresses her father never gave
up on looking for Jared. She said her dad was
constantly calling police to ask for case updates, as well
as bringing in any new evidence that he found. By
this point in the investigation, according to Shannon, pretty much
everyone police talked to about the case mentioned these two names,
(24:33):
Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb. Police talked to Greg, Jason
and Jared's mutual friend. He admitted that the story police
had heard from some other people was true. He said
he and Jared had gotten a kilo of meth from
Robert and Brandon. Also, the name Mitchell Johnson came up again.
Now remember he was the guy who found Jared's car
(24:54):
abandoned at the Walmart supercenter. He told police that he
had taken Jared to North Little Rock, supposedly to pick
up a large quantity of drugs. He also said that
he knew about the death. Jared had talked to his
dad about Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb, so Jared's dad
told police the same thing. A lot of other people
said that Jared was scared of these guys. He said
(25:16):
Jared had told them a sort of cautionary tale about
another guy who owed Brandon and Robert a lot of
money and couldn't pay it back. Jared told his father
that this person who owed the debt had been kidnapped
and blindfolded and taken to a remote location and basically
been beaten and tortured. Eventually, Jared said that person was released.
(25:38):
I've gone through some of the case file documents that
Shannon shared with me. I can't share everything, but with
her permission, I'm going to go back through the events
that followed September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, the day when
Jared went missing. I would invite Helen Gone listeners to
listen closely because there are a lot of names here.
We're going to move away from Jared and his family
(26:01):
and go to North Little Rock to try and figure
out what was going on with Brandon Wheeler and Robert
Webb around the time when Jared went missing. On November ninth,
nineteen ninety four. I can see from these case file
notes that one of the officers from the task force
was interviewing people connected to the house that Brandon and
rob were renting together in North Little Rock. In my opinion,
(26:23):
I think that that house is key to this case.
The officers talked to a woman named Becky Alston, the housekeeper. Now,
what she had to say was very interesting to me, because,
as many of you might know, I really think that
people who clean someone's houses are definitely clued into a
lot of their darkest secrets. Becky had only been doing
(26:45):
that job for a couple months. Robert Webb and Brandon
Wheeler rented that house from their landlord, a guy named
Larry Williford and North Little Rock. They asked their landlord
if he knew of any good housekeepers, and he was
the one who recommended Becky. At the time, this seemed
like a win win for both parties. The guys got
a good housekeeper at a very reasonable right, and for
(27:06):
the landlord it's probably reassuring a trusted housekeeper can kind
of keep an eye on the property and also make
sure that two young guys living there won't completely trash it.
Becky charged seventy five dollars a week, and she said
Brandon and Robert would always give her a tip. Typically
they would give her one hundred dollars, always in cash.
Becky said she had a good relationship with these guys.
(27:27):
She said Brandon and Robert were always very cordial and
nice to her, But they were in an odd situation
because two very young guys. Remember Robert Webb was only
seventeen or eighteen years old, a senior in high school
at the time when all this was going down. With
a pile of cash would raise a lot of red flags.
(27:48):
The story that Brandon and Robert told their landlord and
Becky was that they were from wealthy families and they
were studying to be lawyers in Little Rock. But then,
of course Becky started to notice that Robert and Brandon
never seemed to go to class, so she kind of
was figuring out that their cover story wasn't true. This
is all, by the way, pretty much verbatim from the
investigative report from the case file. It was around August
(28:12):
or September of nineteen ninety four when Becky said things
were starting to change. She said that there was a
crawl space in the upstairs area where the guys would
throw dirty clothes in. She said sometimes she would get
into that crawl space to pull the dirty clothes out
so she could try to wash them, and when she did,
she found a stash of guns up there, she told police.
(28:35):
During this time, she was noticing more and more guns
which the guys were obsessed with. Apparently they would sit
around and watch videos of guns and people shooting all
the time, and not just hunting guns. These were things
like uzi's and semi automatic weapons, including one that Becky
said had a silencerr Now, we don't know what they
(28:56):
were doing with these guns, or whose they were, or
if they were planning to sell them or keep them
for that matter, but just using common sense, if a
gun has a silence on it, that's not something these
guys are going to use for deer honey.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Becky said that.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
They always dressed very nicely, not like college kids. They
were wearing suits that looked expensive. She said they would
always carry concealed weapons when they left the house. There's
something else that's a little bit unusual here. Becky said
that she was the one who paid Brandon and Robert's
utility bills for them, the electricity bill, the phone bill,
(29:33):
the water, et cetera. Becky said typically the guys would
give her cash and she would make the actual payment.
From the interview with Becky, it seems like around September,
Robert and Brandon started to become a little bit quieter,
a little bit more paranoid. Both Robert and Brandon had
cell phones. Remember this was back in nineteen ninety four.
(29:56):
That was also something that was very unusual for a
teenager to have at the time. They also had a
landline phone. When Becky was discussing how paranoid they were
with the pl she said, every time the landline would ring,
they would look at the caller ID and then never answer.
Then they would call the person back and demand to
know who they were and why they were calling. It
(30:17):
was just a very paranoid atmosphere. Then another really odd
thing happened. In late September of nineteen ninety four. Becky
said that she was cleaning the apartment and she saw
a California driver's license with the name of Lance Wells,
but it had Robert Webb's picture on it. She said,
(30:37):
when she went back a few days later, the ID
was gone. At this point, I should back up and
we should explain a little bit more about what was
going on at the time with methamphetamines in the state
of Arkansas. At the time, meth was exploding in Arkansas
and around the South and the rest of the country.
A lot of the myth at the time was coming
(30:59):
from these super labs in California. They were controlled mainly
by the Mexican cartel In the earth only nineties, the
drug selling operations in Arkansas were evolving. According to a
report by the Department of Justice. Instead of drug dealers
using eighteen wheelers and these really elaborate operations, they started
using a lot of regular passenger cars that had hidden traps.
(31:21):
They would put the drugs in gas tanks or they
would have these hidden compartments. Then the dealers would use
regular people to transport the drugs from California to Arkansas
and beyond. So, thinking about these scenarios, Brandon and Robert
would definitely fit the bill. Two young, ordinary looking guys
who probably looked like they were on a road trip
(31:42):
would be the perfect people to carry these drugs. When
police were putting all this together, they showed Becky a
picture of Jared Green, and Becky said she recognized Jared.
She said she had seen him there in the apartment
with Brandon and Robert at least three different times. Becky said,
when Jared was at the house, and this is an
(32:02):
exact quote from the statement, she said, quote observed numerous
needle marks on his arm and stated that he was
wearing blue jeans and a short sleeved shirt. He appeared
to be very strung out and looking bad.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
End quote. So we know that.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Jared Green owed Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb money, potentially
a lot of money, and that these guys, according to police,
were drug dealers. But again, we have to go past
local rumor and we have to figure out exactly what
everyone was doing around the time Jared Green went missing.
And this is where the timeline gets very interesting. On
September twenty second, just over a week before Jared Green
(32:41):
went missing, Becky said, Brandon Wheeler told her he and
Robert Webb were leaving town. That they were going to
check on Robert's father, who they told her lived in
California and was really sick. Then, on the twenty seventh
of September, Robert contacted Becky again. He said they were
back in Little Rock. He asked if she could come
over and clean the house. On the twenty eighth, of September.
(33:02):
She went there on the twenty eighth and said neither
Brandon or Robert were home at the time. On September
twenty ninth, at around six am, Becky said she got
another call, this time from Brandon Wheeler. He asked her
to take care of their two dogs. Becky said that
this was not uncommon. Brandon Wheeler and Robert Webb had
two large dogs. When they were out of town. They
(33:25):
kept their dogs in the garage. Normally, when the guys
would take a trip, which normally they told her was
to California, they would ask her to come in and
give food and water.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
To their dogs.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
So presumably, if they're asking Becky to feed their animals
on September twenty ninth, they were making a plan to
leave town. Of course, we know September thirtieth, the next
days when Jared went missing, and after that day, Becky
said she never saw Brandon or Robert again. Becky also
described the atmosphere at that house. She said she would
see young women there, a lot young women who appeared
(33:58):
to be from around late teens to early twenties. She
said the guys would sit around and watch videos about guns,
which they seemed to be obsessed with and that she
saw other evidence of what could reasonably be construed to
be drug use, things like alcohol paths with drops of
blood on them. Police also talked to Larry Wilford, Robert
and Brandon's landlord. The landlord said that when they wanted
(34:22):
to become tenants, they gave him a similar story to
the one they'd given Becky. They said they went to
the University of Arkansas Little Rock, that they were going
to be lawyers. They were from San Francisco, California, and
they had wealthy parents. They wanted to pay in cash.
Larry agreed to rent these guys the house for eleven
hundred dollars a month, plus a fifteen hundred dollars deposit.
(34:42):
He did get a little suspicious because when he went
to do the tenantcy agreement, he wanted to talk to
Robert's parents.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
He said.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
When he drew up the tenancy agreement, he faxed it
over to someone who he was talking to, someone who
was claiming to be Robert Webb's father. But the landlord
said when he called that person back later with additional questions,
he said he was never able to contact them again.
So of course we can't be sit, but it seems
almost certain this was not Robert Webb's father. Much more
(35:09):
probably it was either Brandon or Robert or one of
their friends pretending to be his dad so they could
get into this apartment. I found something else on the
report that may or may not be interesting, but I
think is worth bringing up. So the landlord said Brandon
and Robert paid two thousand dollars to have the pool repaired.
They also had a satellite dish installed for around twenty
(35:30):
two hundred dollars. They only ended up staying at the
property for a few months, so I think the fact
that they put all this money into it right away
maybe should have been a red flag. The landlord said
that things seemed to be going well for a while
until late September. That's when the electricity got cut off
(35:50):
because Brandon and Robert hadn't paid their bill now around
that point, the landlord told police. Once the electricity got
cut off, and because they were all so late in
rent at that point, he started to get more concerned.
In the first week of October, Brandon and Robert came
to the landlord's house. They gave him a cashier's check,
(36:12):
for twenty two hundred dollars and said that was to
cover the rent for October and November. But at that
point something seemed to have unsettled the landlord and he
told them he was not going to rent to them anymore.
The next time the landlord said that he heard from
Robert was on October twenty first, when Robert called the
landlord to say that he and Brandon were moving out
and returning to California. Then the very next day, on
(36:35):
October twenty second, nineteen ninety four, police raced to the
scene of that rental house because it turned out that
just hours after Robert and Brandon were evicted, the house
was on fire. We'll have more on Jared Green's case
next time on Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder
(37:02):
Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced
by Gabby Watts. Music is by Ben Solee, and this
episode was scored and mixed by Miranda Hawkins. Executive producers
are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowling. If you
have a case you'd like me and my team to
(37:23):
look into You can reach out to us at our
Hellingonge Murder line at six seven eight seven four four
six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four
four six ' one four five
Speaker 3 (37:43):
School of Humans
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