The Short Family

Warning, this episode contains graphic crime scene detail and maybe sensitive for some listeners. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to talk right now in true crime. It's been a crazy week. There is a lot going on. So first thing I want to talk about not anything I've probably ever talked about on this podcast. For those that aren't familiar with the case against Pam Hop, they're okay. This is a long story. So in twenty eleven, Pam murdered allegedly her friend named Betsy Faria and got away with it for a long time until twenty nineteen. So Betsy's husband, Russ Frea, ended up going to prison and serving quite a few years for them of Betsy, when all along it was Betsy's crazy ass friend, Pam Hop who ended up killing her for money, and it was just a whole thing. And then in twenty nineteen, she ended up murdering someone else because she's a horrible human and basically tried to make it look like a plot that Russ was setting her up, and it was a whole thing. But she got arrested for that, and then she was arrested for the murder of Betsy and charge and they've decided to refile charges against her, and it all has to do with the case being moved to a different area in Saint Louis. They had originally planned on holding it further away, but they've decided to refile in order to petition for a closer venue and they're hoping that the move will ease the financial and travel burden on Betsy's family. So it is a lot. This is an ever evolving case. Last year at Crime con Russ, Betsy's husband and his lawyer were there and it's amazing their story, their dynamic, the way that they were able to essentially put this horrible human, Pam behind bars. There was an NBC movie, or I guess it was more of a show about Pam called The Thing About Pam. There's a whole podcast narrated by my best friend in life, Keith Morrison. It's also called The Thing About Pam. This story has so many wild twists and turns. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend you watch or listen to the podcast. Such a crazy story and another instance of somebody being wrongfully accused and convicted of murder and spending time behind bars when the person who did it was out and about act in a fool committing other crimes and essentially murdering another person that did not do anything wrong. So that's the thing about Pam. I will keep you updated on her because I cannot wait for the day that she has to face consequences for her horrific, horrific actions. Okay, moving on to Richard Allen, the Delphi alleged accused murderer of Abby and Libby. This whole thing has turned into such a shit show. I can't even tell you so last time I updated you, guys, his defense attorneys, like the people representing him had quit, and then they came back and said, no, we didn't like, we didn't quit. It's so much confusion. And then one of the attorneys offered to represent him pro bono, and the judge denied the request for him to represent a pro bono. It is so much. But eventually, his new trial date has been set for October fifteenth, of twenty twenty four, and they're expecting it to run about sixteen or so days the trial. It's going to be such an interesting trial. I feel like there's going to be so much more that's going to happen in the next year, because if this has been like the hot take right lately, there's been so much going on in this case and with the lawyers, and there was the photo League, and it has been NonStop drama surrounding this case. So I don't want anyone to lose sight of the fact that this man is accused of brutally murdering two young girls, and he lived his life for a long time before he was arrested, and I feel like if they arrested him, they have a good ass reason to have arrested him, and they have to have some type of evidence. They're not releasing everything right now, and that is understandable because they need to protect the integrity of the case. But I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that this man, if he really did what he is being accused of, is not a good person. And hopefully the case will play out and we get to see evidence and if he's guilty, then he has found guilty. That is all we can hope for. At the end of the day. In Idaho Case News, they have decided to return to the house, the house in Moscow where the murders happened now. I don't know if you guys remember initially the prosecutors had approved of the house being torn down and demolished. Well, luckily that didn't happen, because they're now returning to the house and they're going to be constructing visual and audio exhibits and a physical model of the home and they're going to basically take off all the plywood from the doors of the windows and that's going to be removed and they're going to get to go back in. So thank god that they did not tear this house down. I think my opinion, the trial is going to be in twenty twenty four now. Unfortunately, because freaking Cober is the worst human anyways, they need to keep that house up because if they want jurors to walk through the house, that's going to be a big part of the physical like being able to see it, and if you're a tactile person and a visual person, it's going to be I think really important, just like when they brought the jurors out to the murdav property so they could see like how Mozelle was laid out and the area that Maggie and Paul were in. It's so important to have those areas intact and be able to access them. So I'm not saying I'm against the house being demolished. I just think it needs to wait until after the trial, just because Caitlin Armstrong update For those that don't remember, she is the woman who is accused of murdering her ex boyfriend current boyfriend's friend and like a love triangle gone wrong, it wasn't even a love triangle gone wrong. She's just batshit crazy. And she's also the one that escaped a few weeks ago while she was going to a doctor's appointment. She tried to run away from cops, ran into a therapy clinic, and she is just not a good human. So her trial has officially begun with jury selection. They have selected eight women and six men, and they are going to let her escape attempt come in. This woman is the worst, Like, she did horrible things and then she went and hit out and got bo talx and changed her appearance to tried to disguise herself and luckily she was caught brought back to the United States, and now they are picking her jury. So it's about to get real. Her trial is about to start. I keep you guys updated on that, Like word on news, he has officially filed in the South Carolina Court a motion to seek a new trial. I know I have kept you guys updated on all of that thing, with the mishaps of the first trial and the county clerk allegedly persuading the jury one way or the other, it's a whole thing. But he has officially asked for a new trial. He, in my opinion, will probably get a new trial, and it's going to be even more wild than the first one. I don't know. That first trial was insane to me, like I loved every second of it. Do not get me wrong, but it was a total twist and turn, crazy, crazy story. The whole story from start to finish has been crazy, and this new allegations of jury tampering has just been the cherry on top of a crazy story. Also, I know this isn't a pop culture podcast, but there is a true crime connection. Matthew Perry passed away, and first of all, as a Friends fan, I'm devastated. He was my fave of the Friends cast, besides Monica. Chandler and Monica were like the best. I love them. I always appreciated Matthew Perry for his comedic humor. I just started reading his book, or I started listening to his book on audiobook. It is really good. He talks a lot about his struggle with addiction and how he thought acting was going to fix everything and being famous would fix everything and it didn't, and just his battle to heal himself and he really did that in the last many years of his life. He was really fighting to get better, be better and help others. That was the best thing that he did in my opinion. Like friends was great, That part of his life was amazing. However, like him being there to help other people who were struggling with drug and alcohol addiction ten out of ten that is what his purpose was in life. And the True Crime connection. He is actually Keith Morrison's stepson, which I have known about for forever. But the amount of people that have messaged me this past week to tell me that did you know that Matthew Perry was Keith Morrison's step son, and me having to tell them yes, I've known for like two decades. But it's sad. It's unfortunate. The night that he was or the day that he was found. That night Keith was there with his wife who is Matthew's mom and Matthew's father, and it was just so sad. Like obviously media is all over things like that, and to be filming something in someone's probably like worst day of their life when they've lost their son and even step son like Keith has been married to Matthew's mom since nineteen eighty, nineteen eighty or nineteen eighty one, so it's a long time that he's been in his life. It's got to be so tragic. So it is unfortunate, and I just hope that he is at peace because he really struggled in life, but in the last few years he really did get it together and he was doing such good things with his sobriety. All right, So we're going to go ahead and call that good for this week's Right Now in True Crime or this episode's Right Now in True Crime. Anything I missed or need to update on, I will do so on Monday's episode. But with all of that being said, we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode already jumping into a new episode today. Today we are going to be talking about the still unsolved murders of the Short family. Michael Wayne Short, Mary Frantz Short, and their daughter, Jennifer Renee Short, who were all killed in Virginia in two thousand and two. So we're going to do a little backstory first on the family, how they came to be and what led up to them losing their lives in two thousand and two. So Michael Wayne Short was born in nineteen fifty two, he was married, he had three sons, and unfortunately his marriage did fall apart, so he was divorced, but still a very present father and took good care of his sons. He later would meet and marry a woman named Mary Francis Hall. She was born in nineteen sixty six in Virginia, so they had about a fourteen year age gap between the two of them, but nevertheless they married, they fell in love, and they ended up having one child who was a little girl, and they named her Jennifer Renee and she was born in nineteen nine tinety three. So unfortunately, when tragedy struck in two thousand and two, she was set to begin her fourth grade year at her local elementary school. And she was very close to her parents and was just your average little girl that enjoyed playing outside and being around her friends and being around her family. So they lived in Oak Level, Virginia, which was about an hour south of Rowandoke, Virginia. A smaller little town, close knit and everybody just kind of did their own thing, kind of kept to themselves. And the house itself was located just off of Route to twenty, and there was a lot that was easily accessible from where this house was since it was right off of Route two twenty. There was a handful of hotels, motels, gas stations, and the address, because you know I'm a visual person, was ten eight too oh Virginia Avenue. Like I said, that was in Oak Level, Virginia. So the family was close. The short family was very close. They did keep to themselves, but they were always very nice and welcoming to any new neighbors and others in the neighborhood. And they all seemed to have a really good relationship with Michael's three grown sons. They were often seen there visiting and they all seemed to get along and have a really good relationship. There didn't seem to be any animosity between Michael and his children for the divorce and then remarrying and having another daughter, so everybody seemed to really get along. So Michael and Mary had both worked for the same company, which was called MS Mobile Homemovers, and that was actually Michael's company, and the MS stands for Michael Short, and this company helped move mobile homes from one point to another, but it had started to struggle in the year two thousand and Now in two thousand and two, the Short family had decided that they were going to go ahead and put their home on the market and they were going to maybe be looking at some other options as far as the company goes, and they were going to temporarily move into a mobile home while they were trying to figure out the best move for their family. And there had also been people that had said that Michael had talked about moving his family to South Carolina and completely getting out of Virginia, but this never was able to happen because of the tragedy that's struck in August of two thousand and two. So August fourteenth, two thousand and two, in the evening, Michael was at his house and he had one of his employees there who was named Chris, and they were both working on Michael's car. Chris was helping him, and Chris left sometime after sunset and had returned to the motel down the street that he had been staying at, and then he had planned on coming back the next morning to help Michael do something as far as the business goes, moving a mobile home from one point to another, So he was going to be back over there at nine am the next morning so they could go do that. So shortly after Chris left, Michael, Mary and Jennifer went to the Burger King drive through, and this is the last place that they were all seen together. This was around eleven PM, and they are believed to have been back at the house and have gone to sleep somewhere after midnight. But between the hours of midnight and nine am, the happenings of what happened at that house are still really blurry, and we're still unsure to this day exactly what happened between those hours. So Chris returned at nine am the next morning, and when he got there, he noticed that the garage door was open, and he thought Michael was probably inside. He was either in there watching TV, or he was working on his car, or he was just out there pitdling around in the garage. So Michael had set up like a man cave for himself in the garage. He apparently was a big snorre and Mary didn't like that, so they often would sleep separately. Mary would stay in the room in the house, and then Michael kind of would just often fall asleep on the couch in the garage watching TV. That was very common for him, not at all out of the ordinary. So Chris walked in and he saw that Michael was on the couch and assumed he had just fallen asleep watching TV. But he got closer to Michael and realized that he was no longer alive and that something terrible had obviously happened. So right away Chris called the cops, and the Henry County Sheriff's Office came out to the scene, and they found the body of fifty year old Michael Short in the garage that was attached to the house, and they of course went inside the house to see if there was anyone inside to see what was going on, and they announced that they had found another body inside of the home, which was that of Mary, who was thirty six years old at the time, but they had no sign anywhere of Jennifer Short. Who was their daughter. Immediately they knew that something major was going on. Both of the parents were dead, and then nine year old Jennifer was missing. So immediately they began to reach out to all of the Shortz family and friends, and a lot of the family lived in the immediate area, and none of them knew anything that possibly could have happened where Jennifer could be, and it was really really scary. Of course, they did everything they could to try to track down Jennifer, and within the first couple of hours they had no luck, and they issued an Amber alert which came in that afternoon August fifteenth of two thousand and two. And because police really couldn't put a timeline on what had happened and when it had happened, obviously between the hours of midnight and nine am the next morning, they expanded this Amber alert all throughout the state of Virginia into Washington, d C. And they really were trying to get the word out that Jennifer was out there and she was missing, and whoever had her was dangerous. So over the next few days there was so many searches that happened. There were dozens of volunteers and police units that volunteered to come out to try and assist with the search. They brought out ATVs, there was helicopters and canine units and everyone out there was on the search trying to find Jennifer. And unfortunately, none of these efforts were able to recover any trace of Jennifer and she remained missing. But we also had an extremely dangerous person out there who had taken the lives of Michael and Mary, So investigating into what possibly could have happened to them might lead the police to being able to find Jennifer and hopefully finding her safe. So, like I said earlier, Michael's body was found outside in the Famili's attached enclosed garage he was lying on the couch, and the body of Mary was found lying inside of the couple's bed inside of the house. And both deaths had been pretty quick, and they both appear to have been completely unaware as to what happened, because there was no signs of a struggle, and that indicated that both Mary and Michael they believed that they had been killed in their sleep, and they were killed using a small caliber weapon and they were able to piece it together, like I said, between midnight and nine am, and they had each been shot once in the head, which they would call an execution style death, and because they used a twenty two caliber weapon likely helped avoid the other person waking up while the first shooting was being conducted, because it usually could be muffled into just being kind of like a soft thud type sound, So if Michael had been killed first, it likely wouldn't have alerted Mary and vice versa. So initially, when the police searched the home, they were surprised that when they went into Jennifer's bedroom that it was empty and there was no sign of Jennifer being in there. And they did note, however, that Jennifer's pillow was found on the floor and that her bed had been moved about two inches from its usual position in the bedroom, like maybe a scuffle had occurred. Another thing that investigators found was that the phone lines to the home had been cut, which to them indicated that the killings of Michael and Mary and the abduction of Jennifer had been a premeditated act. Typically, if you're going to do something like this, you want to stop whoever's in the home from calling nine one one, and that would be the perfect way to do it, and that would be a sign of premeditation for sure, and not something that was just random where someone came in off the highway and decided, I'm going to go kill two people and then kidnap their daughter. It just didn't seem to be lining up with the way that things had been laid out at the crime scene. So for about two weeks after the crime was committed, police kept the home closed off to everyone while they were carefully scanning every inch of the property, and they pulled an untold amount of DNA evidence from the home, but they never specified what kind or how much. They did say that they had approximately pulled sixty six items from home as evidence, and I'm going to read those. I'm not going to read all of them, but they had two twenty two shell casings that were found near the bodies. One was next to Mary's body and one was next to Michael's, a twelve gage Winchester shotgun, a box of twelve gage shotgun shelves, a twenty two caliber rifle, a partial box of twenty two caliber AMMO. Approximately six hundred dollars in cash was left on the kitchen counter, business checkbook, a computer, desk and unidentified documents that were contained in a briefcase. I assumed those probably were documents in regards to the business that Michael and Mary had, And there was a reported note from the kitchen table, and that contents of that note remained a mystery. There was even a Latin impression of a message that was written on a window in the garage which read I'm glad to see And they didn't really know if this message was related to the crime or not, and it could have been a partial message written by one of the Shorts family members, but they weren't really sure if that had anything to do with it or not. So authorities continued to conduct searches in the area. They searched a small pond that was near the Short home and this was really the only sizeable body of water that was in the area, and they were able to find nothing. They also searched a Circle Ce motel which was near the Short family home and it had been known to attract drug addicts and transience and the motel owner said that she was interviewed and she could just tell that they wanted to check everything out just to kind of cross it off of the list and in the early parts of the investigation, police did say that they were looking for a specific vehicle that was seen in the area, and that vehicle was a red or dark colored van or truck or pickup, and sometime prior to nine am it was seen in the area, but they really weren't really sure if it was something where it was an involved vehicle or if it was just somebody that was passing through kind of wrong place, wrong time kind of situation. So initially, when everything was going down, the police office's theorized that maybe Jennifer had been able to escape when this person came into her home and killed her parents, and that maybe she had just run off and was lost and didn't have any way of getting in touch with anybody to get help. But pretty shortly after everything happened and there was no sign or any people that had seen Jennifer or any word about anything to do with Jennifer, they quickly thought that it wasn't just a missing child, that Jennifer had potentially been abducted, and they did bring out bloodhounds to try and track her scent, but they were only ever able to pick up her scent in areas that police knew that she had previously been, such as the family's home, or there was a convenience store that was next door, and they really weren't able to develop anything at all that was worthwhile, So initially there weren't really very many suspects that had emerged in the beginning days of the investigation. The only main person that they knew that they could question was Chris, who was the one who essentially discovered Michael's body, and he was fully cooperating with the investigation and didn't have anything to hide. He said that he was with the Shorts the night before their murder, working with Michael on a car in the family's garage, and he had told the police that when he left the evening of the fourteenth, the family was still alive and well, and that Jennifer at that point had already gone to bed, and the police did extensively question him and he ended up being cleared as a suspect. So since the Short family had their home on the market and it had recently been listed for sale, they decided to go through and see if it could have been anybody who had potentially toured the home to see if whether or not they could be involved, and there really were no leads there, but they did think that whoever did this potentially could have used the open house and the house being for sale as a way to get into the home to kind of know the Holmes layout and where different people primarily stayed at night, so they could kind of plan their attack. That is a potential thing that unfortunately, sickos and weirdos do. About a week after the murders, they were able to lay Michael and Mary to rest on August twenty third of two thousand and two, and it was a public funeral, and the authorities were kind of using this to their advantage to try to set up different angles with different cameras to see if they could catch anybody at the funeral who was acting suspicious or any like red flags that would pop out. But again, nothing stood out to them and nothing led to anything more as far as potential suspects go. So for whatever reason, just a week later, on September fourth, authorities decided they were going to exhume the body of Michael for additional testing. And they said that for whatever reason, they did not initially get hair samples from Michael, so that was the primary focus behind the exhumation was to take these hair samples. So early on in the investigation, they discovered that Mary at one point had a stalker, which was in the early nineties. She had worked at a place called the Pluma Ink Plant, which is now defunct. They had closed back in nineteen ninety nine, so she was a seamstress there and there had been multiple occasions where a man had come looking for her and he ended up being escorted off of the property. And there was one time in nineteen ninety two when he physically entered the plant and he had to be asked to leave by the plant manager, and he described the man as leaving in a white pickup truck. And authority said that they don't really know if it was a stalker per se, just that they know that there was someone at one time or another who was angry with her, and they don't know who it was or what it was about. But this person was escorted out by two people that worked at the plant, and neither one of them knew him. So they received this information pretty early on. But they could find no record of Mary ever filing a restraining order or any other kind of protective order. And following the incident in nineteen ninety two involving this mystery man getting inside and being asked to leave by the plant manager. Mary had asked the plant manager not to call the cops and not to report anything. So this had to have been somebody that Mary knew, I think pretty well, or knew of this person, had some type of connection to him, and potentially was afraid of him to not want to have to contact the police. The Shorts family did every everything they could to try to keep their case at the forefront of everything. And Keith Jennifer still out there, still a missing child, and that she potentially could have been abducted. They did everything they could to keep all of this out there, and the story had gone pretty nationwide and there were a lot of different news entities reporting on it. But unfortunately, in September of two thousand and two, there was a man living about an hour south of the crime scene. He made a weird discovery in his front yard. A dog that belonged to this man had hair in his mouth and the owner thought that it was a wig and he just threw it into the trash when this dog came up with his hair, And then two days later the dog came back on September twenty fifth with what appeared to be a turtle shell, and quickly once he saw what the dog had, he realized that it was a skull and not a turtleshell at all. So he of course called the cops, believing that he found some type of human remains, and he directed them to the skull that were discovered by the dogs, and as well as the hair because he still had it in the trash from a few days earlier. And they did a search in that area that day and they were able to locate the remains, which did belong to a child, and they had been dumped near a pond along a rural road. And in addition to the skull and the hair, they also found teeth and bone fragments near a bridge, and they also found part of a rib cage, but they did not find the whole skeleton. They only found parts and pieces of it. Now, like I said, these remains were found a little ways away from the Short family home about thirty five miles north. And initially you hear about a body being found, everyone thought it has to be Jennifer, but police originally denied that the remains were a match for Jennifer, even though it seemed evident that they probably were Jennifer because this skull had a small caliber gunshot wound to the head, so that was people pretty much thinking this has to be related because that is the same way that Michael and Mary were killed. Of course, the family remained hopeful that this was not Jennifer, and they kept keeping the word out about Jennifer's abduction, disappearance, her being missing. But unfortunately, October fourth of two thousand and two, authorities revealed that the remains had been positively identified as Jennifer Short and they did determine the cause of death to be gunshot wound to the head. They weren't able to well if any other factors like sexual assault were present because of the state of decomposition that had already taken place by the time that they found her remains. Everyone thought it was so weird that in a murder of three people that two were killed at the house and one was taken away from the house and killed some time between when they found her and when she was initially abducted in August. It really just doesn't make sense, especially if there was no motive for there wasn't robbery, there was no signs of a struggle. It's just all such an odd all the circumstances of this story are just so odd. So the media continued to speculate about the different possible theories for weeks after Jennifer's abduction. Why did they abduct her and kill the parents? This doesn't make any sense, But investigators did start to zero in on a suspect, and that was sixty six year old Garrison Storm Bowman. He was a carpenter and an avid outdoorsman, and he became an integral part of the story just weeks after Jennifer's skeletal remains were discovered, and initially he was named a material witness by the authorities, but he quickly became investigator's main suspect. So they had alleged that Garrison Bowman had fled to Canada the day after the murders, and this was weeks before Jennifer's body would even be found. Police also received a call from Garrison's landlord, who said that two days before the murders happened, he had mentioned paying a man in Virginia to move his mobile home and that if he didn't follow through, or return his money, he would have to kill him in quotes, and that seemed to be a pretty clear indication that he harbored ill will towards somebody in a mobile home moving industry aka Michael Short. And the landlord also claimed that on August fifteenth, which was the day that the Shorts were murdered, he saw Garrison with a pistol, and the next day Garrison was gone and his trailer was nowhere to be found. But they later discovered his trailer approximately one mile from the area that Jennifer's body was found, which it's just too coincidental in my opinion. Police did get a search work and they were able to search a piece of the property that belonged to Garrison, and they discovered that he had a map in his possession that had a specific route to the home of Michael and Mary Short mapped out on it. And there are some publications out there that they say that there was an ex marked on the exact location of the Shorts home. There was a friend of Garrison's who tried to explain his friend's actions, say that he had been planning this trip to Canada for a long time and it just so happened that he left the day after the murders, and he also had claimed that the trailer had not been abandoned and that he had essentially offered to keep it on his property until a specific buyer could come get it, and it just so happened to be in the same area that Jennifer's body was found. There were other friends of Garrisons that claimed that he was an avid alcoholic. He started drinking beer at seven o'clock in the morning and he didn't stop until he fell asleep, and they said that because of this, he physically couldn't have carried out the crime. And there were people that vouched for his whereabouts on August fourteenth and claimed that he was always too drunk to have been able to commit any kind of violent crime. So at this point that all this stuff is coming out, Garrison had gone off to Canada and he was essentially living off of the grid, and police went and te trying to get in touch with him, and they realize that he had already been detained by Canadian authorities because he was arrested for drunk driving, and he also had violated some immigration laws. He lied about prior criminal history, and he had had multiple past convictions for drinking and driving, and they caught him and then quickly deported him back to the US, which would lead him back to being questioned by the Virginia police officers about the deaths of Mary and Michael Short and Jennifer as well. There was a hearing with Garrison Bowman on November twelfth, and he appeared in front of a grand jury. However, there was no indictment that was handed down because they said that there was not enough evidence to even consider charging him with the involvement of the Short family murders. He was then later in the month convicted of his drunking driving effect from Canada and was sentenced to seven days in jail. Even though this was his second time driving under the influence and being caught since nineteen ninety seven, he only got seven days in jail. So there were no charges filed against Garrison Bowman in the murders of Michael and Mary and Jennifer, and he would continue to deny involvement in the crime when police would ask him about it, When the public would ask him about it, he would continue to deny being involved and he said this will hang over me for the rest of my life unless they find the person who did it. This will live with me until the day I die or until it's solved. Always in some people's mind, I'll be the guy that got away with it. So that kind of hung over his head for a very long time, and it really wasn't until two thousand and five when the spotlight began to move away from him. The reason for this is initially there were two men, Timothy Fenn and Samson and Jerry Riley Mills, who had lied to investigators and said that they saw Garrison leaving the Short Family home carrying a little girl on the night that the murders took place, and they would later come forward and say that these were false statements, and that was what initially led investigators to even look into Garrison and try to figure out what if he could potentially be involved, because these two people decided to lie about something, and unfortunately, their motive for doing this was because they were trying to get the reward money that they were offering for any information leading to the arrest of people that were involved in the Short Family murders. And unfortunately, in situations like this, somebody comes forward, they lie, They implicate someone else in order to get a reward, or just for the hell of it, because they have no soul. It really puts a damper on the investigation because you're so focused on this one person. It has to be Garrison. We're going to solely focus on him. And it's entirely possible this guy had nothing to do with it. It doesn't sound like he did have anything to do with it, and he had that hanging over his head initially, and everything that he did just kind of coincided with the murders. It didn't at all mean that he was involved. But people saying we saw him leaving the house with her, automatically, investigator's ears perk up and they think, oh my gosh, this is it, this is the smoking gun, when it was all a lie. And in two thousand and seven, the police finally admitted that Garrison Bowman was no longer their primary suspect and that he had nothing to do with the murders, and Garrison passed away in December of twenty fourteen. A truly innocent person who maybe said some things that made him look bad, and he did some things that made him look bad, but ultimately, just because you do shitty things, and you make shitty choices doesn't make you a killer. And the people that implicated him on that really did a huge disservice to this case. In two thousand and three, after they had laid the remains that they had of Jennifer to rest, they ended up exhuming them again, another exhumation in this case, and they didn't really say why they were exhuming the remains, just that they wanted to check for some additional evidence. There had been a lot of rumors in town that Jennifer was not Michael's biological daughter and that whoever took her was really the biological father of Jennifer, and none of that came to be true. There was all these rumors and speculation about that's why they were doing the exhumations and trying to prove identity and DNA and protect But at the end of the day, Michael was Jennifer's dad and that was that. So later that year, in December of two thousand and three, authorities traveled to an airport in British Columbia, Canada in pursuit of new clues, and there was this mystery woman who might be able to shed some light on the case. There was a person of interest that allegedly met with this mystery woman, and they said that essentially there was a meet that took place at the airfield between this woman and a person of interest in the investigation. That person may have had contact with this woman in or around that area during the time of the investigation. We don't really know much about this mystery woman other than she was slim, white woman in her late forties or early fifties with reddish blonde hair, aka like half of the world at this point. So this case went cold for many years. The family expressed some dissatisfaction with the investigation, and they really didn't have a ton to go on. It wasn't until two thousand and nine that the FBI released some sketches to the public, and one of them was a composite sketch of a potential suspect, which was a man that was seen near the Short family home around the time of the murders, and he was described as being in his forties with a weathered complexion, and the sketches revealed not only what he looked like at the time of the murders in two thousand and two, but what he might look like. Seven years later, in two thousand and nine, they also released a sketch of a white, single calved flatbed body truck with wooden rails, which the FBI had theorized had been made between nineteen ninety eight and two thousand and two, which would have made it a newer model at the time of the murders. And they think that this was a truck that was seen near the Short family home in the early morning hours of August fifteenth to two thousand and two. There was a lot of people who were asking, why did you wait this long to release this information, and they basically just said, there's a specific reason why we released it at this point in time, and I can't go into detail why those sketches were released at that point in time. So interesting. Seven years later, here's these sketches, here's the picture of the person that we think might be involved, the vehicle that they may be driving. Seven years later, what so the case remains cold from there. And in twenty fifteen, they announced that they're finally going to start shifting focus from Michael and Mary to Jennifer and they have spent the last thirteen years investigating everything to do with Michael everything to do with Mary, They're coming up cold, so they decide that they're going to shift the focus to Jennifer, thinking that maybe she was the obvious motivation behind this crime, and she was the only one who was abducted, so maybe she was the target of the killer and that's why she was taken and the other two were killed and basically Mary and Michael were just collateral damage. But this also doesn't make a whole lot of sense because Jennifer was rarely without her parents. She was very close with them. She didn't really go places by herself. So who would have had the opportunity to meet Jennifer one on one to know, Okay, I'm gonna kill her parents and kidnap her. After the short family was killed, their home was auctioned off December of two thousand and two, and it was pretty much mostly vacant over the years, but in twenty nineteen it was burned down and they don't really know the cause of the fire, if it was arsin, if it was intentional, intentional is oursin. Sorry. There are some people that think the fire is related to some of the other fires that were started in the area which were related to a local arsonist. There's other people who suspect that whoever did this did this an attempt to cover up any evidence that could have been left behind. However, that's a really long time from two thousand and two to twenty nineteen to think that you're going to come back in twenty nineteen and quote unquote finish the job and get rid of anything that might be left behind. Since two thousand and two, I don't know. I guess it's potential that there could be evidence there, especially with the advancing genealogy and DNA stuff. I guess it's possible. So we are at twenty one years since this horrible crime occurred, and it is still an open and active case. Investigators continue to work sporadically on the case, and there is a eighty thousand dollars reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible. If you do have any information, you conford it to the Henry County Sheriff's Office. And it's unfortunate that these three people lost their lives in a horrific way. Whoever did this obviously planned it out, They had it figured out what they were going to do. We're going to cut the phone lines, we're going to kill mom, we're going to kill dad, we're going to take the daughter. And then the fact that she was found several weeks later. It's just so odd. The whole story is so odd. I feel like there's more to this story than we know. I think there is a likelihood that law enforcement knows a lot more than has been released to the public, because as far as the story goes, there has been a lot that has been released to the public. So I feel like there's a lot of information out there there, but still nothing leading to an arrest of the person or persons who did this. So very interested to see what you guys think about this one. I feel like it's kind of reminiscent of some of the other stories I've covered, some of the other cases I've covered, but also it has its own unique twists and turn So thank you guys so much for listening this one. It was a little bit of a longer one. I didn't anticipate it being almost forty minutes long, but it is a long story to tell, and I wanted to be sure that I told it in the correct way, in the correct order. So let me know what you guys think about this one, and I will see you guys later for a new episode. Bye.