Sherri Ann Jarvis

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. It may be sensitive for some listeners. 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 to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to jump into right now and true crime. Unfortunately, the news that nobody wanted. The body of Riley Strain was found on Friday in the Cumberland River. They did say that his death appears to be accidental. There's no foul play suspected, there's no trauma, and the area that he was found was about eight miles away from downtown Nashville, where he was originally at Luke Bryan's Bar. Of course, an autopsy is pending, but they are seeming to think that he was just intoxicated and accidentally fell into the river. And he was missing exactly pretty much exactly two weeks. It was Friday, March eighth that he disappeared in the evening and he was found Friday during the day. And it's really sad and unfortunate because when he left the bar or was asked to leave the bar. His friends had called him and he just said, I'm going to walk back to the hotel, so they didn't really think anything of it. Again, hindsight is always twenty twenty, and you never think anything bad is going to happen, because that's not the expectation in life that bad things are going to happen, especially to somebody that you know. And honestly, to me, it seems like somewhere along the way of Riley leaving the bar headed back to the hotel, he somehow got turned around, got lost, and I really don't know. I mean, they said that they don't suspect any foul play, but I'm going to be interested to see if his blood alcohol level was really really high, just something that would kind of explain some of the behavior that he was demonstrating. He was stumbling, he could hardly stand up, like if he was disoriented. That all could have led to this, and it's an unfortunate tragedy. I feel really bad for the kids that he was with, his family, his friends, anybody that had gone out there to help search for him. There were so many people in the community, others from various places that came to Nashville to help search for Riley. So we will keep all of them in our thoughts and prayers and hopefully they can get some resolution and know that Riley was loved and he will be deeply, deeply missed. Moving on in Ruby Frankie News, she is the mom mom Fluencer, if that's what they were calling her for whatever reason, that was abusing her children along with her friend and I don't know co conspirator Jodie Hildebrant. So there was a twenty twenty episode on the other night. I have not had a chance to watch it yet, but I heard it is insane. They actually showed the ring camera footage that is of her son going to the neighbor's house and asking for the neighbor to call for help. He is very thin, he doesn't have shoes on, and it is just really really sad and unfortunate that these poor kids had to withstand all of this. It seemed that the majority of the abuse was happening to Ruby's younger children, which is horrific that you would single out your children and abuse them. That doesn't really make any sense at all. One of the prosecutors in the cases called it one of the most severe cases of emotional abuse that they have ever seen and ever worked on. So pretty much all of this happened when Jodie Hildebrand ended up entering the lives of the Frankie family. So Ruby Frankie chronicles her and JODI's actions in a journal, and it's basically a manicured day by day account detailing how the women isolated the two children from the outside world. They restricted them of food, water, and shelter, and they physically and emotionally abused them. They made them go outside and do all of this work in the hot, hot sun, and then would refuse to feed them and give them water. These two people had basically told these kids that they were going to be in trouble, they were going to go to jail, they needed to repent, and it was just so weird. So Ruby describes that her kids are possessed, and it was basically like the reason that they were being abused as a chance for repentance, and which is so bizarre. That's like some Lori valo backwards ass thinking. So the neighbor that the Sun had gone to to ask him for help, he basically described the child's condition, and he says he has duct tape around each ankle, their sores around them, and he's obviously very, very emotional, and he said, this kid has obviously been I think he's been detained. He's obviously covered in wounds. Just so, this neighbor was so so upset, like he was emotional even, you know, talking to dispatch to get some assistance. So ems arrive and they do their initial assessment and they said at their first assessment they knew right away that something was wrong. He was extremely thin, his clothes were just hanging off of him, and he just looked like he had been through some stuff. There was a lot of open wounds on his wrists and ankles, and the duct tape was on top of the wounds, and then some of the wounds had been dressed with honey and kyenne pepper, Like WTF, Like I cannot even imagine the pain that they felt with all of that, like wounds and duct tape and kyenne pepper, I can't even imagine. So when law enforcement goes to the house, Jody hildebrandt answers the door and the first word she say to police are I have my attorney on the phone because she knew she was in deep, deep shit. And Jody Hildebrandt was a quote unquote life coach, and that is initially when she came into reby Frankie and her family's life for life coaching. Basically, it's like some kind of brainwashed pseudo cult shit that I think Jody was into. I give full responsibility to Ruby as well for actually, first of all, and letting this person into your home and then letting her take charge and aid in abusing your children. That is a really, really shitty, loath thing to do. So when investigators went to the home, they discovered the other child, who was a little girl. They thought that she was a little boy because she had a buzzed haircut, and she was pretty timid, and they had a hard time getting her to stand up and leave the spot that she was sitting out on the floor. They eventually were able to entice her with some pizza, and she ate the entire pizza by herself, and after about four hours she finally got up and left the area on the floor that she was sitting. The amount of abuse that poor girl must have been put through I cannot even freaking imagine. So of course, Jody and Ruby are separated. They are interrogating them. The children are taken into custody, and Ruby's husband, the children's father, Kevin Frankie, comes to the police station. He has not seen his kids in over a year. He had been basically asked to move out of the family home, and he hadn't seen Ruby or the children in over a year. And he said that as soon as Jodi showed up, she pretty much ran the show, and I was asked to move out. In July of twenty twenty two, he was, of course shocked and devastated at the condition of his two youngest children. And now seven months later, he is seeking to regain custody of the four minor children, and he has officially filed from divorce, and the two youngest kids have been placed in foster care together and they are doing well. They've put on some weight and they have gotten back into being children and being able to function as children. But I just can't even imagine the horror that they went through. All of the information I just shared is from abcseven Chicago dot com. They had a nice article about the twenty twenty program. But I do encourage you guys to go watch it. It is on my list of things to watch. So we are going to call that good for right now. In true crime, there wasn't really a ton to talk about, but I did want to highlight Riley and I wanted to talk a little bit about Ruby and Jody because they are horrific humans and they should remain behind bars for a long time and be tortured every single day because they abuse children, and that is not okay. So we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode. Okay, guys, today we are doing something a little bit different. I'm still going to be telling you about a unsolved homicide, but this particular unsolved homicide was a Jane Doe for forty one years. So this is a prime example of when I say it's never too late, it is never too late. So today I'm going to be talking about the unsolved homicide of Sherry Ann Jarvis, and she would be non for a long time, for forty one years as the Walker County Jane Doe. So I kind of wasn't really sure how I wanted to approach this episode. If I wanted to start off with all of the Walker County Jane Doe stuff or talk a little bit about who Sherry was. And I've just decided to do it how I normally do it. We're going to talk a little bit about Cherry, what led up to her disappearance and her ultimate murder, and kind of everything that happened from there on out, because this is a really interesting story. Sherry Ann Jarvis was born March ninth of nineteen sixty six to her parents Donald and her mother Carolyn in Forest Lake, Minnesota. She was known amongst her friends by the nickname Tati. Her family said that she loved animals, children, and horseback riding. So she was removed from her family's home at the age of thirteen and had been placed temporarily at a shell in Stillwater, Minnesota, and she was awaiting an appearance before the Juvenile Court for habitual truancy. So at this point in time, she is in custody of the state of Minnesota. In March of nineteen eighty, Sherry ran away from the Washington County Courthouse that was in Stillwater, Minnesota, and she was supposed to be appearing for detention hearing. So at that point she ran off to Green Bay, Wisconsin with two other people that were there. There were two local sisters and they ended up coming back home, but Sherry refused to come home and was never seen or heard from again. The agency that she went missing from did report her missing, but all of those records, somewhere along the way over the forty one years that Sherry went unidentified, were scrubbed or lost, so they never really had a chance to follow up. I don't know when the records went missing or when they were scrubbed, but somewhere along the line, the records of her being missing were completely scrubbed and did not exist, hence why sheherri was a Jane Doe for forty one years. So Sherry was only fourteen years old when she went missing. She did have some contact with her mother. It was in a letter that she wrote from Denver in August of nineteen eighty. In the letter, she basically said to her mom that she was frustrated that she was placed in state custody, but did say that she was going to be returning home eventually. So Sherry is only fourteen, and she is literally on the run on her own at such a young age, and I have to imagine that running away was not probably her first choice, but I think since she was taken out of her home and placed in state custody, that it was probably the only choice that she felt she had, and that's just really sad. Overall, the State of Missouri definitely ft this one up, in my opinion, because she never should have been allowed to run away and it should have never came to her being gone for such a long time. I honestly don't know what her family thought about this whole thing. I don't know what their role really was as far as trying to figure out what had happened to Sherry. I assumed that they probably thought she had just run away and that she was out there somewhere. I don't think they ever thought that anything bad had happened to her. But I also think that with her being in state custody at the time of her disappearance, I feel like there was probably a lot of red tape that went on in regards to her family and the State of Missouri and her being missing. I'm sure there was a lot of back and forth going on there, and it's really sad when you think about it. This girl was only thirteen when she was taken from her home. Literally because she didn't want to go to school, which I understand one hundred percent, and placed in state custody, and before she knew what her life was turned completely upside down. So somewhere between the contact that Cherry had with her mother and November first of nineteen eighty, Sherry was murdered. Her remains were found November one of nineteen eighty in Huntsville, Texas. Her body was spotted by a truck driver who had passed by the Sam Houston National Forest and he immediately phoned the police about nine twenty am that day to report his discovery. She was found nude and was lying in a prone position, face down in an area of grass. And this was about twenty feet from the shoulder of Highway forty five, which even back in nineteen was a major highway. So whoever dumped Sherry out there really didn't care about her not being found. They weren't trying to conceal her. They had her pretty much right out there in the open. So investigators come out and they of course complete all of the initial things that they need to complete. They believed that Sherry had been dead for approximately six hours. They thought her death was around three twenty am. She had a rectangular brown pendant which had a blue or brown glass colored stone that was around her neck. Her ears were pierced, but she didn't have any earrings in at the time, and she had high heeled red leather sandals with light brown straps that were on and the rest of her clothes were missing. She didn't have anything else on besides those high heel red sandals. During the autopsy, they concluded that the victim was about five six between one hundred and five and one hundred and twenty pounds. Her eyes were hazel and her hair was brown and about ten inches long. She had a vertical scar measuring one and a half inches at the edge of her right eyebrow, and they did say that she seemed to be in pretty good health. It seemed that she had received pretty good dental care overall, and they thought that she was probably from a middle class household due to this, and they ended up saying the cause of death was aphixia due to ligature strangulation and trigger warning, I'm about to talk about some graphic things in regards to Sherry's body and how she was found. They thought that the strangulation could have happened from pantyhose, because they did find remnants of pantyhose and even her own underwear inside of the body's vaginal cavity, and they thought that this probably was in an attempt to prevent the body from bleeding as she was transported from the area she was killed to the area where she was disposed of. She had been sexually assaulted prior to her death with a large instrument, and there was no biological evidence any DNA or seamen found at the scene on the body. They also discovered that the victim had been severely beaten prior to her death. She had a lot of bruises on her body, her lips and her eyelids were swollen, and she also had a bite mark on her right shoulder, which again is very very interesting. Whatever this poor girl went through, she battled and tried to fight back. There is no doubt about it in my mind head, And to think about this poor fourteen year old girl having to fight literally for her life, I just can't even imagine the fear that was going through her mind at the time. So, of course, law enforcement is putting out this message that this unidentified girl has been found and they're asking for people to come forward if they saw anything. There were several people that came forward and said they saw a teenage girl matching the victim's description within the twenty four hours prior to her murder. I'm going to talk about all of the different witnesses and what they said that they saw. So the first witness said that they saw a girl appearing somewhat disheveled. She had arrived at the South End Gulf Station at approximately six thirty pm October thirty first. At this location, the girl had exited a blue nineteen seventy three or nineteen seventy four Chevrolet Priest with a light colored top, and this vehicle was driven by a white male. The witness said that the girl asked for directions to the Texas State Department of Corrections Ellis Prison Farm, and after the witness gave her the directions, the girl had left the golf station on foot and was last seen walking on Sam Houston Avenue. The second witness said that the same girl was later seen at the Hitch and Post truck stop alongside I forty five. She again requested direction to the Texas Department of Corrections Ellis Prison farm, claiming that she had a friend that was waiting for her at that location. This witness drew the girl a map and handed it to them, and there was a waitress there that said that she thought that the girl had been a runaway. The girl had informed the waitress that she was from either Rockport or Aransas Pass, Texas, and also had claimed that she was nineteen years old. The waitress definitely expressed doubts that she thought that this girl was nineteen because she did look significantly younger, and had asked her, do your parents know where you're at? And the girl replied back to her, who cares? So at this point, investigators are going off of what these witnesses told investigators that they saw, and they went out to the Ellis Prison farm and contacted both inmates and employees there, and they were shown photographs of the victim in her deceased state. None of them were able to identify her. None of them knew who she was. But there was a detective working the cold case in the twenty first century, and there was one inmate at the time that was there that was of similar age to the victim, so around the age of fourteen. But they were never able to establish that the two knew each other or any kind of connection between the two of them. Investigators then decided that they were going to travel to Rockport, Anna Ransis Pass to consult with some of their law enforcement divisions to see if anybody of that age had been reported and missing, trying to get the description out there of this person so they could hopefully figure out who she was. They canvassed the different schools. They went to different high schools and looked in yearbooks to search for any female who was known to be missing that looked the same as this victim that they had found, and there was nothing that turned up, and there was no missing persons reported reports that had any young Caucasian females who matched the victim at the time. So they had no idea who this girl was, and they very much went off her living in either Rockport or Ramsis Pass, but nothing was ever able to be confirmed stating that she had even ever been in those places. It might have just been somewhere that she saw along the way and decided that she was going to say that's where she was from to kind of throw off the trail. I think she wanted to kind of do her own thing and for people not to be looking for her. So I think that she kind of just created this narrative in order to throw off the trail of where she was going, not intending of course, that she was going to be brutally murdered. On January sixteenth of nineteen eighty one, they buried the unidentified girl at a cemetery in Huntsville, Texas. The inscription upon her tombstone reads, a known white female died November first, nineteen eighty So she became Walker County Jane Doe. And for years and years, nothing happened with this case. From nineteen eighty to nineteen ninety nine, literally nothing happened. In nineteen ninety nine, they exhumed the remains in order to conduct some further forensic examinations. They wanted to obtain some DNA samples from the body, and the second forensic examination of the body, they were able to determine that they thought that she was more between the ages of fourteen and sixteen and a half years old, versus being between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, which was a wider area. So they got it right on the dime. Between fourteen and sixteen and a half. They were right, she was fourteen years old. So again they collect this DNA and for a long time, nothing happens with the case. In November of twenty fifteen, the case was officially reopened by the Walker County Sheriff's Office. They also at the time conducted some DNA testing on the high heeled red leather sandals that were found at the crime scene. They did not disclose this information to the public, but local police departments still were actively monitoring missing persons, anything for any potential match as to this victim, because at this point she's still unidentified. Investigators then start reaching out to the public on news media, websites and different TV programs to try to generate some interest and leads of who this person could be, but again they come up empty handed. So there were several forensic facial reconstructions that happened to illustrate kind of how Walker County Jane Doe might have looked in her real life. In nineteen ninety there was a forensic and portrait artist, Karen Taylor, that created a post mortem drawing of her, and she added in the necklace that she was wearing at the time that she was killed. And then there was an investigator at the Walker County Sheriff's Office who also came up with a facial rendering of the victim. So they did their first facial reconstruction and it was released in twenty twelve, and there was another one that was released after the thirty fifth anniversary of the murder. And they were all created with photographs from the mortuary photography that was taken of Walker County Jane Doe. And when I show you guys the pictures, it is insane how accurate these sketches are, how the facial renderings are one hundred percent so accurate, And it is insane to me that this case went unsolved as to who this person was for such a long time, because the pictures and Sherry Ann Jarvis are a complete and total match. And I don't understand how this case went unsolved for such a long time. So in twenty twenty, the Walker County Sheriff's Office partnered with authorm who I talk about all of the time, in an attempt to identify who this person was with genetic genealogy. So they initially had attempted to extract usable genetic materials from her remains but that was unsuccessful. But they did do some testing on some preserved tissue samples and they were able to get some usable DNA from that. They used that to generate a genetic profile and they were able to construct a family tree from there. And through doing this family tree, they were able to locate living relatives, and these people were identified, they were located, they collected DNA swaps from them to ensure that this person was related to them, and on November ninth of twenty twenty one, bnounced the identity of Walker County Jane Doe as Sherry and Jarvis. They had actually confirmed it in September of twenty twenty one, but they didn't announce it right away because they were giving Sherry's family time to process the news and give them time to grieve, which I can't even imagine. For so many years, first of all, not knowing if your daughter is out there, if she's happy, if she's well, if she's safe, and then finding out that she was brutally murdered and a Jane Doe for forty one years, I cannot even fathom. So finally, after all of this time, she has finally been given her identity. She has been given her name back. They would later change her headstone to bear her name, her nickname and the inscription never Alone and Loved by many. So, of course, with the identification of Sherry's identity and knowing who she is, now investigators are working on trying to figure out who is responsible for killing her and getting this person off of the streets. They are obviously a vile human and they don't need to be out and about wandering around with everyone else. But the fact that she wasn't identified for such a long time really hinders the investigation. This person could no longer even be alive. We really don't know what we're looking for, but there have been some different things kind of thrown around, so we're going to talk about that next. So one of the things that was thrown around was that the gender of the perpetrator could have been a female assailant as opposed to a male, and this was brought up by a journalist named Michael Hargraves, and he based his assumption on the fact of how Sherry's body was found and that the sexual assaults happened with an object, and also the fact that he said men who typically commit crimes of sexual nature are typically known to bite their victims upon sensitive areas of the body, as opposed to the shoulder, which had occurred in this case. And also a lot of male perpetrators who commit crimes with sexual motivation will take souvenirs from the victims. And her necklace was left in place, but her clothes were not, so whoever did this did take her clothes. And also she did have pierced ears, but she did not have any earrings in so that is potentially something else that could have been taken. But basically they're trying to argue that the way that her body was found and the way that she was assaulted aren't on par with how a male who was doing a crime for sexual motivation would usually perpetrate. But I feel like if a woman did this, like I can't even imagine a woman doing something like this, Like it is so vile, I cannot even and it's a teenager. I can't even imagine to me the screams some creepy pedophile truck driver, gross actual sexual deviant who did this to Sherry and Jarvis. There is also some talk that she had been murdered by the same perpetrator as another murder victim who was also unidentified for forty years, who is named Deborah Jackson, and she was murdered a year before Sherry was murdered, and her body was found in Georgetown, Texas. There has also been rumors that serial killer Henry Lee Lucas could possibly be a suspect in this case. But they did do some investigation into the bitemark on Cherry's shoulder and it is inconsistent with Henry Lee Lucas's dentistry, and law enforcement really doesn't know what direction to go in, but they do think that Cherry could have potentially been murdered by a serial killer. I can kind of see that whoever did this kind of knew what they were doing, I think. So it's going to be really interesting to see if any more ends up coming out in regards to who killed Cherry. In in twenty seventeen, there was a theory that arose that Sherry had been killed by the same person that was known to have murdered three other females in nineteen eighty who were all dumped alongside I forty five. All of them had been strangled and some had been sexually assaulted in a similar manner. To Sherry, and all four of the victims were described by investigators as being high risk runaways, people that are very susceptible to creeps preying on them and their vulnerability. So I do feel like all of these are really big possibilities. The fact that she could have been killed by a serial killer, I feel like are pretty high. I don't think this was a one off kind of thing where this person decided that he was just going to kill this random girl that he saw walking along forty five. I just don't see that. Whoever did this is obviously a horrible human needs to be off the streets, and Cherry deserves justice. She was killed in nineteen eighty That is a long time ago when you think about it, and the fact that she went unidentified for so many years is truly wild and insane, and it really just brings up the fact that this is why it's so important to have records of people when they are missing and keep their stories out there. Because Cherry's remains were found pretty shortly after she had run away from the state of Missouri, and had it been widely known that there was a fourteen year old girl with this description miss out of Missouri, they would have been able to immediately figure out who this person was and try to figure out what happened, retrace her steps, and try to figure out who potentially could have done this. But now they are forty one years in now actually it's forty four years in the future, trying to figure out who potentially could have done this crime. And this person has had forty four years to get away with it because nobody knew who this girl was. It is sad, it's unfortunate. Major props to the Walker County Sheriff's office for seeing this through and figuring out who this girl was because it easily could have faded into oblivion and they did not let that happen. And that is an amazing feat and I think that's great. And I think if anyone is going to solve who did this to Sherry, it's going to be them. So we are just going to say our prayers and hope that they are able to figure out who did this to shary Ann and get them off of the streets because I guarantee you they've done it before and they've done it since. So that is the story of our Walker County. Jane Doe, who now has her name back Sharyann Jarvis aka Tati, and also researching this case and going through Sherry's story, learning about also the murder of Deborah Jackson, who was the other woman who was murdered that I briefly talked about. She was a Jane Doe for forty years before they figured out who she was, So I think I'm also going to be doing her story at some point in time, because her story deserves to be told. And again, it's such an interesting dynamic to cover these Jane does for so long and then we find out who they are, and then you try to figure out who could have potentially hurt them, who murdered them. So I'm going to be doing probably a story on Deborah in the next few coming weeks, so be on the lookout for that one. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. I'm going to be sharing some photos of Sherry, the facial reconstruction pictures that were released, and I'm also gonna release a map of the path that Sherry kind of took because she was headed towards this prison to allegedly visit a friend of hers. So all of that is in pretty close proximity to where she was found, so I'm going to share that as well. So thank you guys so much for listening. As always, I appreciate you and I hope you guys have a fantastic week ahead and I will see you Friday for a new episode. Bye.