WANTED: Justice for Rhys Pocan & MMIW Part 1

0:00Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today has been years in the making. It all started when we set out to cover one unsolved case in Wisconsin. But what we uncovered was a possible serial killer at work in the state and 10 eerily similar cases that had never been connected, separated by jurisdiction and bureaucracy. But sometimes it takes a little podcast and three years of work to get people working together and thinking outside of the box. So our story today starts with the case that piqued our interest years ago, and that's the murder of Reese Pocan.

1:12On September 2nd, 1989, the non-emergency dispatch line at the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin started to ring. The caller won't give his name, but he says earlier that morning, like sometime before sunrise, he and his wife were walking in Nichols Creek, which is this like public hunting ground, and they stumbled upon a dead body. So the dispatcher asked like, are you sure it's a human body? And the man says, quote, oh yeah, it's been decapitated and it's been there for a while, apparently. Now he explains that he saw the body about 100 feet off a public access road, And when the dispatcher offers to get a detective on the line, the man's like, no, no, no, no.

1:54Like, I just found it. I wanted to report it. Like, I don't want anything to do with this, basically, right? So he hangs up without identifying himself and leaves before authorities actually get to the scene where they do find the body that he described. And it is in a particularly gruesome state. This victim is severely decomposed, like almost mummified. And the victim's head and hands are missing. And it appears as if the corpse had been scavenged by animals and insects. Like, the insides are literally hollowed out and the skin is almost like leather. And other than the body, though, there is nothing else at the scene.

2:33And despite searching far and wide, they don't find any other body parts. They don't find any clothes, no personal belongings, which makes identification essentially impossible. But based on the pelvic bone of this victim, the ME determines that this was a female. And a small scar on her abdomen, plus surgical clips near where the gallbladder would have been, tells them that this Jane Doe likely had a gallbladder surgery. But there aren't any obvious markings or wounds on the body, so the cause of death is undetermined. And strangely, the manner of death is ruled undetermined too. Ma 'am, she was decapitated.

3:11How is that undetermined in any way? I listen, everyone agrees with you, like now. Wow. But back in the day, I guess the ME, so this guy named Dr. Jeffrey Jensen, says that the head and hands being gone, again, he's saying this way back when in 89, he says that could be due to like animal predation. And they didn't take her feet. Animals just came and took the things that could identify her. I know. It sounds bananas when you say it out loud. But everyone back then was like, well, that's what the ME says. like he's the professional, except yes, he was a professional, but he was new at his profession at the time.

3:47And we actually talked to this doctor for this episode. We asked him to review his own old findings. And he said that if he could do it all over again with like what he knows now, his experience, he would definitely list her death as a homicide rather than leaving that line blank. He said that in 89, again, he's brand new to the job. And in talking to us, he admitted that there's like just no possible way that her head and hands were actually removed by animals. So anyways, almost two months later, the Waukesha County Sheriff's Office, which is just over an hour south of Sheboygan, they get a surprise when a hunter walks into their office with a severed hand in a bag.

4:27Now, this man, Russell Martin, says that he was out with his son and their dog like pheasant hunting on October 21st in this big open field, which, by the way, is also a public hunting ground, when all of a sudden his dog starts acting super strange. Like, off in the distance, like, he's not right next to him. He's just rolling around on the ground. It's like, I have Chuck. I know he's rolling in something dead, always. Like, it's terrible. So he's not coming when he calls him. He goes over there to see what his dog's doing, and he gets the shock of his life when it's not animal poop or an animal he's rolling in.

5:01He, like, looks at what his dog is so worked up over, and it is a human hand. It looked like a left hand, mostly skeletal, with four fingers and no thumb. But thumb or no thumb, there is no doubt what Russell is looking at. So he actually, he doesn't call police like they did with the body. He like picks up the hand and takes it to the sheriff's office in like this little plastic baggie that he had in a first aid kit. And then the sheriff comes out to like where he found it. They end up doing this big search of the area, which turns up the other hand, but nothing else. So basically in Sheboygan, there's a body with no head or hands.

5:37And in Waukesha, there's hands with no body. Exactly. So Waukesha actually tried getting fingerprints off the hand to try and identify them. But I told you it's like mostly skeletal. Like it's not even really possible. But then I'm not really totally sure like which department it was. Someone has this like light bulb moment and is like, oh, wait a minute. Exactly what you said. Like, I wonder if these hands belong to that body that has no hands. Right. Now, they couldn't definitively connect anything yet. But like, you know, come on, probably. Though, even if they could say that these hands belong to the body, like, you still can't say who this person is, right?

6:14Can we at least call it a homicide? Because animals didn't take the hands and drive them 80 miles away. Of course, we could if they were determined to be connected, right? But they can't for sure say that. Like, this is where DNA would be super useful right about now. but in 1989 in rural Wisconsin, like, forget about it. It's not until like six months later in April of 1990 that efforts are finally made to see if detectives can finally match the Waukesha County hands to the Sheboygan County body. And more importantly, try and identify who they belong to. So lab tests are done out of state, but those ultimately come back inconclusive.

6:55Okay, this might be a dumb question, but I assume they've gone through all of their like cataloged missing people, right? Not dumb question, no, but yes, they have. So there's nothing in either of these counties that fits the little information they have. But after these inconclusive lab results, investigators decide to broaden their search. And I mean, considering how far apart these remains are, like clearly someone is willing to travel to cover their tracks here. So they start looking as far away as Milwaukee, which is a pretty big city with a lot more missing person reports. And one of them really stands out.

7:32There is a 35-year-old woman who was reported missing in August of 1989 named Reese Pocan. Not only does the timing fit since she went missing about a month before the body was found, but there is a note in her missing persons report about a gallbladder surgery scar that really raises some eyebrows. And it's that scar that helps detectives confirm less than a month later what they've been waiting almost a year to find out. Their Jane Doe is without a doubt Reese Pocan. But now they have even more questions because the circumstances around Reese's disappearance are truly bizarre. The story of her disappearance begins on August 10th, 1989.

8:13So Reese had dropped her eight-year-old daughter, Charlie, off with her sister, Flavia, who was Charlie's aunt. And I actually got to meet Charlie. And even all these years later, she says that she can still remember her last moments with her mom vividly. And there are certain parts of this episode, I'll tell you right up front, that I want you to hear something directly from the person who lived it. And this is one of those. So here's Charlie. I do remember that day and it's always kind of just replays in my head. She told me I had to go to my aunt's house, that she was going to watch me. And so we rode our bikes down.

8:47She didn't live far from us. And then we got there, and I was like, well, I don't want to stay here. I want to go with you, because I would go with her sometimes. So I was like, I don't want to go. I don't want to stay here. I want to go with you. And she's like, no, you can't this time. You have to stay here. And then I remember watching her ride her bike away, and I was mad. And then I turned around, and that was the last time I saw her. It replays all the time. And now I look back, and it's just kind of weird, because I'm watching her right away, not knowing that's the last time I would see her.

9:16but it's really hard when you look back and you know that was the last time I was gonna see her. Did your mom tell you why you couldn't go with her that day? She just said you couldn't. I just couldn't go with her that day and she didn't say. Reese's brother Billy also remembers seeing Reese that afternoon on her bike and this is likely right after she dropped Charlie off but he's not totally sure of the timing. He said they spoke for a second and Reese seemed like she was in good spirit. She told him that she was on her way to her boyfriend's house. We're going to call her boyfriend Chris. So Chris told Billy that Reese had stopped by his place and he puts that at like 2.45, 3 p.m., which would have been right before he left for work.

9:57And then Chris says that Reese headed out on her bike in the direction of nearby National Avenue to go bar hopping. And this is where things start to get weird because there was this trail of sightings and encounters counters, and even physical signs of Reese Pocan in the following hours. But sometime before midnight, she seemingly vanished into thin air. All of Reese Pocan's last movements center around this one strip of establishments on National Avenue. The first sighting of her there is actually around nine-ish at a bar called the Golden Spike Tavern. And apparently, while she's there, Reese seems pretty drunk or like just out of it.

10:42Now, where she was from the time she left Chris's place to the time she got to this bar and how she got so drunk or whatever it is she was, that's unclear. There are no confirmed sightings of her during that period. But the bartender at this bar says that around 10 or 11 p.m., Reese ends up leaving with this older man named Harry to go like sleep it off at his house. Oh, I don't like that. So that was my first reaction, too. But apparently, like, it's not as sinister as it sounds. The bartender says that Harry lives, like, right around the corner from the bar. And he's known, I guess, to let barflies kind of crash at his place if they're too drunk to drive home or, in Reese's case, bike home.

11:19So she says that Reese just, like, grabs her backpack and heads out with Harry on foot. Did she leave her bike behind? It would seem so. And actually, a few days later, when her brother Billy is trying to retrace her last steps, like on his own, he does find her yellow bike propped up outside of a place called Jean's Unicorn Bar, which is right across the street from Golden Spike Tavern. It's possible she was there, like in between that time. We just want to be sightings of her. But anyway, according to Harry, when he and Reese go to his backyard gate, Reese kind of like stumbles and drops her backpack in his yard.

11:50So Harry like bends over. He picks it up to like hand it back to her. But before he even can, Reese darted back toward National Avenue. So Harry started walking back toward the bar to return her bag to her. And she's like out of eyesight by this point. And when Harry gets back to the bar, he sees actually Reese's flip-flops, like neatly placed together on the sidewalk outside. So he scoops her shoes up, planning to return those as well. But when he gets inside of the Golden Spike Tavern, she's nowhere to be found. So he just leaves the items with the bartender. Do we know if Reese ever made it inside the bar?

12:25That's unclear. But around 11.35 p.m., Reese encounters a woman named Shirley, who works at the American Indian Council on Alcoholism, which is just down the road from the bars on National Avenue. And I guess Reese was known to attend this council sometimes, so she wasn't a stranger to Shirley. But Shirley says basically she's working a late night session and was approaching the front doors to leave when she sees Reese coming inside. And she said that Reese was incoherent when she tried to speak with her. She seemed to be under the influence of something, but she didn't know what. Shirley thought maybe it was drugs only because she said she didn't smell alcohol on her.

13:01And she said that Reese's words were like slurred when she's trying to talk to her. She just wasn't really making sense, but she seemed super agitated. And Shirley says that she tried to talk to Reese, but Reese sort of just like pushed her away. And from there, Reese walked off without explanation, without shoes, in the eastbound direction of National Avenue. Now, what's interesting is Charlie told us that her mom did drink a lot, but the only drug she ever experimented with was pot and not even that often. But maybe that's something that you keep from your kid. Totally possible. But I will say the investigator on this case today, his name's Detective Nathan Hatch, he says that that seems to kind of be backed up by other family members, like not just her eight-year-old kid.

13:45Apparently Reese did like to drink beer, but she wasn't into especially hard drugs. Which makes me wonder if someone drugged her at the bar. It makes me wonder too. I mean, it would be great to have other accounts of her behavior or what she said when she sobered up. But this encounter with Shirley at 11.35 p.m. is the last known time that Reese Pocan is ever seen alive. She never shows back up at her sister's house at the agreed-upon time to get Charlie. So Flavia ends up taking Charlie back to Reese's apartment herself. And not finding Reese there, she ends up leaving Charlie with the downstairs neighbor, Carla.

14:21And Reese basically lives in this duplex. So she lives on top, Carla lives on bottom. And Carla watches Charlie, like, pretty regularly since Reese works full-time, so it wasn't all that odd when Charlie got dropped off. But what was odd was when Reese didn't show up the rest of the night, or the next day on the 11th, or the 12th. I mean, normally her routine was to pop by every four hours or so to make sure everything was good when Charlie was with Carla. But two days went by without so much as a word. And Carla didn't think to tell anyone? I guess not. And we actually did get to speak to Carla and she wasn't able to remember exactly what she was thinking at the time.

15:00But apparently she, I think, just assumed Reese would turn up eventually. Now, it wasn't until the 12th that she finally started to get concerned because that's when Chris, her boyfriend, Reese's boyfriend, came by looking for Reese. Apparently, he and Reese were in this bowling league together, and she had been totally MIA to their bowling alley date. So he figured that something might be wrong. But it really wasn't until that moment that he and Carla both realized how wrong things were. So they raised a flag for her brother, Billy, and he came over to stay with Charlie until Reese came back.

15:32But when she still wasn't there on the 13th, the next day, like all bets are off. That Sunday, August 13th, Billy reported Reese missing to the Milwaukee PD, and an investigation began. And really it's like investigation light, I should say, because police call the local hospitals, they call the jails, but of course they don't find Reese in any of those. And five days later, at the suggestion of Reese's mother, Zane, they pulled Reese's bank records, which showed some transactions on August 7th and 8th and 9th, but nothing on the 10th or after, which is kind of just confirming what they already knew.

16:10Also, leave it to the mom to suggest, like, very routine, basic investigative moves. I know, yeah. So in all that time that Reese has been missing, in almost the year before she was connected to that body, showing up in Sheboygan, the Pocan family, to your point, is, like, pretty much their own investigators. Like, they were having to unravel her disappearance themselves. Like, her brother Billy was actually the one who went and canvassed the National Avenue bars in the early days when police wouldn't. He was the one, like I said, to find her bike. And he is the one who found out that her backpack and shoes were left at the bar with the bartender at the Golden Spike Tavern.

16:47Did Milwaukee PD do anything to search for her? I mean, at a certain point, they like follow Billy's lead and start canvassing the bars themselves. But I think that their lack of action probably can be attributed to two things. Number one, 1989 Milwaukee was prime dommer time. Like he gets arrested in 91. And listen, he's like not connected to Reese's story. even though we're talking dismemberments, but it's just proximity and like really close proximity. So interesting. As we're like in Milwaukee, we were like going to all the places that like things had happened, like the scene, the bar she was at.

17:21And as we're driving, the detective's like, oh, by the way, that was Dahmer's house. Like it's literally six blocks east of where Reese's boyfriend Chris lived. But again, just a coincidence that we stumbled across. And I don't think police at any point were ever trying to even connect Reese to the Dahmer stuff back then, even before he was like found. Right. Dumber targeted men like exclusively. Exactly. But still, again, this is like Milwaukee PD was zeroed in on that investigation and maybe didn't have the bandwidth to dive into Reese's case as they should have. But the second reason that Reese wasn't getting the full force of the MPD behind her was likely because of who she was.

17:59Reese was an indigenous woman and a single mother. And she didn't just leave behind Charlie. She had three other daughters too, Barbara, Regina, and Michelle. They were a little older than Charlie. They lived with different relatives out of town. I mean, Michelle was 11 when Reese went missing. Like she was living with her grandma. She hadn't seen her mom since she was very little. So all of the sisters had vastly different relationships with Reese. But her going missing still deeply affected all of them. The summer that Reese vanished, Barbara was actually considering moving to Milwaukee to live with her mom and Charlie.

18:35So they had to have been like pretty close or kind of close, even though the relationship was long distance. But all that to say, I do wonder if Reese's scattered family played into this assumption that the police maybe had or were making about her life or her lifestyle. And then just add on top of that assumption, just a general apathy toward indigenous people. As an adult, Reese was a member of the Bad River La Pointe Band of the Lake Superior tribe of Chippewa Indians. And there is no arguing that indigenous people, especially those who go missing or are murdered, are treated vastly different than their white counterparts.

19:12And I can say it, but here is where I want you to hear it from someone who has lived it. So this is Reese's daughter, Michelle. This happens to our people all the time. They have reports of these Caucasian women that go missing. Nobody reports about us. It's like we don't exist. They need to realize we're still here. But a lot of our women, we go through a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff we don't talk about. Our families, we bury stuff. Our tribes, they bury stuff. They don't want stuff to get out there. But it happens. And there's so many of our women. Sorry. They're gone. Nobody knows where they're at.

19:56There's so many of our women that are found. And it's a shame that we have to go through this. We've been dealing with this for, God, hundreds of years. And this is something that really just touches my soul. Because it's sad that it's hit my family. And we have to go through this. And, you know, it's not just our race. There's also other races that are going through this as well. Our brown sisters are going through the same thing. We're all still here, and we need the attention just as much as everybody else. But Reese's disappearance didn't get much attention. And not just from the police. The press at the time wasn't really talking about this missing mother either.

20:45And for Charlie, it sort of seemed like nobody cared about her mom, who just up and banished. It was very confusing because I remember when I went to my aunt's house and she was missing for a while, I remember being very angry and saying, I don't understand why they can't find her. Like, she's probably just down at the bar by our house. Did anybody go there? You know, have they looked there? Have they, you know, why can't they find her? I remember being very upset that I just couldn't understand why nobody could find her. At this point, Charlie was living with her aunt, uncle, and their five sons.

21:17And that situation was starting to feel more permanent. It was a completely different world there. I was used to just being my mom and I, and that's it. And then all of a sudden, I have five boys. It was very different from what I had known. And we lived in the country. I was used to the city. It was a pretty big shift. And then obviously not having my mom. But it was nice. You know, it was different having all those people with you, but I know they cared about me and stuff, so it was good. Charlie had been living with her aunt for almost two months when the call from the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Office came in.

21:53They had found Reese's body. And Charlie still remembers what that conversation was like with her aunt and uncle when they told her. They had sat us all down, and they had told us that, you know, my mom's remains were found, and, you know, that she had been murdered. And I remember just sitting there and not knowing what to do. It was almost like I was frozen. And then I remember my aunt was like, it's okay to cry. I started crying. I know I couldn't process everything. I remember telling my aunt that I remember I had to help her home from the bar one time, and maybe she was sick. And she's like, no, you know, somebody killed her.

22:34And I was like, oh, okay, yes, that's right. So I remember just being like very confused and not totally understanding. But it was like, I didn't know what to think. I knew they had found her torso. And then I knew her hands and her skull were missing. But I didn't totally know like where they found what. They would share things with me. but I don't remember like a lot of the details. My ancestors, they told me, they always try to be honest with me. So I don't know if maybe I block some of it out, but I don't remember them really telling me her hands are found here or her spell was found here and her spell was found here.

23:15Any of those actual details of, you know, or autopsy or anything like that. Reese's skull would end up being found more than a year and a half after Reese went missing in the Vernon Marsh area. And this is about a quarter of a mile from where her hands were found. But finding her skull doesn't progress the investigation much. It's not like it's in a new location that gives them clues. Plus, the skull didn't show any markings or signs of trauma that would indicate even how Reese died. Is it weird that they didn't find the skull before? Possibly, but I mean, Detective Hatch took me to that marsh.

23:48And we were talking about the possibility of animal activity there. Like, I mean, it is this big wildlife area, so animals could have easily moved the hands or skull for that matter. Now, Charlie couldn't understand how anyone could have wanted to do this to her mom. No one in their family could. Not even Detective Hatch could, because everyone he spoke with during the investigation had just glowing things to say about Reese. Her co-workers at the Bradley Center, where she worked as an admin assistant, loved her. Her friends loved her. there wasn't an obvious suspect. That is, until police learned about Reese's boyfriend, Chris.

24:27And there was something that right off the bat set up some pretty big red flags. It was a few of Reese's siblings who first became suspicious of Chris, like, again, very quickly. And for two reasons, mostly. One, he had been dating another woman at the same time as Reese. And apparently he started dating this other woman in July and then continued to see her through September while Reese was missing. And two, apparently his story kept changing. Like originally he told police that the last time he saw Reese, she was biking away from his apartment heading south after visiting him on the day in question.

25:07But later he told police that the last time he saw her was in his apartment and that he never saw her biking after that, which is like small inconsistencies, but they stuck out nonetheless. less. And he also didn't have an alibi for the night that Reese disappeared. Chris originally told Billy and detectives, again, Billy is Reese's brother, he said that he was at work while Reese was at the bars. Now, I don't know if they checked with his work, but even if they did, his shift was scheduled to end at 11 p.m. We know that Reese was last seen at 11.35, so he would have been off work at the time that something happened to her.