The Unsolved homicide of Mickey Bryan and the wrongful conviction of Joe Bryan: Part 1

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail and may be sensitive for some listeners. Hey guys, it's Kylie from Primetime Crime and I am bringing you a new series, this summer Summer Series twenty twenty four. It is going to officially start on Friday, May third. We are going to be covering the murder for hire and killing of law professor and father of two Dan Markel in twenty sixteen. The story is very complex, very convoluted. There are a lot of moving pieces, but we are going to break it all down and talk about some of the amazing police work that went in to still currently getting justice for Dan Markel. This case is one that spans over many, many years, from twenty sixteen to present day twenty twenty four. There are still new developments happening in this case, and we are going to unpack it all together. I hope you will join me New Summer Series twenty twenty four, episodes dropping every Friday until we get through the entirety of this case. I hope to see you guys there. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now and 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. Thank you so much for joining. We are going to jump into right now and True Crime. I have a little bit to talk about since I didn't talk about any right now in True Crime for a Monday's episode because I was not in the headspace to really talk about it. I was feeling very emotionally run down, and once I kind of go through a little right now on True Crime, it's probably gonna make sense. Why So, we are talking Brian Coburger, the suspect in the killing of the Idaho four in Moscow, and he was due to forward and say what his alibi was. So his alibi was that he would go on nighttime drives and he would go looking at the stars. So that is what he was doing that night, and that he wasn't anywhere near the house where the four were killed, and that the evidence, the cell phone evidence, is going to show that. But the DNA evidence and all that was left behind the knife sheath that they were able to tie back to him probably isn't going to show that. It's probably going to show that he was there in the house. Committing that murder on that night and not looking at the stars. And Kaylee's family came forward with the statement and it says we have been waiting on this information for months and it has finally arrived. It is so hard not knowing anything about the case, and you find you have to cling to dates, motions, and hearings in order to figure out anything. A big part of this has been waiting on the alibi information. Now that it's here, we feel even more confident in the prosecution of the defendant. The defense claims is The defense's claim is that the defendant was driving late at night, hiking, running, and stargazing. We are not sure why it's taken over a year for this to come out, as those don't seem to be very complicated activities. We believe that if this alibi had any weight, it would have been submitted months ago. It also isn't direct conflict with the probable cause affidavit that states that the defendant's phone was turned off between two forty seven am and four forty eight am. So if the defendant was driving around and there is cell phone information that he was in a different place, it would have either been before or after the time of the murders, hence not really an alibi. We continue to look forward to justice in this case and can now put this part of the proceeding behind us. Thank you for all of the support for our family. So they're one hundred percent right. This isn't an alibi. If he was doing what he said he was doing and the cell phone was turned off, which was original what he said, then there wouldn't be cell phone data saying that we're going to prove that he was in this specific location at these specific times. I'm not saying he wasn't out stargazing, but he was also allegedly out committing a quadruple homicide that evening. But it's all going to come out in trial and I cannot wait for this trial to go down. Chad Day Bill trial updates. There has been a lot going on in the trial. They have heard from Colby Ryan, who is Lorie Vallo's son. He's testifying as to what he knew in regards to the relationship that Chad had with his mother, and of course testifying on behalf of his brother and sister, Tylie and JJ. Really really interesting stuff. We've also heard from Melanie Gibb and that whole thing is just insane and wild. I just am overwhelmed by it. Yesterday we also heard the nine one one call that came in on the day that Tammy was found dead from Garth and then Chad kind of took over for the call. Garth was very stoic and he wasn't emotional at all. Chad, shockingly was a little bit more emotional than I would have thought he was. But I think Chad's a really good actor. And I also think there is a bit of like, oh shit, what have I done? When you conspire to kill somebody and then you actually kill them, And I think there is a little bit of like shock and awe in just like what have I done? Kind of thing, not remorse, but just shock. So we could also be seeing and hearing him being upset in those regards, but it looks like, you know, he's a morning husband who just tragically lost his wife suddenly. But it's all really interesting, pretty Liza and Alibis is doing two episodes a day updates keeping us informed and in the loop on everything that's going on in the trial. Highly recommend that, and I also highly recommend nadieton his Nighttime Lives, he kind of goes through everything. Again, highly recommend. I always watch Nate's Nighttime Lives on Facebook, and then I always will listen to Gigi's podcasts two times a day. And it's been really good because as much as I want to sit and watch every bit of happenings in this trial, it just isn't feasible at this point. So having them to give me updates on what's going on has been a game changer, all right, switching gears. I don't have a lot more to talk about, but if you follow me on social media, you have seen I've been posting for over a year about Kalan A Turner who went missing not too far from where I'm from, and after four hundred and seven days, they located remains. Last Friday, Texas Ecosearch located remains and they as of today, have been positively identified as Kalan A. Turner. I have a lot of thoughts. I'm not sharing all of my thoughts at the current moment, and it's going to be a process. But all I really need to say right now is if you haven't listened to the episode that I did with Rosa Calhoun, who is Kay's mom. I highly suggest you go listen to it because Kay was a normal, educated, smart, giving, helpful, independent, amazing young woman. And she had so so many accolades under her belt and did so much for others and won all of these scholarships. She was the definition of what you would want your child to turn into. That is who kay Alana was. I didn't know Kay personally, but I feel like I have gotten to know her over the last year just through her family. Her family posted twice a day on her updates for Kaylana Turner Facebook and Instagram pages, and I just feel like I have really gotten to know this girl. Knowing her family, I know that she is everything that I have been told she is and more. Now, if you go and you listen to the episode, you will learn that kay Alanna worked in New York City in the midst of a pandemic. She worked in a hotel and it was one of the very few hotels in New York City that was open in the pandemic. And she went to work every day, rode the subway. It was a ghost town. Everything was closed, everyone was closed inside, everything was shut down. And Kay went to work every single day and she witnessed a lot of not so great things in getting to and from work every day. She was traumatized from everything that happened during the pandemic, and once she returned home to her family, she was very scared and would wear a mask in the house and just everything scared her. She wasn't the normal Kialaana that her family knew, and she had a lot of PTSD from living in the city working in the city during the pandemic. So she got on some meds to help a little with her anxiety. And Kayalaana was a tiny girl, like one hundred and ten pounds, really really tiny, and was put on certain meds and she wasn't really liking the way that they were making her feel. So instead of working with her in a way that you think a doctor that prescribes medicines that can affect your mood and all would work with you, they just decided to up her medicines and up her dosages. So she was taking her medicine and she was having some type of mental distress. She wasn't sleeping, she was just not acting herself. She went to visit a friend and she got confused about like how to get back in the house and she couldn't remember the door code, which was very unlike her. And in the midst of this, she got in her car and she fell asleep in a driveway in a neighborhood that she was not familiar with, in a part of town that she was not familiar with, and from there it snowballed into the cops being called. Kaylana was sleep deprived, over medicated, more likely than not, and she also had a heart issue that she had had from birth, so that was playing a factor, and law enforcement didn't recognize that this woman who was in this vehicle was suffering from not just a mental health crisis but also a medical crisis, and they used a two by four to bust her window. She was spooked because it was early morning hours, these people were chasing after her, She had no sleep under her belt, She's having all of these other things going on, and she ran off and they did not run after her, but they made it real clear that they were going to slap all of these warrants on her and charge her with felonies and all this other stuff because she ran from the cops, and they gave her family hell for four hundred and seven days to try to get help with finding their daughter. They blocked Texas Echo Research from helping initially, they said that you can't have a missing person coinciding with warrants, and they just made it so difficult on the family every single turn. No news media wanted to cover case story because it had to do with law enforcement. And we unfortunately, we live in a society where I think a lot of the times we think that law enforcement can do no wrong. And I am not here to bash law enforcement. That is not what I am here to do. What I am here to do is bring awareness that there are some not so great people in every single profession, in healthcare, in teaching, in law enforcement, in politics, there are people that make mistakes in their jobs. And like I said, it is not my job to basche law enforcement, but it is my job as a law abiding citizen to call out right versus wrong. And I do not believe that the way that Kaylana which was treated that morning was on the up and up, and something like this cannot happen again. Another family should never no family should ever be put through what Kaylana's family has been put through for the past four hundred and seven days. The past year, not knowing what happened to their daughter, being stopped from trying to get her story out there at every turn. And it's just fascinating to me that things like this can happen and there's never any changes or there's never any accountability that is being taken. And I think that's really what we need to look at in a case like this, because the events that happened that morning on March tenth never It never should have transpired that way, and it did transpire that way, and we need to use it as a learning opportunity so stuff like this never happens again. People make mistakes, people are human. Unfortunately, in this case, it costs Kaylana Turner her life. Law enforcement officers have to be better about recognizing mental health crises, recognizing when there's a potential medical event going on, and taking these things seriously. This is someone's life, and this is someone's daughter, sister, girlfriend, friend, and she wasn't treated with the respect that we all deserve to be treated with. Just as human, human to human, we all deserve the same amount of respect. And it's unfortunate that it didn't happen in this situation. And trust me, I could go on a rant about it, and I'm not going to yet. I will at some point, I'm sure. But what I want to leave you guys with is that this could have happened to anybody. It happened to Kalina Turner. She was as average and normal as you and I and never did anything wrong, never even had a parking ticket. She did nothing wrong. The only thing that she did that day was fall asleep in someone's driveway, and again, there's nothing wrong with falling asleep in someone's driveway. So I want you guys to go back and listen to the episode I did with Rosa if you have not, it is really really important. We need to rally behind Rosa and Robbie Calhoun Kaalana Turner's parents, and we can't let this go without a fight. And that is all I am going to say at the time about the situation. But I do encourage you guys to go listen to that episode, and we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode. But if you are the praying kind, please pray for Kayalana Turner's family right now. They really really need the strength from your prayers, so it would be very much appreciated. We are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode. Okay, guys, we are jumping into a brand new case today, one that I shockingly didn't know about. I like to think that I know everything about everything, but there are those random cases that fall in to my lap that I literally know nothing about, and this was one of them. This was sent to me by my friend Amy, and I was very intrigued because A it happened to Texas. B It was a husband and wife. The wife ended up getting killed and the husband ended up going to prison for it. And it's not one of the cut and dry cases where it's obvious that the husband is the guilty party. There is a lot of gray area in this story. So I decided that I wanted to explore a little bit, deep dive a bit, and really get to the bottom of what was going on in Clifton, Texas in nineteen eighty five when this crime occurred, and who's responsible did the right person go to jail? So today we are going to be talking about the murder of a woman named Mickey Bryan in Clifton, Texas. She was forty four years old at the time of her murder and the eventual conviction of her husband, Joe Brian for her murder. Mickey Blue was born May seventeenth of nineteen forty one in Texas, and her and her future husband Joe would meet when they were younger as kids, but they wouldn't start dating until two decades later. In nineteen sixty eight, Joe was in the middle of a divorce. He and his first wife married young and ended up divorcing after four short years of marriage, but he and Mickey started dating and within a year they got married. All of their friends described them as a very happy couple and that they really seemed that they worked together as a team together in their marriage, and nobody had anything bad to say about them apart or together. Once they married, they moved to Clifton and Mickey was a fourth grade teacher and Joe was the principal at Clifton High School. They both had a deep, deep love for children, but they were never able to have any children of their own. But regardless of this, they had a very happy life together. So I am going to take you on a Tuesday, October fifteenth of nineteen eighty five. This was a typical Tuesday. Joe Brian was actually attending a education conference that was in Austin. Now Austin is one hundred and twenty miles away from Clifton, and this day was a pretty average day. However, Mickey didn't show up for work that morning. One of her fellow teacher friends had walked by her classroom and noticed that it was dark and the door was locked, so she thought maybe Mickey was running late. However, that was very out of the ordinary for Mickey because she was a very punctual person. Her friend had the school secretary call the Brian home, but there was no answer. Now, they did know that Joe was out of town at a conference and they weren't really able to get in touch with him. This is nineteen eighty five, pre cell phone era, so they decided to call Mickey's parents to check with them to see if they knew where Mickey might be. And they had just seen her the previous evening and everything seemed fine, but they knew that if she didn't show up for work, something had to be wrong. They made their way to Mickey and Joe's home and at that same time, Mickey's friend from school, who was one of her fellow teachers also got a sense that something was wrong and also headed for Mickey and Joe's home. She ended up being the first to arrive, and when she arrived to the home, she noticed that the garage door was open and Mickey's car was parked inside. She proceeded to ring the doorbell, but there was no answer, and she noticed that inside it was pretty dark. Shortly thereafter, Mickey's parents arrived and they had a spare key to enter the house. Her mom kind of led the way inside of the home and calling out, of course for Mickey with no answer, and her mother made her way to the master bedroom to find blood spattered on the walls and ceiling, and immediately Mickey's father knew something majorly was going on, and Mickey's father and Mickey's friend escorted Mickey's mother out of the room, and Mickey's dad just kind of stood in the doorway and could tell that Mickey was dead on her bed and it was a bloody scene. It was horrible. So Mickey's friend rushed into the kitchen to call police immediately, and she said, it looks like someone had broken in and had shot Mickey. Small towns talk, so words spread very very quickly about the murder, and everybody was shocked. Mickey was a very well liked woman. Nobody had any issues with her. She didn't have any issues with anyone else. It was just so out of the ordinary for this to have happened in Clifton. Everyone immediately too thought about Joe and knew that he was going to be devastated by this horrible tragedy of his wife being taken. So. Like I said, Joe was one hundred and twenty miles away at an education conference in Austin. While he was at the conference, the place that was holding the conference got a phone call and it eventually ended up being passed on to Joe that Mickey had been shot and was killed. Joe was very confused initially by this and was like, are you sure that you have the correct information? Mickey Brian from Clifton, Texas. He was in utter and complete shock. He just sat there with his head in his hands, and a couple of his coworkers came to take him up to his hotel room. He is still fully dressed in his conference gear, in like a nice suit, tie jacket situation, and he just laid down on his bed. He was trembling in shock and just kind of pulled the covers up over his head, like the actual reaction of somebody who had no idea what had just happened in his life. Of course, from there he had to make the trip home to Clifton, but he wasn't going to be able to do that on his own. There was no way that he could function to drive and process what was going on. So two of his coworkers that were at the conference with him that lived in Clifton said that they were going to be the ones that drove him home. So they did. They loaded up the car and headed back for Clifton. They both said that it was a completely silent ride home. Joe didn't say much. All he did was cry the entire time with his head in his hands. And I cannot imagine how devastated Joe must have been by this. To be away from your wife and find out that somebody has come into your home and murdered her in cold blood, and unfortunately things to come, Joe is going to be facing not only the horrible murder of his wife, but then being charged and convicted of the murder of his wife when he was one hundred and twenty miles away in Austin. So Joe arrived back to the house. It was an active crime scene at that point. It had police tape all over. There was police officers everywhere, and of course the investigators wanted to talk to Joe. They wanted to kind of get an idea if he had any firearms that he kept in the house, and he said that he had a three point fifty seven pistol that he kept in the bedroom, and he said he kept it loaded because there was a lot of rattlesnakes and copperheads that would just randomly appear in the yard and they would need to kill them if they popped up, So he kept the gunloaded with bird shot. And at this point too, friends are coming over to pay their respects, make sure Joe is okay, and everyone that had any interaction with Joe right after the murder of Mickey said Joe was inconsolable and often could hardly even function or stand up because he was so distraught. And there's always like this huge debate back and forth of the quote unquote right way to act when something horrible has happened in your life or you're truly in shock. There's no really true way to know how one is going to react in a situation like that. You could act in a way that others look at you and think that you're not acting appropriate. But there's really no playbook for how to process how to grieve a traumatic event in your life. So it's always really interesting when you hear situation like this where obviously Joe was distraught, he was dealing with the loss of his wife, and he was acting what we would say is appropriate for somebody who had just learned that their wife was killed. It seems from the outside looking in that he is a grieving husband and he has just lost his bride and in a really traumatizing way, and from the outside looking in, he's acting what we would deem as appropriate and normal. And I will go on record saying personally, after reviewing this whole case, we're going to get into all of the nitty gritty details, but I do believe that Joe's reaction to Mickey's death was one hundred percent real and genuine. But then there are also people that would argue that if somebody was involved in the death of their spouse and they were acting this way, it might be either put on or truly realizing that they did a bad thing and that they have like all this remorse and kind of like an oh shit, what did I do moment? I, however, do not think that that is the case here. I do think that Joe's reaction was one hundred percent genuine and he was one hundred percent taken aback and shocked by the murder of his wife Mickey. Investigators stayed at the house until about midnight. Of course, they were trying to examine the scene get as much evidence as they could, but they didn't have a ton to go off of. Neighbors didn't hear anything, There was no bloody fingerprints left behind, although the scene was very, very bloody. They discovered that Mickey had been shot four times. She had been shot once in the abdomen and then three times in the head. One of the shots they discovered had been fired at an extremely close range. And they did a search of the house, of course, and they discovered that the three point fifty seven was missing. There was also a goal wedding band that Mickey wore, her watch and a diamond ring that were also missing, and the bullets were just kind of scattered around the bedroom and they did believe that she was killed with that three point fifty seven. There wasn't any obvious signs of a break in, but there was a cigarette butt that was on the kitchen floor of the Brian home, and neither Mickey or Joe smoked, so of course they took this evidence and they thought that it had to have been some type of burglary turned homicide. There was also a back door that was found to be locked when more investigators came on the scene, but they weren't really sure if this door had already been secured, if there had been other evidence there to begin with, that wasn't really looked at, and they just kind of closed the door and locked it, so they're not really sure if that could have been the entry point of this person that allegedly broken The police department called in a blood spatter expert to try to figure out where potentially the killer could have been standing when Mickey was shot, and they really didn't get a whole lot out of it, other than the killer was likely standing on the west side of the bed when the shots were fired, which if you're directionally challenged like me, I cannot tell you what the west side is of course, Joe continues to be distraught. He ends up going to the home where his mom lives, and he decides that he's going to spend the night there. Of course, his mind is wandering. He has no idea what could have happened to Mickey, who would want to harm her? And he had no idea what was to come in his life, Like his life was about to become even more of a nightmare than having his wife tragically taken away. Because good old Texas law enforcement they're still up to no good in twenty twenty four, and they were up to no good nineteen eighty five. They called Joe into the station to talk with him more about what had happened with Mickey. Now, Joe didn't think that he was a suspect or needed a lawyer, or needed any type of counsel or anything like that. Times were certainly different. But I would never expect somebody in nineteen eighty five to think, after their wife was just heinously murdered, that they are going to be the primary suspect just for the reason that they're married to the victim. So Joe willingly went down to the police station and he said that there didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. He said that he had last spoke with Mickey from his hotel room around nine pm on Monday, October fourteenth. He said that he had been watching the Country Music Awards and that Mickey had said that she was doing some grading and said that she was in good spirits and there was also a storm that had kind of come through, so they had also talked about the storm that was going on in Clifton at the time. Now, the Texas ranger who was interviewing Joe didn't really give him any information about kind of where the investigation was going at this point. He said that they did find a metal box, and Joe had told them the previous day that he and Mickey kept one thousand dollars in cash in that box, which in nineteen eighty five was a heck of a lot of money. But the Texas ranger said there wasn't any money in it, and it was also covered in dust, meaning that whoever had burglarized the home didn't disturb the box all. But the money was missing. So the Texas ranger said, you should look around the house to see if the money was misplaced somewhere else, but this thing with the money doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, because one thousand dollars is a lot of money in nineteen eighty five, and it wouldn't be something willy nilly that would just be randomly placed somewhere else in the house. It would probably be locked up in a lock type box for safety and security purposes. Joe himself didn't have any theories about who would want to kill Mickey, and investigators at this point did not have a lot to go off of. But I will tell you that the pressure was on because there was another unsolved murder that had happened four months previously in Clifton. It happened in June, and it was the murder of a seventeen year old girl named Judy Whitley. Her nude body was discovered in town and she had some ligature marks on her wrists and gray duct tape over her mouth, and the medical examiner did determine that she was sexually assaulted and that she ended up dying of suffocation. So you know good and well that the Clifton Police Department is really feeling the pressure because they have not one, but two unsolved homicides and it was a very safe place. People left their doors open, they didn't lock their doors at night. It was a much different time, small town vibes. Everybody knew everybody, and it was a safe place to live. But two murders, two heinous murders, unsolved within four months. I don't think that the police department wanted that on their shoulders, and that, I believe, in my opinion, is a big part of why Joe Bryan ended up becoming prime suspect number one in the murder of his wife. They were doing everything they could to try to figure out what might have happened to Mickey. They even flew a helicopter over the Brian property to see if there was any discarded clothes or anything like that in the area. They also followed up and interviewed the family of a teenage girl who said that there was a peeping tom at her bedroom window in the area, thinking that it might have been a connection. But nothing really turned up, so law enforcement doesn't really have a lot to go off of. But then on Saturday, October nineteenth, this is only four days after the murder, they ended up getting their first break. Now, this break came at the hands of Mickey's older brother, who is named Charlie. Charlie had come to town from Florida following Mickey's death. Now, Charlie and Mickey were not close at all. They really didn't speak very much, but they didn't have any bad blood between them, but they weren't like super close siblings. And Charlie and Joe were cordial and nice to each other. They had kind of helped each other out here and there, but they again were not super close. Charlie is one of those people that thinks he is like a armchair detective before armchair detectives existed. His whole sole purpose of coming to was to do a little investigation of his own because he had some things that were bothering him about Mickey's death. So he had made a phone call to a guy named Bud Saunders. He was an ex FBI agent now private investigator and he did some work for the company that Charlie worked for. So he asked him if he could come with him to Clifton and check on some things that were bothering him. Again, being an armchair detective, Charlie didn't feel that it was necessary for him to share any of this information. With Joe, or even that there was parts of his sister's death that were troubling him and that he was trying to figure out more about. He didn't share any of this with Joe. So Charlie had borrowed Joe's car, And this is such an important part of this whole story in case that it just completely blows my mind. He came into town the day after Mickey was found dead and asked if he could borrow Joe's car, and Joe said sure. His family was driving him to and from all the different places to the funeral home, to the police department, so on and so forth, so he didn't have any reason to say no, you can't use my car, also showing me that he also had nothing to hide, in my opinion, So Charlie has Joe's car. Bud Saunders comes into town and is now in the car with Charlie aka Joe's car, and they're driving around. They stop at a dairy queen. They just spend all this time talking about Mickey's murder, and then at one point they pull over because they needed to use the bathroom, and while they are using the bathroom, Bud allegedly gets mud on his boots and he starts looking for something to clean his boots. So Charlie ends up opening the trunk of the vehicle and he sees a cardboard box and there's a flashlight inside of this box and the flashlight the lens of the flashlight where the light is, it's facing up, and in Charlie's opinion, he noticed what he thought looked like blood specs on the lens of this flashlight, and he ended up handing the flashlight to Bud, and Bud agreed that it did look like there was some tiny flux of blood on the flashlight. So Charlie n ex FBI Private investigator Bud decided that they were going to go back to town in the car with this flashlight and go to the Brian house for some reason because they thought that there was like a cleaning crew there doing some painting, and they thought like maybe cops would be there. So they decided to go to the house. And the house was unattended. Front door was completely unlocked and open, and they went in the house, like actually went into the house and did god knows what at the house. And these are all things that you should know as a former FBI agent and private investigator Bud Saunders that that is not kosher and okay to be doing at what was a crime scene. Why are you going to the house. They then, after being at the house doing god knows what for god knows what amount of time, they left the house and drove to a payphone and decided to call the Texas Rangers because they had a smoking gun, evidence of a potential flashlight with blood spatter on it. Of course, there's not really any record as to how that conversation went when they reported this, They then issued a search warrant of Joe's car shortly after midnight, and they did an inspection of the trunk. They photographed it, and they also noted that the car's interior was clean, which contradicts the I have mud on my boots theory story that Charlie had originally said that Bud had some mud on his boots, but the car was completely clean, no evidence of any mud ever being introduced into the vehicle whatsoever. But luckily, Bud Saunders, being the super smart former FBI agent slash private investigator, said later on that he used his pocket knife to clean the mud off of his boots. Hence that's why there was no mud on the interior of the car. This flashlight, which had now been contaminated by Charlie and former FBI agent Bud Saunders, was taken to the lab for further examination. They did say that its lens had reddish brown specs, and each of them were quite small, roughly the size of the tip of a pencil point, so a sharpened pencil. So once they took the vehicle and did the inspection of it, usually after that happens they do something called impounding the vehicle because it was used as part of a murder investigation. But not Clifton PD. You know what they did. They decided that they were going to give the car back to Charlie. It wasn't even his car, which is astronomically insane to me that they gave it back to Charlie when it's not even his vehicle. Holy moly. Charlie N. Saunders went ahead and brought the vehicle back to the Brian home, left it there at around four a m. And then Charlie left and went to Austin, where he boarded a plane back to Tampa, Florida. So poor Joe, whose wife had been taken from him in such a heinous, horrible He was in the midst of grieving his car was taken from him. It was out of his possession for four days. Joe didn't know that any of this had gone down, everything that had happened when Charlie and Bud Saunders had his vehicle, He had no idea. He didn't know about the flashlight. He didn't know that they had entered his home and done god knows what. He didn't know that the car had been examined by law enforcement, didn't know that it had been returned to Charlie and then randomly just parked in the Brian's driveway. So he had been without his car for four days, and Charlie and Saunders were doing sneaky shenanigans, in my opinion, allegedly with his car for those four days, not informing Joe of any of this, which is crazy. So Joe picks up his car keys at Mickey's parent home and has no idea what has gone on. So the next morning, Joe calls the chief of the Clifton Police Department and said, Hey, on my way back to my mom's place, I stopped to get gas and he had opened the trunk to grab a fuel additive, and he said that he spotted a brown money bag which had eight hundred and fifty dollars in it, and that money was money that belonged to Joe and Mickey. He then said, you know what I do. Remember I put it there two weeks ago because Mickey was going to go shopping in Waco, And in the crazyness of all that had happened with Mickey being murdered, I had completely forgotten about it that I had taken the cash out of the metal box and put it in the trunk so Mickey could use it on her shopping trip if she wanted. So, even though this car had been allegedly searched by armchair detective Charlie Blue and former FBI agent Blud Saunders, they didn't see this money that was in the car so or the police searching it as well, because remember they did a thorough search of this vehicle allegedly. So when the lead detective heard Joe's story, he thought, you have got to be kidding me and thought that Joe was lying about it. And at that same time, the specks of blood from the flashlight lens did come back and they were positive for being human blood, and it was type OH blood, which was the blood type that was Mickey. Now it was not Joe's blood type, so it didn't really tie him to anything forensically speaking. And again it was nineteen eighty five, so at the time, blood typing was one of the most precise to that law enforcement had, But it wasn't really the smoking gun that it would be nowadays because it was still in the beginning stages of development and the technology was of course developing, so it was a long time ago. So even though they said it was type O blood, that really didn't mean a whole lot. At least it wouldn't mean a whole lot in today's world, but in nineteen eighty five world, it did mean quite a bit to them. There was also a crime lab chemist who said that they found some tiny particles that were semi consistent with what they thought was bird shot shotgun shells. So at this point they are convinced that Joe Brian is their guy, and that he is the one that, while he was in Austin, a one hundred and fifty miles away, was able to drive back to Clifton, kill his wife and then drive back to Austin, so On October twenty third of nineteen eighty five, just eight days after Mickey was found dead in her home, three officers arrived to Thelma Brian, Joe's mom's home, and Joe thought that they had come to give them some news about the investigation, and they said, you're under arrest for the murder of your wife. Joe was so taken aback, asking them if they were serious, what evidence do you have? And they didn't give him any answer. They put him in handcuffs and they took him outside and Waco News TV crew was out there and they were waiting to video the whole thing. High school principal being arrested for the murder of his wife, And this is where Joe Brian's nightmare gets worse and worse and worse. Guys, I hate to do this to you two weeks in a row, but I'm gonna have to make this one two parter or I didn't intend on this happening, but this story spans decades and there is a lot still to go through. And I really don't like doing hour long episodes. I know some people like them, but I like to do like my sweet spot is thirty to forty five minutes, and I don't want to rush through this next part of the episode because it is an important part. It is going through Joe's trial and trial again and his eventual conviction and kind of where we are present day with Joe Brian. I want to make sure that I do the story justice and the way it's supposed to be done. So we are going to call that good for Part one of Mickey and Joe Brian. If you haven't guessed it, I think Joe is one hundred percent innocent, and we are going to be calling this the murder of Mickey Bryan and the wrongful in my opinion, allegedly conviction of Joe Brian part one, and we will get part two next week. Promise. It's only going to be two parts. I promise, promise, promise. So I thank you guys so much for sticking around, for supporting the podcast every week, interacting with me on socials. I love chatting with you guys and talking to you, and I appreciate each and every one of you, and I will see you next time for Part two of Mickey and Joe Bryan. Bye,