Kathleen Heisey

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. It may be sensitive for some listeners. All witnesses, purchas of interest, and suspects 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 in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome back to Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to dive in to right now in true crime. A few little housekeeping things I want to talk about. First of all, we're going to talk about the death of Mike and Miller. I do want to say my girls, Jules and Jen of True Crime and Headlines, they are coming out with season two of their podcast. Jen did a really good episode about Mike and Miller that was released the other night, So I do suggest you guys go listen to that and be sure to stay tuned for season two of True Crime and Headline. Okay, So there was a new article that was put out by news Nation and I'm going to read this. This is directly from a NewsNation now dot com Micah Miller's husband, John Paul Miller, admitted in an apology letter to posting a topless photo of her online. Quote I'm sorry for putting a picture of you on the internet. End quote, reads the apology email, which was exclusively obtained by NewsNation National correspondent Rich McHugh. Quote. It was for less than one hour and immediately taken down. I was hurt that you were telling people, telling everyone horrible immediate details of my past sin, and I just wanted to try and hurt you. Please forgive me. It was evil of me to do that. End quote. So a couple of days after this email was sent to Micah, that is when her Affidavid was sent to her attorney. And this was all about nine days before she died. And this is a quote from Micah. Quote. Since the day we became husband and wife, I have been abused in every way I can think of, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, financially, and physically. He has harassed me physically and electronically with letters, phone calls, emails and texts, hacking my emails, hacking my personal Facebook, and impersonating me using my stolen phone to send text and emails out to church members pretending to be me, texting friends and families saying that I am sleeping with teenagers from our church and showing up in person at places around town, to having installed three different tracking devices on my vehicle end quote. And this kind of confirms what we all thought when we first read through all the affidavit information, was that John Paul was the one who was stalking her, installing these tracking devices on her vehicle, following her from point A to point B. I mean, the name was redacted, which I think is weird, but regardless, it now seems that John Paul is the one who in fact stalking her, so really interesting information. Of course, I feel like in the next week we are going to be getting more and more information. Her family is very much pushing for more investigation into this. I really don't know what to think at this point, but I do feel like he definitely pushed her to her brink, and he is definitely not a good person, and he deserves to pay for what he did, because he's just going to do it again and again and again to the next girl that he's with, and the girl after that, and the girl after that and the girl after that until he has stopped all right. Next thing, I want to talk about a little bit of Chad Daville chatter, just because Friday's day of court was so interesting. Tammy's sister was on the stand, and then Tammy's sister's husband was also on the stand, talking about the relationship that they had with Chad, and of course Tammy and Tammy's health leading up to her death, how surprised they were when Chad got remarried so quickly after Tammy's death, and Chad saying that Tammy came to him at the cemetery and told him that he needed to move on, and her sister thought, when someone tells you that it's okay to move on, they usually mean two years after a spouse passes and not two weeks. Also, another very interesting thing that came out in trial on Friday was that Chad did not want his name on Tammy's headstone, which Tammy's sister thought was very interesting because the family is very into tracking their ancestors, and that is how they typically would track different ancestors is looking at the headstones and seeing who was connected to who, and if Chad's name was nowhere to be found on Tammy's headstone. It would mean that there is no connection there. They would never be able to connect the two of them, So that I think was very very interesting, given that Chad and the family were really into tracing back family history, very very interesting little tidbit there. I do feel like this week of testimony is probably going to be interesting. I feel like we're getting into the meat and potatoes of the trial, and I do feel like we're going to be hearing from some pretty important people. I am very anxious to hear from Chad's kids. One thing that Tammy's sister did say is that they were very very close with Chad, Tammy and the children growing up. They raise their family side by side for the most part, and once Tammy died, they were completely cut out of their lives. The children. Tammy and Chad's children have nothing to do with them and do not have a relationship with them, which I think is very telling of who Chad is as a person. I feel like the kids have been indoctrinated since day one on what to believe and who to believe, and it's only in my opinion it only makes sense that they are are following Chad's lead and going with everything he says, because that is all that they know, which I think is really unfortunate. Because the cards are on the table. We all see what's going on here, and I can't even imagine supporting anybody that did this to my family. But that is all of the Chad day Bill stuff for right now. I will continue to keep you guys updated with any new little tidbits and information that come out in the trial. Okay, that's all for right now. In true crime, we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode. All right, guys, today we are jumping into a brand new unsolved homicide. This one took place in nineteen ninety eight in Bakersfield, California, and as always, we are going to start off talking a little bit about the victim and what they were doing in their lives leading up to the horrific homicide. This one, for me, is really interesting. We're going to talk about some of the potential suspects as the episode goes, but I'm really interested to see what you guys think about this one, and we're going to go ahead and get started. Kathleen Heisi was born in September twelfth of nineteen forty seven and at the time of her death, she was fifty years old living in Bakersfield, California. She was the principal of an elementary school which was called Browning Road Elementary School. Now, this school was about twenty five miles away from Bakersfield, California. She was a single mom. She had two kids, Lisa and Tim, and she loved them dearly, and she loved and adored her job. Her job was one of the most important things to her, next to her children. At the time of her death, Kathleen was living at two zero one six Raymond a Spruin's Court, and this street was a quiet little cul de sac type of road, and adjacent to where Kathleen lived there was a empty field that no longer exists. It now houses a Low's, but back in the day in nineteen ninety eight, it was an open field. So let's talk. Monday, June twenty ninth of nineteen ninety eight, Kathleen, after she got off of work, had gone and visited a fellow teacher friend's house. Her name was Lynn Runyan, and Lynn said that they visited and Kathleen ended up leaving around seven pm that night. Now, the next day, Kathleen failed to show up for work. She had some meetings that she was supposed to be attending and did not show up. And then again on Wednesday, she failed to show up for work and school officials were I guess a little bit concerned, but they went ahead and ask Lynne if she would go and check in on Kathleen because they were good friends. So we are now. On Wednesday, Lynn went to Kathleen's home around noon on Wednesday, and when she got there, she found two newspapers that were on the front porch that had not been picked up. They hadn't been touched, and ended up getting inside of the home and found a horrific, horrific crime scene. Kathleen had been murdered. It was trigger warning, a bloodbath. Law enforcement of course was called and they came out and Kathleen had been killed with a knife, but they said it wasn't a normal type of stabbing. The first homicide detective that was present was a guy named Kevin Legg, and he said that it was more of like a poking type of stab wound. And they said it was kind of like an overhand into the upper torso slashed down until you hit the bone and then you go right to left, which just sounds horrific. I don't even know. I don't even know. I can't even image the horror that poor Kathleen endured. And Kevin Legg said that there was definitely overkill, and in his opinion, he thought that this was an extremely personal attack. They did think that she had been killed in the living room of the home and was then dragged into the bedroom, which is where Kathleen ended up being found. And there were two items that investigators believed were inserted into Kathleen's body in a sexual manner, and they thought that it was two guns, which is very interesting, And we're going to talk a little bit about one of the suspects and how this kind of replicated one of their crimes, so we will get to that in a little bit. So interestingly enough, there wasn't anything missing from the home. There was no signs of forced entry, and there was nothing left behind as far as weapons go, so they knew that whoever the killer or killers were, that they brought the murder weapons with them to the home and they took them when they left. Law enforcement, like I said, did believe that this was extremely personal and that Kathleen knew exactly who her killer was, but who would want to hurt the fifty year old single mother of two that was very well liked in the community. She was a elementary school principal. Everyone loved Kathleen. Who would want to hurt her? So there was of course a lot of rumors that were floating around because small towns talk, and one of them was that the Mexican mafia may have been involved. And another was that since Kathleen was a elementary school principal, it was her responsibility if she suspected any child abuse to report that child abuse, and that it could have easily been a retaliation for something. In those regards, they did have a theory that she might have been a victim of a serial killer who is named Michael Charles Brown. Also sidebar for a quick second. I feel like every case I cover, if we talk about a killer or a serial killer, there's always somebody that has three names. I just think that's a really interesting fact. So anyways, Michael Charles Brown, he was forty one and he is a serial rapist and convicted murderer. He is on death row in San Quentin and the reason that he's on death row in San quentin Is because he is connected to a series of crimes in Bakersfield, California, between two thousand and two thousand and eight. Now, there isn't any known connection between Kathleen Heisey and Michael Charles Brown, but investigators did say that there are definite similarities in her death and several crimes that were committed by him. So one of the murders that Michael Charles Brown committed was the death of Ruby Lee Jackson Merriweather, and she had been raped and murdered in her home in Bakersfield in two thousand. She had been stabbed eighteen times and her body had been positioned at the foot of her bed in a sexual manner, which again could allude to being very similar to the way that Kathleen was killed and then of course sexually assaulted after her death. He was also arrested for committing a series of rapes in two thousand and seven and two thousand and eight, and sometimes he would sodomize his victims with random foreign objects. Again, it has overlap with Kathleen's murder, so that is why he was brought up as a potential suspect in Kathleen's murder. This case was also brought to Paul Holes and in his investigation and interpretation of all of the evidence, he does believe that Michael Charles Brown is probably suspect number one in his opinion, just because of the overlap and the way that the crimes are very consistent with each other. And I would definitely definitely agree. I feel like he is a very very strong suspect in this case my opinion. But we are now going to move on to who Kathleen's son thinks is responsible. So Kathleen's son, Tim Heisei, he was twenty one years old when his mother was murdered, and he did live there at the house, but he left Sunday right before her murder because he was training as a cadet for the US Naval Academy, So he had left that Sunday to go start his training for that. But before he left, he said that his mom told him that she was really, really terrified and scared of this particular coworker of hers, and this is a quote. She told him that she was writing a bad evaluation on him, and when she presented it to him, he flipped out and basically said, if you submit that it'll be the last thing you ever do end quote. And of course Kathleen was super upset by this. She came home and she was in hysterics, and then several days later she was found dead in her home, which coincidences we know. I don't believe in them. That to me, he sounds like a pretty solid lead. So this coworker was a counselor at the school and his name was Lloyd Wakely. So at the time of the murder, when Kathleen was fifty, Lloyd Wakely was only two years younger. He was forty eight years old, six foot one, he was two hundred and twenty five pounds, so a really large guy that could easily overpower Kathleen. Now, for detective leg Wakely is the number one suspect and said that he was pretty much a suspect immediately as soon as the investigation started. But Lloyd's family says that the investigation that they've completed has proven that Lloyd is innocent. They've been investigating him since nineteen ninety eight and he's never been charged or arrested in the case. Lloyd did give a DNA sample the week of the killing, and he has taken light detector tests. His house has been searched, and there is no evidence that really say that he is guilty of this. But he did have some previous run ins with the law. He had previously lived in Oklahoma, and in October of nineteen eighty three, he had a run in at a post office. He had some issues with the letter not being delivered and he was upset and he took a Postal service computer off the counter and then threw it and smashed it on the floor, and that was a federal offense and he was indicted on that and kaget dot com they actually did an interview with the employee who witnessed that interaction with Lloyd at the post office. The employee is at the time of this interview ninety four years old, and he said he walked to his car, I followed him out, and he ended up pulling out a pistol and he thought that he was going to shoot him, and they said it was a really, really scary interaction. He ultimately pled guilty and he was placed four years of probation in nineteen eighty four and was required to have treatment by a clinical psychologist, and then just a few years later he was living in Bakersfield, California, working as a counselor at the school that Kathleen taught at. Three and a half months before Kathleen's murder, there was a traffic incident and he had a little bit of road rage. Lloyd is a road rager, and he ended up threatening this person that he was in this altercation with with a sword, like I'm sorry, what who carries a sword with them in nineteen ninety eight or in twenty twenty four for that matter, So he is definitely unhinged. He said to this driver, you guys need to watch what you're doing. Someone could come along and cut your heart out, which is super bizarre. Also another reason that I think Lloyd remains such a high suspect on the list is because Kathleen had shared with one of her friends, Carol, who was also a teacher at Browning Roade Elementary, that she was afraid that Lloyd was going to kill her in the middle of the night, which again is really really interesting. In twenty sixteen, when this article was written, at the time, Lloyd's wife had said that Lloyd was suffering from dementia and only had a few months to live. I have not been able to find an obituary for Lloyd because this was done in twenty sixteen this article, and we are well beyond that now, so I don't know if Lloyd is still living or not. But his wife did say that he provided receipts, photographs. There are statements for multiple people saying that he was miles away at the time of the murder. And there is no way that he can be involved. He has never been charged, arrested, or anything in connection with the murder of Kathleen. But I do feel like it kind of makes sense that he is suspect number one, and that is how Kevin leg feels, the lead investigator, and that is how Tim Heiseie feels as well, which is Kathleen's son. Now, we do have another important suspect to bring up, and that is the man that Kathleen was dating at the time of her murder. His name was Bob Taylor. At the time of all of this, he was fifty three years old, six foot three and two hundred and seventeen pounds. Again, somebody that easily could have overpowered Kathleen if he needed to. So he was married at the time of his relationship with Kathleen, and Kathleen had given him pretty much an ultimatum, which was actually cooperated in a letter that years down the line, Kathleen's daughter Lisa found a letter from Bob pleading with Kathleen not to end their relationship because Kathleen was probably tired of being the other woman, and I'm sure Bob was filling her head with things like I'm going to leave my wife. I'm going to leave my wife. I'm going to leave my wife, and never did so Kathleen was over it and gave him this ultimatum. Kathleen and Bob had been together for four years, which is a really long time to carry on an affair, but Bob was one of the last people to see Kathleen. They were together just hours before she ended up being killed. Because investigators did believe that she was killed Monday night or the next morning or Tuesday morning, because she never came to work that Tuesday. Lisa, Kathleen's daughter, said that he was there that Sunday night, and when she had spoken with her mom that Sunday night, she was not upset at all. She seemed very carefree and that her and Bob were going to play a game of cribbage. But the family of Kathleen weren't really sure why investigators didn't really question Bob Taylor very much or his wife, because if his wife had found out about it, it is a huge potential that she could have been livid and pissed and wanted revenge. And I feel like that is a reasonable thought and very likely that that could have happened, But it doesn't seem like investigators really pursued that route very well. So even years down the line, Bob had gotten divorced and remarried and his current wife didn't have any idea that he was ever even involved with Kathleen Heisey until eventually he said, yeah, I was in a relationship with her when she was murdered. Very very interesting how this information was able to be kept under wraps for such a long time, especially in such a public case like in Bakersfield. This case was huge, huge, huge, huge, So that is very very interesting. Personally, I don't think Bob was involved. He made a really shitty decision in having an affair with Kathleen, but I don't think that he is the one who's responsible for her murder. Again, that is just my opinion. Just from doing the research that I've done in this case. So the last person that Detective's question during the investigation was a man named Charles Curran Shannon, and he is actually Kathleen's cousin. So we're going to talk a little bit about him. So Charles was noted to have been in trouble from an early age. He had a prosecution at eighteen for grand theft and he also had a couple of DUIs by the time he was twenty two. He also had a lot of psychiatric issues and had received some psychiatric care while he was a teenager. So he did enter the army in nineteen seventy four, but within a year he was out due to some type of family issues. However, we don't know exactly what the family issues are. In nineteen seventy seven, he attempted to kidnap a woman from a Bakersfield motel and he ended up being convicted of false imprisonment. He went to jail for a year and he was ordered to get alcohol abuse counseling. And then in nineteen eighty one, he kidnapped another woman, took her to an oil field, attempted to rape her, and he ended up eventually pleading guilty to that case, and then he was sentenced to four years in prison and he had to register as a sex offender. There was a lot of other things. He was convicted of forgery in Missouri and grand theft in Arizona. So in nineteen ninety eight, when Kathleen was killed, he was forty three years old. He was living in South Dakota at the time, but in late June he ended up moving to Bakersfield and literally moved there the week that Kathleen was killed. And then right after Kathleen's body was found, he decided to move out of town and he moved to his mom's house, which was in nearby town Glenville. Once investigators got worried about him, they started to kind of investigate him, and they realized that he had not registered as a sex offender in the county that he was living in, and they brought him in and questioned him, and he did get a year in jail because of the non registering as a sex offender, but he denied any involvement in Kathleen's killing. He ended up being released from jail in nineteen ninety nine and he moved to Mexico, and again he has never been charged or arrested in connection with Kathleen's murder, So we don't really have any super solid leads in Kathleen's murder. There's a lot of this person could be involved, this person may be involved, but there's nothing definitive, which unfortunately is what leads us to doing this episode today because we do not have a slow case. Tim Heisei remains very, very frustrated about everything. He said that he has very much tried his best to be on the side of law enforcement, and he said, for years, I've battled with this frustration of their mishandling of this case and thought, oh, I should be quiet, They're going to get this solved. I put myself in the detective's shoes, and he's probably got all of these new cases coming across his desk and he has to focus on those. It never ends, and there's not a lot of incentive for them to get this solved. End quote. Then he goes on to say, I don't support vigilante justice, but a police department. But with a police department that has a murder solve rate of forty percent, I find it hard to tell people to just sit tight when something catastrophic happens to their family end quote. And that is so true. It is so easy to sit on the outside looking in and think, Okay, law enforcement is going to handle this, They're going to figure out what happened. But as evidenced by pretty much every podcast episode I do, that's not the case. Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. And that's really really frustrating because as a living victim of somebody who has had their life taken, you were having to relive that every single day and replay it in your mind every single day as it is. And then if you're actively working to get attention on a case and try to get word out there, try to get the case solved, you're actively dealing with that every single day on top of your already crazy grief that you're having. I'm going to read an obituary that was put out by Kathleen's children, and this was put out ten years after her death. We are now at twenty six years, almost twenty six years since Kathleen was killed. In Loving Memory of Kathleen Jane Heisie September twelfth, nineteen forty seven to July first, nineteen ninety eight. Ten years have not lessened the memories of a beautiful and energetic mother, daughter, sister, and teacher. Kathleen's life in Jesus Christ endures despite the end to her physical life. Kathleen was killed in her home in an unsolved murder. Kathleen's passion for her work as a teacher and principal in the McFarlane School district for twenty two years. She loved coming alongside students, encouraging them to remain in school, resist drugs and gangs, and set educational and career goals. Kathleen knew the struggles of being a single parent and reached out to the young teen parents at her school. She mentored these young women to provide a safe and loving home children to their children and encourage them to finish their education. Cooking, sewing, reading, and gardening were the tools that she used to build relationship with these young students that Kathleen Heisey's scholarship is still encouraging McFarlane's students to continue their education. Kathleen's love, humor, and enthusiasm for life gave her children the courage to become successful adults. She taught them that through Christ, all things are possible and gave them the inner confidence to excel and reach out to others. She loved her children and would be proud of the adults and parents that they have become. So Like I said, that was published in two thousand and eight, and another sixteen years have passed since that was published, and twenty six years is way too long to have any type of crime unsolved, but especially a crime as horrific as this. So as always I encourage you to share this episode. Let's get the word out and let's hopefully figure out what happened to Kathleen. I know for a fact that Lloyd Wakely and Bob Taylor, if they are both still living, both have dementia and are unable to do interviews or speak for themselves in regards to what happened around that time. Like I said, I don't think Bob is connected at all. I do have some questions about Lloyd because if Kathleen's son thinks that he's the number one suspect, I feel like that's fair and that it needs to be investigated further. But that is the story of Kathleen HEISEI. I am going to post a lot of pictures of all the different people that I've talked about on my Instagram carousel and my Facebook pages, So please go check that out. And I hope you guys have a fantastic week ahead and I will see you Friday for Part three of Summer Series twenty twenty four. Dan Markel, Bye,