Post Mortem | Joe Hunter’s Mission

0:10Natalie Morales:Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and today we're discussing Sacramento Fire Captain Joe Hunter, who you might know from the CBS TV show Survivor. He competed in season 48, and he's going to be back again for next year's season, season 50. If you watch the show, you know that Joe talked about the profound impact of losing his sister, Joanna. Back in 2011, 36-year-old Joanna was found dead in her Vacaville, California home, hanging inside a bedroom closet by a bathrobe sash. Her death was ruled a suicide, but her family believes that her husband and church pastor, Mark Lewis, killed her after a history of domestic violence.

0:57Natalie Morales:Now, to this day, Mark Lewis has not been charged with any crime relating to the death of Joanna. Joining me now to discuss this case is 48 Hours correspondent Natalie Morales, who was the one who reported on this. Natalie, there's there are so many elements to this case, so much to talk about. You know, I've done true crime stories now for more than a decade. And I got to say, for me and I also know for my crew, the team that worked on this, this is definitely one that stands out. It had such an impact on all of us, probably the most meaningful and heartfelt, I think, in my career. And I've never really felt more purpose in telling a story than I have with this one.

1:36Natalie Morales:I am not surprised. As you know, after I watched it, I immediately emailed you. My mind was blown. I found myself speaking to the screen over and over again. I want to remind everyone, if you haven't listened to this episode of 48 Hours, head on over to your podcast feed. You're going to find the full audio of this episode right below this podcast. Go listen. Come on back. We're going to have a conversation. So a bit of a recap for everyone. Since Joanna's death in October of 2011, her brother Joe and mother Patricia have never wavered in their belief that Joanna's husband, Mark, killed her and staged the crime scene to look like a suicide.

2:18Natalie Morales:Joe was especially close to his big sister, Joanna, and they often talked about competing together one day on the long-running CBS series Survivor. Yes, he and Joanna had loved the show. They talked about competing on the show. He was never really thinking he was actually going to apply to be a contestant. But, you know, when he was overcome with his grief, he, you know, had lost his sister and then later lost his dad. There was just so much trauma that he was dealing with. He was meeting with a counselor at the time, and the counselor told him, you know, maybe you should do something with your grief.

2:56Here's a clip that didn't make it into the hour, why it was important for him to be a contestant on Survivor. And my counselor said to do something really spectacular would be to help you manage the situation with Joanna. Hannah, just do something for you and her to help close the room. And I thought back and I said, she had always mentioned it. She actually was a super fan. My wife is too. And I thought, she did tell me we should do this. And I thought, all right, I'll give it a shot. So on a whim, I said, I'm going to give this a shot for her.

3:35And it took off. It just was an awesome feeling. It took off. so you know my big sis again helping me out and it went well and it landed me on the show he said he sent in his audition and he didn't think it was going to go anywhere until he got that call back but he said his true reason for wanting to be on the show was to bring awareness about domestic violence and and wanted to bring some sense of justice to her case and to her death.

4:09Natalie Morales:It's sort of stunning to me, maybe because I'm an only child, but how much they look like each other. And I feel like as I watched the hour, they began to look more and more like each other, almost like twins. Yeah. And, you know, as you said, they were very close growing up. She always was sort of the protector as the older sister. And that's why I think he struggles so much to this day is that in the end, he felt like he couldn't protect her from what she was going through. You know, as he said, he had so much regret. You hear that in the episode because they had actually had an argument in their last conversation before she died.

4:48What did they fight about? He thought she was going to leave Mark Lewis and she was so close. Joanna's mother, Patricia and Joe, said, you know, the year before she died, she was almost going to leave. And then she ended up going back to him.

5:04Natalie Morales:I'm not surprised that he's doing Survivor again because he really was kind of a standout competitor. These reality shows can be cutthroat, but in this case, you have somebody who was just incredibly competitive but incredibly compassionate. I don't know if you remember the episode where, I mean, I think everybody, it's the moment that went viral from season 48 where he helped a contestant, Eva, out in a really big way. Eva was the first cast member on Survivor to talk about living with autism. So early in the game, she told Joe, I guess she saw him, you know, as this great father always talked about his kids.

5:42She felt that she could trust him. So she confided in him. And it was during a competition on the show that she did become overwhelmed and overstimulated. And Joe could see that. And he went over to her, he crossed tribal lines to be able to do that. And he took her hands and held her. Still thinking about that moment gets me emotional. And it was such an incredible moment.

6:07Natalie Morales:So in terms of the case, Joanna's case, she's got this brother who would always look out for her. And I think that that is one of the things about this particular hour that really stood out to me. I think it really sort of reinforced how challenging it is for victims of domestic violence to get out of that situation. Yeah, that's right. And there had been a history of repeated abuse, which was very much documented. She had taken out restraining orders against Mark Lewis. So that said, Joe really believes that Mark Lewis killed his sister and then staged the scene to make it look like a suicide, what is called a hidden homicide.

6:50And we're going to talk about that more in a little bit. But I even asked Joe and Patricia both if she ever showed signs of being suicidal. You know, Joe did say she may have been upset. Of course, you know, she was going through a lot. But in his heart of hearts, he believed she was ready to leave Mark Lewis. What's interesting is investigators did find this empty suitcase in the closet next to her with a note that read, take care of the dogs. So the investigators thought that was a suicide note. Now, Patricia saw the note a few weeks later, and she vehemently disagreed. She said that when Joanna had come home before, you know, she didn't bring the dogs because Joanna's late father had severe asthma.

7:43So Patricia believes that she was just in her mind saying, take care of the dogs.

7:48Natalie Morales:So an autopsy report determined that the ligature marks on her neck were consistent with a suicide. There were no signs of a struggle. Toxicology report comes back. It is clean. And the county sheriff's office then closes the case. Right. And I asked the Solano County Sheriff's Department spokesperson, Captain Jackson Harris, who's in charge of field operations. Now, according to Harris, he pointed out again, there was no evidence of a struggle, no evidence of force that another person was there even to kill her. But as we reported in the hour, there were no homicide investigators responding to the scene.

8:29The bedroom was not treated at all like a crime scene. No fingerprints were taken. No DNA was tested. The cell phones, because there were cell phones in 2011, they were not collected. officers did take pictures of the note and they did an external autopsy only, not an internal autopsy, meaning that, you know, they just looked at the injury, the ligature marks on her neck, and they didn't see, you know, any signs of struggle on her body. That said, they did do a toxicology test and that all came back clean. So the evidence, according to the investigators, supported a suicide.

9:11Natalie Morales:I think we should remind people, too, medical examiners, you know, they certainly look at the body, but they also take the additional information that they get from officers who were at the crime scene to help them kind of come to a conclusion, which then brings me to the history of domestic violence. Was that not part of their investigation? Right. You know, I pressed Captain Harris on that. Mark Lewis, this was 15 years prior, was convicted of domestic violence when he sent Joanna to the hospital with a sprained neck. So Captain Harris said because this was an incident that happened 15 years prior, that that would not have been available to the deputy in the field at the time.

9:51Natalie Morales:So then we learn that a little more than two years after Joanna's death, Mark Lewis is arrested and he's charged for something else, arson, stalking, and conspiracy against another woman who he had started dating, Sarah Nottingham. You spoke to Sarah. What did she say about that experience? What did you learn from her? Well, Sarah was a member of the church, and she and Mark were friends at first, and then the relationship evolved after Joanna's death into a romantic relationship. She told us that Mark Lewis became more controlling. He would sometimes become a little physically rough with her.

10:28The final straw, she said, was when she discovered that there were text messages that Mark Lewis allegedly sent to an underage girl. That's when she tried to end the relationship. She said at the time he wasn't ready for the relationship to be over. She and her kids had at the time been living with her parents and he was calling constantly the house. And by 2014, we then hear of this incident where a Molotov cocktail was thrown in the overnight hours into her parents' home and it lit a fire. I mean, fortunately, they were all able to extinguish the fire before the fire department got there. But the police determined that Mark had hired three people.

11:20The three were picked up that night. They confessed to the act, saying that Mark Lewis hired us to do this. He ultimately pleaded no contest to the arson and stalking charges, but he was sentenced to eight years in prison, although he served five.

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12:48Natalie Morales:Welcome back. Well, after serving five years of his eight-year sentence for the firebombing of Sarah Nottingham's house, Mark Lewis was released on parole. He's currently living in Arizona. He has a new wife. He is working for a plumbing and drain cleaning company. And 48 Hours reached out to him several times to see if he wanted to respond and participate. He did not respond. And so you and producers actually went to his front door. You had a hidden camera. I'm curious about what that was like. And I want people to know that it wasn't about sort of catching him off guard. This is about giving him every possible opportunity to respond to these accusations.

13:34Absolutely. Thank you so much for pointing that out. This was, you know, our intention truly going there was just to get his side of the story. And we tried multiple ways to reach him. We sent him letters. We called people, you know, who were associated with him. We tried to call him. We were able to find out, though, that he was living in Arizona with his new wife's family. And we approached him because we wanted to give him that chance. We didn't know even if he would be home. Turned out when we arrived there, he was standing outside his front door in the gated area with his wife and his dog.

14:11I knew that, you know, we were in a situation where Mark Lewis probably would be surprised that we were there. And maybe I had like two to three questions that I'd be able to get in. So I point blank asked him, you know, if he wanted to say anything, if he wanted to tell his side of the story. And he said no, and he walked back in the house and closed the door. So that's when we saw that, you know, the garage door was open and Lewis's father-in-law was in the garage. And so we went over there and asked him a few questions. And I asked him if there was anything he would like to tell the Hunter family.

14:46And he said anything he wanted to tell them. He already told them in prayer. And he felt, you know, that Mark Lewis had served the time that he had served for Sarah Nottingham's arson and the stalking charges.

15:02Natalie Morales:Well, you know, it is the conviction that he received for the Sarah Nottingham case that helped to reignite the pressure to reopen Joanna's case. The wheels start to turn. In 2014, the Solano County Sheriff's Office reopened the case and they tracked down Andrew Alvarado, who had actually called 911 the night Joanna died. And he'd originally told investigators that he had been with Mark playing basketball since 3 p.m. That would have meant that they were playing basketball for about six hours. But when they re-interviewed him in 2014, we learned that he actually left during that time frame. And so he wasn't actually with Lewis the entire time and doesn't know what he was doing when he was gone.

15:50Yeah, you know, and it's key nailing down sort of this timeline. Joe Hunter, as you heard, he found it hard to believe that Mark Lewis was outside playing basketball for six hours straight, didn't go into the house once to go to the bathroom to get a glass of water. I should point out we tried to reach Andrew Alvarado. We never heard back from him. Multiple times we tried calling him. He wouldn't return our calls.

16:14Natalie Morales:And I will give it to the sheriff's office because they had another forensic pathologist look at Joanna's case. And that person agreed with the original coroner that Joanna's death was a suicide. The case was closed again. And then in 2015, the county district attorney's office announced its own investigation, which included testing DNA on Joanna's bathrobe sash. And the result is something quite interesting. They found her DNA, as you would expect, on her bathrobe sash. And they also found the DNA of an unknown male, not Mark Lewis. They tested it, according to Captain Harris, in CODIS, which is, you know, the criminal database system, and there were no hits on that.

17:01So to this day, they still don't know who that male DNA belongs to.

17:09Natalie Morales:So then, you know, Joanna's family is stuck again. But for years, they kept on trying to sort of push this case forward. Then an advocacy group called Alliance for Hope asked for another expert to review the case. And the sheriff's office agrees. The expert is Dr. Bill Smock. And he told you, I'm going to quote him here, every injury will tell you a story if you take the time to analyze it. Yes. And, you know, he came to a very different conclusion about what he saw based on the photographs of the scene and the photographs of Joanna's body. So, you know, at the time, police reported that the noose was a bathrobe sash, as we've talked about.

17:57Well, Dr. Smock looks at the scene, then three feet from Joanna's body, there is a nautical rope at the bottom of the closet, which Dr. Smock said, you know, this is completely out of place. And this was something that was not seen before or was not taken in as evidence. And Dr. Smock points out there are two different, what he sees, ligature marks on her neck. One is a red welt. He says it's red because her body was still alive. Her heart was still pumping blood. Whereas the bathrobe sash mark, which he views in the picture as sort of the wider yellowish mark, he said it was yellow because at that point in time, the bathrobe sash was applied after she was already dead, meaning her heart had stopped.

18:45So he believes that Joanna had been strangled with nautical rope. And then he believes that then the bathrobe sash was applied after Joanna was dead. You spoke to Captain Harris about this. Yes, I did. And Captain Harris questioned Dr. Smock's credentials. Let's play a little bit of that. Dr. Smock has never done an autopsy in his life. Dr. Smock has reviewed thousands of autopsies. Reviewed, correct. Correct. I can review just as many things and provide an opinion as well. So I asked Harris then if he was discounting everything in Smock's report. He said he was discounting the conclusion. He was disputing it, saying that there was no evidence it was a homicide, that it was a suicide.

19:33Natalie Morales:And we should note that Captain Harris also said that they had the former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners do a review. And he also concluded it was a suicide. That's right. In the hour, we meet Casey Gwynn and Gail Strack, co-founders of Alliance for Hope International, which is an advocacy group for survivors of domestic violence and their families. They agree with Dr. Smock's assessment that Joanna's scene was staged in what they refer to as a hidden homicide. Hidden homicides are when homicides are staged to look like a suicide or an accident. And Casey told me, you know, domestic violence homicides are the number one staged murders in America.

20:20You know, Casey told us, if you kill your wife or you kill your girlfriend, everybody is going to be looking at you as a suspect. So you have to stage it to make it look like something else. You know, Joanna's history of neck injuries documented by her visits to the hospital, by the number of times that she took out restraining orders on Mark Lewis, that police had to come to the house. That all informed them that they were looking at a case of a young woman who had experienced strangulation in the past. And they told me this astounding statistic. If a woman has been strangled more than once before, there is almost a 750 times greater likelihood that she is going to be killed by her partner.

21:08This is based on an academic report, which is just stunning when you think about that.

21:13Natalie Morales:This is a very important red flag. The experience working on Joanna's case actually led Casey and Gail to create a checklist of 10 factors to be considered by law enforcement. And they began drafting a new law. The law included the red flags that could signal a homicide. Yes, and I'm going to look down and read a few of them because they are so important. Okay. First is if the scene of the death gives the appearance of death due to suicide or an accident. if there is a history of being victimized by domestic violence that includes strangulation or suffocation, and if one partner wanted to end the relationship at the time.

21:55Now, Casey and Gail told us that in Joanna Hunter's case, there were all 10 factors present. Wow. So, Anne-Marie, remember when I told you that Joanna had left the note in an empty suitcase? We didn't have the time to include this exchange in the hour. But Gail explains why in a case where domestic abuse is involved, when a victim wants to leave the relationship, it is the most dangerous time in that relationship. Take a listen. When you analyze a suspicious death or when you analyze any death, you have to look at victimology. Was this victim who died at risk of being killed? So a victim of domestic violence is at risk.

22:37A victim who has been strangled is at risk. Is she trying to leave her partner? The most dangerous time for victims of domestic violence is when they leave. And that's when those stranglers become stalkers. And if they can't have her, no one will. Stranglers become stalkers and then sometimes even become killers. Yes. Casey Gwynn shared an interesting perspective as well. Well, you know, often, you know, as we've heard in these cases of domestic abuse, so much of the focus tends to be about the victim. Why did they stay is the question, you know, instead of why did the abuser do this to them? That should be the question.

23:19That's where the focus should really be.

23:22Natalie Morales:So let's talk about A Bright Light with this dark tragedy. And it's about the passage of Joanna's Law. It became law in California, state law in California, January 1st, 2025. Joanna's law requires investigators responding to reports of suicide, drug overdoses or fatal accidents to check for a history of domestic violence. Casey Gwynn and Gail Strack helped write Joanna's law. How involved, though, were Patricia and Joe in pushing this law forward? Very, very involved. You know, Patricia went to every legislative hearing. she always had on the bench a large 8x10 picture of Joanna right next to her.