Jeanette Ralston

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. Please listen with discretion. All witnesses, suspects, and persons of interest are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now on true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Poppy killed Mommy was the first thing my little sister said to me after her father murdered our mother. My mom had gotten off the phone at nine to fifty three pm on July eighth, nineteen ninety three, after making plans to leave him by one forty am. A nine to one to one call was placed asking for help. Three hours and forty seven minutes. That's how fast a woman can go from planning her escape to being gone. Her death was ruled a homicide. The man who killed her admitted that he might have shot her. My sister, just three years old, told police more than a dozen times Poppy killed Mommy, But the Yavapai County Attorney said there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute. Seventy five percent of women murdered by an intimate partner are killed while they're trying to leave. My mom became part of that statistic. This is the story they buried. Listen to Poppy killed Mommy and hear what they refuse to see. Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to get into right now in true crime, which honestly, I really want to spend a little bit of time talking about the BK sentencing that happened on Wednesday. He was sentenced to four life terms running consecutively, no possibility of parole. But what I really want to talk about is the victim impact statements. There were many that were given, but Kaylee's sister Olivia, gave probably the most powerful victim impact statement that I have ever heard, and I want to play it right now on this intro. I've listened to a heck of a lot of victim impact statements in my day, and I feel like this is one of the most powerful ones, and I think it really tells the story. If you have followed this case at all, you know that BK was a predator and a creep, and he thought he was smarter than everybody. He put out a questionnaire on Reddit many many years ago because he was a criminology student and he wanted to have all these questions answered about people that had committed crimes. And Olivia turned that and put it right back in his face. And I am going to play her victim impact statement right now. It is about ten minutes long. It is powerful as hell, and I applaud her for getting up and she didn't stumble over a single word. She was passionate. She looked him in the eye and it was impactful, and we're going to play it now. I'd like to start by thanking the court for allowing me the time and opportunity to speak today. My name is Olivia and I'm the big sister of Kailey Gonzalvez, and I was blessed to love Madison Mogan as a sister too. I'm not here today to speak in grief. I'm here to speak in truth because the truth is my sister, Kayley and her best friend Mattie were not yours to take. They were not yours to study, to stalk or to silence. They were two pieces of a whole, the perfect yin and yang. They are everything that you could never be loved accepted, vibrant, accomplished. Brave and powerful. Because the truth about Kayley and Maddie, they would have been kind to you if you would approach them in their everyday lives. They would have given you directions, thanked you for the compliment, or awkwardly giggled to make your own words less uncomfortable for you in a world that rejected you. They would have shown mercy. Because the truth is, I'm angry. Every day I'm angry. I'm left shouting at the inside of my own head everything I wish I could say to you. The truth about me is when I heard the news, I didn't cry. I listened for them. I promised them I would that I would fight for them, that I would show up no matter what it cost me. I swore I'd never let them feel alone, because you see, I've always been their heavyweight. I've always been the one to fight the battles. They didn't feel ready to fight themselves. All it ever took was a call, and they knew I would handle it for them, no matter the time, no matter the cost. They could wave their white flag because they knew I would never back down, not for them, and not even death could change to that. Somewhere along the line, I started to think about what I would say to them if I was given just one last chance, if I could gather enough heartbreak or love or sacrifice or whatever it took to get just one message across, what would I say. Throughout this entire. Process, I've written my feelings down at every moment, my wishes, my love, my denial, my anger, and as one final act of love, I planned to read these thoughts, even jarring and discombobulating and not even making sense, because for me that was true love, as bare and as naked as it could be, not laced in pretty words or dressed for the occasion, but written through bleary eyes at two am, with clenched fists, angry at this reality. My true final act of love was to continue on without them for them that dream to read love, to read aloud my love to them, to bring meaning through pain was the latest blow in realizing you don't deserve it, and Kayleie and Maddy don't need it. Kayleie and Matty have always known my love, and they would never ask me to prove it by further victimizing myself to a defendant who has shown no guilt, no remorse, no apprehension. They would say to me, why would you give the satisfaction of showing vulnerability? Now you promised you would never back down, And for that clarity, I'm thankful. I won't stand here and give you what you want. I won't offer you tears, I won't offer you trembling disappointments like you thrive on pain, on. Fear, and on the illusion of. Power, And I won't feed your beast. Instead, I will call you what you are, sociopath, psychopath, murderer. I will ask the questions that reverberate violently in my own head, so loudly that I can't think straight most any day. Some of these might be familiar, So set up straight when I talk to you. How is your life right before you murdered my sisters? Did you prepare for the crime before leaving your apartment? Please detail what you were thinking and feeling at this time. Why did you. Choose my sisters before making your move? Did you approach my sisters? Detail what you were thinking and feeling before leaving their home? Is there anything else you did? How does it feel to know the only thing you failed more miserably at than being a murderer is trying to be a rapper. Did you recently start shaving or manually pulling out your eyebrows? Why? November thirteenth, did you truly think your Amazon purchase was untraceable because you used a gift card? How do you find it enjoyable to stargaze with such a severe case of visual snow? Where is the murder weapon? The clothes you wore that night? What did you bring into the house with you? What was the second weapon you used on Cayley? What were Kaylee's last words? Please describe in detail the level of anxiety you must have felt when you heard the bear cat pull up to your family home on December thirtieth, twenty twenty two. Which do you regret more returning to the crime scene five hours later or never ever going back to Moscow, not even once after stalking them there for months. If you were really smart, do you think you'd be here right now? What's it like needing this much attention just to feel real? You're terrified of being ordinary, aren't you? Do you feel anything at all? Or you exactly what you always feared? Nothing? If you're so powerful, then why are you still hiding defendant. You see, I'm here today as me. But who are you? Let's try to take off your mask and see you didn't create devastation. You revealed it. In it, in yourself, and that darkness you carry, that emptiness, You'll sit with it long after this is over. That is your sentence, and it was written on the wall long before you ever pled guilty. You didn't win, You just exposed. Yourself as the coward you are. You're a delusional, pathetic, hypochondriac loser who thought you were so much smarter than everybody else, constantly scolding, turning your nose up to grammar mistakes, nitpicking and criticizing others. You wanted so badly to be different, to be special, to be better, to be deep, to be mysterious. You found yourself thinking you were better than everyone else, and you thought you could figure out the human psyche and see through it all while tweaked. Out on heroin. Lurking in the shadows made you feel powerful because no one ever paid you any attention. In the light, you thought you were exceptional, all because of a grade on a paper. You thought you were a lee because your online IQ test from twenty ten told you so all of that effort just to see them important. It's desperate. There is a name for your condition. Though you're inflated. Ego just didn't allow you to see it. Want to be. You act like no one could ever understand your mind. But the truth is you're basic, your textbook pace of insecurity disguised as control. Your patterns are predictable, your motives are shallow. You are not profound. You're pathetic. You aren't special or deep, not mysterious or exceptional. Don't ever get it twisted again. No one is scared of you today. No one is intimidated by you, no one is impressed by you. No one thinks that you are important. You orchestrated this like you thought you were God. Now look at you begging a courtroom for scraps. You spent months preparing, and still all it took was my sister, and as she you work so hard to seem dangerous, but real control doesn't have to prove itself. The truth is the scariest part about you. It's how painfully average you turned out to be. The truth is as dumb as they come, stupid, clumsy, slow, sloppy, weak, dirty. Let me be very clear, don't ever try to convince yourself you mattered just because someone finally said your name out loud. I see through you. You want the truth. Here's the one you'll hate the most. If you hadn't attacked them in their sleep in the middle of the night like a pedophile, Kaylee would have kicked your fucking ass. Thank you, thank you. I literally have listened to that so many times already, and it's only Wednesday night, and I just think that she really chose her words carefully. She degraded him, She read him like a book, and I was so impressed with her statement. All of the victim impact statements were really, really good, and I highly suggest you go listen to all of them. Bethany wrote a victim impact statement and had someone read it for her. She's one of the surviving roommates. And then Dylan got up and read her victim impact statement, and it absolutely completely breaks your heart when you really put into perspective what these poor girls have gone through. Not only did they lose four of their best friends, but they were targets of people accusing them of murder and threats and the worst of the worst. While they are in the midst of their grief. Dylan said, she was only nineteen years old when this happened, and when you really put that into perspective, she was a baby, so young, so innocent, obviously never thinking that the worst of the worst was going to happen right under her own roof, because she had lived a very normal life where you don't think that the worst of the worst is going to happen to you, and then all of a sudden you're thrust into this insanity of what happened to your friends, and you are a survivor of that, and it's just I can't even put into words. Her victim impact statement really really drove it home that yes, they are two living victims that survived this, but they are going to live the rest of their life trying to maneuver through the grief of what has happened to them. And the other victim impact statements, like I said, are all really really good. So I do suggest you guys go and give it a listen, give them all a listen. They're all on Court TV, and they all are really good. Steve Kaylee's dad actually moved to the podium so he was eye to eye, face to face with BK and he had no emotion during the whole everyone going no emotion at all. Everyone that spoke, he had zero emotion. I don't know how you can sit through something like that and not even like WinCE once, and he didn't. He was terrible. Everybody did a really great job giving their victim impact statements, and I think. It was a very powerful day. I personally wish nothing but the worst of the worst for BK in prison. I hope he has a. Terrible time, and I hope I never have to hear from him ever ever again in life. They are starting to release some of the documents and everything. I am not at the I don't have the mental capacity in bandwidth to go through all that right now, but I probably will in the coming days. Last thing I want to talk about real quickly is Eric Menandez, of the Menanda's brothers. Is not doing well medically. They said he had a kidney stone and that he was hospitalized, but now it seems like it's progressed to something a little bit more serious, and they're basically calling that he is let out so that way he can get the proper medical care. I don't know what's going to come of it. But that's kind of what's going on right now. With all of that, they do have a hearing coming up in August about their paroles, so it's going to be interesting to see what ends up happening. But I'll be sure to keep you updated. And I'm going to have a more in depth right now in True Crime next week because this week I really wanted to focus on Olivia's statement the BK sentencing, and we'll get into more next week because I swear when it rains abhors in the true crime world unfortunately, So we are going to go ahead now and get into today's episode. It is a little bit of a shorter episode, but still a really important story to tell. Alrighty guys, Today we are diving into a case that is a recently solved case of a twenty four year old woman named Jeannette Ralston. She lost her life in nineteen seventy seven after leaving a bar in San Jose, California, and although her case was cold for many years, it is now finally solved due to the San Jose Police Department not giving up and re examining evidence and taking a fresh look at what they had available and doing so with Fresh twenty twenty five eyes. We are going to talk about Jeanette the case, why it was dormant for so long, and what's come out since law enforcement has finally announced that they made an arrest. Also, there was a composite sketch in this case, and it's really why to see the comparison of that sketch to the actual suspect now that we know who he is and his identity. So often I feel like those sketches really do a great job at identifying the suspect, and in this case, they super nailed it. It is wild. Jeanette Diana Collins or Elston was born on April twenty fifth of nineteen fifty two in Germany. I wasn't able to find much about her childhood or her upbringing, but at some point she moved to California and had lived in Benetia and San Mateo prior to her death. I'm not fully sure on the timeframe, but I do know that she was married, and she was a mom and had a son named Alan, who was only six at the time of his mother's murder. So Jeanette's story all starts on January thirty first of nineteen seventy seven, when she went out to spend some time with some friends at the lions Den Bar in San Jose, California. It was located at fifteen hundred Almaden Road, and it was just after midnight when she had told her friends that she would be back in about ten minutes. As she walked out of sight from her friend's field of vision, they noticed that she was with the man that they did not recognize. Jeannette never returned to the bar that night, and it wouldn't be until the next morning when her fate would be found out. The next morning, on February first of nineteen seventy seven, Jeannette was found in her Volkswagen Beetle. She was wedged tightly in the backseat of her car. Her car was parked in the carport area of an apartment complex not far from the bar where she was last seen. She had been strangled with a long sleeve dress shirt and had been sexually assaulted. It also appeared that the perpetrator had unsuccessfully attempted to set the car on a fire, which was an obvious attempt to cover his tracks and cover his crime. Despite the fact that the last people with Jeanette were able to come up with a composite sketch of the individual. She was last seen with. Law enforcement had no viable suspects, and the case went cold until twenty twenty four. That is, the San Jose Police Departments Homicide Unit, along with the cold case unit that was established in twenty eleven, decided that they were going to dig back into Janette's case. The Deputy District Attorney, Rob Baker decided in twenty twenty four to rerun and retest all of the evidence. Things that they had collected in nineteen seventy seven that yielded no results could yield results now in present day. So that's exactly what they did. They said that they threw basically a hail Mary and tried to see if they could solve this case. They retested fingerprints that were found on a pack of Eve cigarettes that were found in Jeanette's car, and boom, the breakthrough came. The prince came back as matching a man named Willie Eugene Simms, who was sixty nine years old and living in Ohio. Early in twenty twenty five, investigators traveled to Ohio to collect Willy's DNA and it came back as a match and consistent with the DNA that was found under Jutt's fingernails, as well as the DNA that was on the blouse that was used to strangle her. A true smoking gun. So who is Willy Eugene Simms. At the time of Jeanet's murder? Willie was an Army private who was stationed at Fort Ord. In nineteen seventy eight, a year after Jeanette's murder, he was convicted of assault with the intent to commit murder in Monterey County. He was sentenced to. Two and a half months, which is pure insanity considering the charges. He then moved out of California before the time when DNA was routinely collected and placed into databases, hence why he was able to remain free for so many years. So of course I had to research him a little bit more and try to find out a little bit more about his history, and I found another case of his I believe from nineteen ninety eight that took place in Texas where he is accused and found guilty of a robbery where he entered a home and stole property from a house along with an accomplice. He was basically found hiding in this person's closet with some of their belongings. I am going to read through that case file now. On December second, nineteen ninety eight, at approximately nine am, Dorothy saw two young black males running from her neighbor's house. She watched as the boys ran to a nearby house. She testified that the boy in front was wearing a baise jacket with a light collar, and the other was wearing a striped blue jacket. She physically described the boy in front as tall and slim and the boy and back as short and husky. Further, she said the boy and back was carrying a bulky object. After her husband went to the neighbor's house and saw the black window had been broken out, they called police. While they waited for police to arrive, Dorothy watched the house nearby to see if the boys had left the house. They did not. When the police arrived, Dorothy pointed out the nearby house that the boys had entered. The police officers knocked on the door and missed Kennedy. The owner of the home answered the officer. Dixplained what had happened and obtained her permission to search. The house officer Mark Barrington went to the back bedroom, where he found Sims standing in a bedroom closet. Sims was ordered out of the closet and the officers confirmed from the owner that Sims did not have permission to be in her house. As Barrington began searching the bedroom closet, Sims said, there's nothing in the closet. Barrington continued searching the closet and found three rings lying on a pile of clothes. He looked underneath the pile of clothes and found a VCR. Additionally, in the closet where they found Sims, they found a jacket matching the eyewitnesses description of a bays jacket. The officer also found two bags of coins in the closet. In the bedroom, Barrington found a brooch on the floor and bags of jewelry. On the bed. Barrington also found the other suspect, Jermaine Kennedy, squatted down in the bottom of a hallway linen closet. On the shelf. In the linen closet, Barrington found some rings and watches. All the described items, other than the Bayse jack it were later identified and has been stolen from the victim's house. A search of the victim's house revealed that a window near the back door had been broken out, but the burglars had not been able to gain entry through the door. The officers found that another window had been broken through which the burglars entered the house through. The house had been ransacked. Sims was arrested and indicted for the offense of burglary of a habitation. In his sole issue on appeal, Sim asserts the evidence is insufficient to support his conviction because there's no evidence to show he entered the habitation. The state argues the evidence is sufficient to convict Sims, either under the law or parties, or as a primary actor. We agree with the state and affirm the conviction. Sims asserts there is no evidence indicating that he entered the victim's house, and therefore the evidence is legally insufficient to find that he committed the offense of burglary, despite evidence that the defendant actually entered the home to commit the theft is unnecessary if the record discloses a burglary occurred, that the defendant possessed some or all of the stolen property, and that the defendant failed to proffer a reason for having it. Sims matched the description of the taller male who had been wearing a base jacket with a light collar. In the closet where Sims was found, there was a bays jacket matching the eyewitness's description. The jacket had a roll of dimes in one of the pockets. The officers also found a gun in one of the pockets of the base jacket. The victim testified that her home had been broken into and ransacked, and the property recovered by the police from Sims and Kennedy belonged to her. Furthermore, sims accomplice testified that he and Sims had a prior agreement. Even after eliminating all accomplice evidence from the record, we conclude the other evidence, although circumstantial, tends to support a finding that Sims entered the victim's house. Considering the eyewindest testimony and the fact that the base jacket and stolen goods were found in and around the closet where Sims was found, we believe that there was sufficient circumstantial evidence to support the juries fighting that Sims entered the victim's home and committed burglary of a habitation. So I'm pretty sure that this is the same individual, and he obviously doesn't want to take any accountability for his actions, even though he was literally caught red handed in a closet with all of the stolen merchandise, and he thinks that it's just circumstantial and they really can't even prove that he was ever in the house, and he basically just tried to blame it on his accomplice. But no dice for you, Willy Eugene Simms. So not only do we have that occurrence, we also have the assault in nineteen seventy eight and then the murder and assault of Jeanette. What else is this guy responsible for? I say it all the time. Someone this violent doesn't just offend once. They offend again and again until they are caught. And luckily for us, time is up for Willie. Jeanette's son, who was only six years old at the time of her murder, expressed immense gratitude for the police department not giving up on his mom's case, and is quoted as saying in a WLB three interview, without the Santa Clara Detectives, the whole team that's worked on this for forty nine years how do you think somebody like that and not feel guilty that you didn't thank them enough? End quote. He then goes on to. Say that he holds the memory of his mother close to his heart and says, she raised me to be a happy kid, so I just hold on to that. I've always tried to do good in my life and try to respect her in any way I. Could end quote. This case was cold for so many years, and I'm just glad that there is finally some resolution. It's all kind of happening in real time. They just officially announced this in May, right around Mother's Day, which Alan said was a really good Mother's Day present for him because he's lived so many of his years without knowing what happened to his mom or who was responsible. This story also. Reminds me a little bit of Megan Beth John's, who I just covered again. It's another case that was recently solved, and it's just the track record of the suspect that really gets to me, because so often these people have a trail of violent offenses that they entertained. It just doesn't start one day. Usually they start very very young, and then it just gets worse and with some of them. They aren't locked. Away and put away, so they can not do this to somebody else, and they just keep reoffending until eventually, years down the line, they get caught. And that's exactly what happened in this case of Willie Eugene Simms, because it seems like he was a violent person. He was just basically it seems like a career criminal. What other things could he be responsible for that he hasn't been caught for yet. He served two months in jail after an attempted murder and then was able to leave the state of California, never giving his prints, never giving his DNA, and was able to get away with stuff for such a long time. And I guess it's with his nineteen ninety eight arrests for the burglary that they ended up getting his prints and everything else. He eventually moved. To Ohio, and god knows what he was up to there. He's almost seventy years old now. But I think for a lot of these people that have eluded authorities for so long and have gotten away with these cases for so long, their time truly is running out because DNA technology is catching up and police departments are going back through some of these decades long cold cases, and they're rerunning all of the evidence and things are popping up left and right. That is why I feel like there's so many of these now solved cases. This one was almost fifty years old, and it was almost cold for fifty whole years, but now it's not anymore. And although we don't know at the moment the reason why Willie Eugene Simms decided to take Jeannette's life, I do know that he will never do it to anybody else because he is behind bars in California and there is going to be a hearing that's coming up in August, and if convicted, he is facing from twenty five years to life, and I hope it's more on the life side, because this individual never needs to see the light of day again in my opinion. Of course, they have enough evidence to bring charges against him, but he has not been found guilty yet in a court of law, so I do want to make that very very clear. But I do think that the San Jose Police Department did a wonderful job with this case. They did a great job preserving the evidence and taking the evidence way back in nineteen seventy seven, when I don't even think that they knew that one day that evidence was going to come back around and help them solve this case in twenty twenty five. It's really crazy to think about how much time passed in between the testing of the evidence and the preservation of the evidence. How good they must have preserve that evidence underneath her fingernails, on the shirt that was used to strangle her, and on the Eves cigarette carton of all things. This is why I cover these cases so we can have way more resolution like this one. So although the story is a little bit shorter than my typical episodes, I did want to cover it because Jeanette's story matters, and I'm so glad that we are one step closer to getting justice for her. And like I said, I'm going to be sharing the composite sketch of the suspect, a booking photo current of Willy E Jean Sims, and a former booking photo of Willy Eujeene Sims, because it is definitely crazy to see the comparison and how accurate this initial description of this man was. They just never had this guy on their radar. He probably wasn't somebody that was known to Jeanette, and maybe that night he was able to gain her trust and they ended up leaving together for one reason or another, and then he attacked her, assaulted her, and murdered her, and then tried to cover his tracks by burning the car, but failed miserably because he sucks allegedly in my opinion, So thank god for that, because if that had happened, if he had successfully lit the car on fire, a lot of this evidence that was so well preserved probably wouldn't. Even be in existence. So thankfully. Criminals are dumb and a lot of the times they mess up and things don't go as planned. So that is Jeanette's story. Thank you guys so much for listening. I will see you next week for a brand new unsolved case. I hope you have a great weekend and I will see you then. Bye.