Getting to Heaven (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

0:00One morning in September of 2016, a person sat in their home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, holding a business card. And like always, just the sight of it made their stomach twist into knots. This card had been given to them years ago by a detective, and it was worn and faded from all the time the person had turned it over in their hands, agonizing over what to do with it. This detective had been looking for leads in a murder case, and at the time, this person, now holding the card, said they had nothing to share. But that was actually a lie. They did have information about that murder, and they had kept it a secret for years.

0:33And now, over two decades later, they'd finally decided to tell the truth. But they were scared. Because they knew when they did this, nothing would ever be the same. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week. Once on Monday and once on Thursday. So, if that's of interest to you, please buy the follow button a really nice candle as a gift. But don't tell them you've replaced the wick with a firecracker. Okay, let's get into today's story.

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2:37In the early morning hours of April 19th, 1991, 35-year-old Joy Hibbs lay in her bed in suburban Pennsylvania. She'd just opened her eyes when her 36-year-old husband, Charlie, hurried into their bedroom looking totally stressed out. In his hands was their new puppy, Major, who was squirming in his arms. Joy was surprised that Charlie was already awake, but he quickly explained to her that he had to go into work early today. He worked for a property management company, which was a career that allowed him to work with his hands and allowed him to not sit in an office all day, which was perfect for him because Charlie hated wearing anything but jeans and a flannel.

3:14But as Charlie passed the puppy to Joy, he told her he'd just cleaned up another accident Major had had on the carpet, it. And hearing that made Joy tense up. Most of the time, she and Charlie had an amazing marriage. They were high school sweethearts raising two teenagers and they had just celebrated their 18-year wedding anniversary a few days ago. But Charlie's one flaw was that he had a bad temper. And so Joy was always trying to play peacekeeper. And she knew that little things like Major making a mess could totally set Charlie off. So she quickly changed the subject and asked Charlie to bring the kids in to play with the puppy before he left.

3:49Then she pulled him in for a kiss, letting his big beard tickle her face. Overall though, you know, despite Charlie's bad temper, their marriage was a happy one. They were both a little bit out of place in their nice suburban community. They loved playing loud music and riding around on Charlie's motorcycle and smoking weed. And so it had always sort of felt like it was them against the world. And now, to joy's relief, Charlie lightened up. He kissed her back and then left the room, and then moments later, he returned, but with their 12-year-old son, David, and he sort of tossed him into the bed.

4:21They all hung out with Major for a bit before their groggy 16-year-old daughter, Angie, came in and joined them, at which point Charlie left for work. A little over an hour later, Joy stood on her front steps with her second cup of coffee, watching the kid's bus pull away from the curb. Before she went back inside, she waved to one of her neighbors who was out watering their lawn next door. Joy was close with everybody on Spencer Drive, literally. Croydon Acres, Pennsylvania, where they lived, was just outside of Philadelphia. And it was classic American suburbia with its neat manicured lawns and houses that were only about 12 feet apart.

4:56So everybody sort of kept an eye out for each other. And that sense of sort of having each other's back on the street felt more important now than it ever had. because recently, Joy had begun to worry that Croydon Acres was sort of going downhill. The Hibs had lived there about seven years, and up until recently, they had never had a problem with safety. But in the last two months, their house had been vandalized multiple times. A brick was thrown through their window, someone slashed her car tires, and their back door was kicked in. It was unnerving, but she and Charlie had a theory about who it was, their daughter Angie's friends.

5:33Her daughter was close with a lot of kids in the neighborhood, and they were a sort of rambunctious and wild group. Angie insisted she didn't know anything about the vandalism, but Joy still wondered if maybe some high school drama had gotten out of hand. Joy went back inside to get changed and to have another cup of coffee before she headed out for the day. She worked as a medical assistant at a doctor's office, and on Fridays, they didn't open until 2 p.m., so she usually had the whole morning to run errands. But her son David had a half day today, which meant he'd be home early. So she needed to go get everything done sooner than normal so she could be home when he got back.

6:12After getting dressed and ready, Joy would spend the next few hours running around town, depositing her and Charlie's paychecks at the bank and then also grocery shopping. At around 11am, she went home to take Major out for a walk. After she got back from that, she threw some laundry in, then sat on the couch and rolled a joint. This batch of weed was really good, way better than the one she'd gotten a few weeks ago. That bag had been from one of their former neighbors, a man named Robert Atkins, and it had been full of stems and seeds, with basically no marijuana at all. It was so bad, Joy had actually called Robert to ask for a refund, which really pissed him off.

6:47He'd actually begun screaming at her, which, you know, she should have expected, because she was friends with Robert's wife, April, and through that relationship, she knew Robert was a really angry guy. The Atkins used to live two doors down, that is, until the bank foreclosed on their home. Now, they were living about 15 minutes away. Now, Joy had not told her husband Charlie about the fight she'd gotten into over this bag of weed. She knew he would be furious if he heard Robert had yelled at her, and so she didn't want to start a war between their families. Just then, there was a loud knock on her front door, which made Joy immediately sit up because she was not expecting anyone.

7:23And when she went to look out the window, she saw the last person she wanted to see while smoking pot, a reverend. She had no idea why he was there, but she ran to the bathroom to throw her joint in the toilet and waved a hand through the air to try to get rid of the smell before opening up the door. Moments later, Joy was sitting on her couch with Reverend Fury Orlando and another member of the Ben Salem Baptist Church. Joy had gone there with a co-worker three weeks ago on Easter, and she'd completely forgotten that she told the church she was interested in joining. But that was why the men were here now, to follow up and see if she had any questions.

7:58The reverend spent the first few minutes of his visit just telling Joy about the congregation and the worship style. But then he surprised Joy by asking if she was sure she would go to heaven when she died. And this question gave Joy pause. Now, of course, she'd considered what might happen after she died, and she did believe in heaven. But the reverend asked if she was sure she would get in. And honestly, she was not sure. Now, she was generally a happy and kind person and tried to be good to people, but recently she'd begun to wonder if maybe she was missing some deeper spiritual meaning in her life.

8:31Reverend Orlando seemed to sense her stress and just took her hand and said they should pray. So, the Reverend, Joy, and the other congregation member bowed their heads as the Reverend said a prayer. And while he did this, Joy found herself crying, tears of relief. It was like somehow his prayer had made that sudden, unexpected wave of anxiety when she thought about whether she'd get into heaven. It just completely disappeared. She felt completely at peace. Joy walked the two men out of her home at 11.50 a.m. and told them she would see them in church on Sunday. She waved as they drove away, then she went back inside and closed the door.

9:09Then she would spend the next half hour or so folding some clothes, and then she went to David's room to put some of it away. And as she did this, she heard the back door open and thought it must be her son, David. However, the footsteps that stomped through the house were definitely not her son's. They were heavy and forceful. And they were headed right towards her.

9:35About a half an hour later, around 1 p.m., Joy's son, David, got off his school bus in front of his house. And the first thing he saw once he got off was his mother's car in the driveway, which made him smile. It meant she had not left for work yet, so he could tell her the news. He just got his report card, and he made the honor roll. And so David hustled towards the back door, but as he passed by the kitchen window, he suddenly froze. There was smoke pouring out of it, and it took him a second to process it. His house was on fire. He gasped and ran to the back door, and when he opened it, a ton of smoke and flame shot out.

10:11And so did Major, the puppy. It ran straight from the house and out into the yard. In a blind panic, David yelled out for his mom, but he didn't hear anything back. All he could see was this wall of smoke and flames and he knew he could not go in there safely. And so he turned and began running towards his neighbor's house, screaming for help.

10:3410 minutes later, a firefighter ran towards the burning home on Spencer Drive with a team of firemen and their gear. He knew they needed to act fast. He'd been told there could be someone still inside, and so paramedics were already at the scene and on standby in case there was. The team charged into the burning kitchen and doused the room with water. At the same time, the lead firefighter called out repeatedly to see if anybody was there, but there was no answer. As they continued to put out the flames, the lead firefighter saw why this accident likely happened in the first place. Someone clearly left all the stove burners on.

11:09The firefighter turned them off, and after the kitchen fire was out, they entered the hallway to extinguish the flames there too. Finally, they reached the last part of the house that was also on fire, which was a bedroom. They hosed down the flames, and as the smoke cleared, the firefighters noticed there was a long, charred shape on top of what used to be a bed. One of the firefighters realized what they were looking at, at which point he turned and left the burning building to go speak to the chief. They had just found a fatality.

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13:20The next afternoon, Sam Wisniewski, a detective with the Bristol Township Police, stood in front of a half-burndown home on Spencer Drive. The firefighters had come and gone, and the place was now swarming with crime scene techs and police officers. Until that morning, everyone had believed that this was an accidental fire with a casualty, a 35-year-old woman who had been identified as Joy Hibbs. But then the medical examiner had conducted Joy's autopsy, and even though her body was clearly badly burned, it was also clear that her death was not caused by the fire. Joy had been murdered. She had stab wounds all over her chest, she had broken ribs, and she'd also been strangled.

14:01And there was no smoke in her lungs, which meant she died before the fire started. So Wisniewski was the lead investigator on what was now a homicide case, and he was already 24 hours behind. But he did have an early working theory, and that was since multiple violent methods were used to kill Joy, the attack had to be emotional and frenzied. And in his experience, strangulation and stabbing were common in personal crimes since they required getting so close to the victim. And so what that told him was that Joy likely had a relationship with her killer. But proving that might be hard, since the case already had some pretty big problems.

14:42Not only was Wisniewski getting to the scene an entire day after Joy was found, but when he actually stepped inside the home, he could see the crime scene itself was completely contaminated. The firefighters obviously had not been focused on preserving evidence, and though parts of the house were untouched by fire, a lot of it was burned and then soaked and trampled all over. Wisniewski also knew he would not be able to see if this had been a robbery or not, since missing items could have also just been burned up. And so Wisniewski did an initial loop of the property to check the doors and windows, and he didn't see any signs of forced entry.

15:17So Joy either let her attack her in, or the door or a window had been unlocked. Then Wisniewski went to the bedroom where the body was found. He'd been told it was the son's room and that Joy had been lying face up on the bed. And when he got inside, he could see it was by far the most damaged part of the house, which must have been intentional. By this point, the firefighters had confirmed this was indeed arson. They'd actually found four separate fires in different areas of the home. So Wisniewski guessed the killer must have set fire to joy in this room first, since it was where most of the evidence of the crime would be.

15:52After he finished in the bedroom, Wisniewski looked around the house a bit more, but he didn't find much else. So he told the crime scene techs to collect what they could, then he went outside to speak to the neighbors. A few hours later, Wisniewski jumped into his cruiser and headed back to the station. And he had a lot to do. Because while the actual crime scene had sort of been a bust, the neighbors were hugely helpful. Their houses were physically close together, and the weather had been nice yesterday, so a lot of windows and doors were open. And this meant multiple people saw Joy alive and walking the dog at 11am, and then right after that, they saw Joy let two men into her home.

16:31And they were very noticeable, because one of them was a reverend. In fact, one of the witnesses recognized him as the reverend from Ben Salem Church. Wisniewski had been pretty surprised to hear this. These two men were the last known people to interact with Joy before her death, which made them instant suspects. But this was a bizarre lead. Religious figures were not typically involved in murder cases. But the neighbors said the reverend and his partner left before 12, which put them out of the likely range for when the fire started. Joy's son David got home around 1 p.m., and if the house had been burning for over an hour at that point, it certainly would have been way more damaged, and the neighbors likely would have noticed before David got home.

17:13Now, the reverend and his partner could have killed Joy, then returned to the scene to cover it up later, but that just felt far-fetched. At the very least, though, they could have seen or heard something important while they were there. And so regardless, Wisniewski knew he had to speak to them. He also wanted to speak to Charlie Hibbs, Joy's husband. In a murder, the spouse was always the first suspect. And even though none of the neighbors had reported seeing Charlie around the time of the murder, Wisniewski still thought he made more sense as the killer than the reverend or his partner.

17:48On Sunday, April 21st, so two days after Joy's body was found in the fire, and one day after the case was declared a murder, Detective Wisniewski sat down with Joy's husband, Charlie Hibbs, in an interrogation room at the police station. Some of Wisniewski's officers were currently at Ben Salem Church speaking to the Reverend. That way, right now, Wisniewski could just focus on Charlie. Currently, Charlie was hunched over in quiet, and his hands were visibly shaking. No one had told Charlie yet that the police knew his wife had been murdered, and so Wisniewski wanted to see how he reacted when he heard the truth.

18:22When the detective broke the news, he watched as Charlie went from shock to confusion and then finally to horror. And then after that, he just buried his face in his hands and sobbed. Charlie's devastation appeared genuine, but Wisniewski knew he could just be a good actor. So he waited for Charlie to calm down and then asked him what his relationship with his wife had been like. Charlie's voice shook as he told Wisniewski that they had been married since high school when Joy accidentally got pregnant with their daughter. Now, the pregnancy was a shock at first, but the decision to get married as a result of it turned out to feel like the right one, and they both agreed that they likely would have gotten married at some point anyways.

19:00Charlie said Joy was the best thing that ever happened to him. She was gentle and kind, and she humored his deep love of motorcycles, and he just couldn't believe she was gone now. Wisniewski could see Charlie was getting very upset again, so he changed tracks and asked Charlie where he was between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Friday, April 19th. Charlie said he was at work about 20 miles away at a construction site in Philadelphia, and he had been there until a co-worker told him that his house was on fire. So he went home right away and he saw the flames and the firefighters and then his wife's horribly burnt body being wheeled out on a stretcher.

19:38Wisniewski wrote all this down. He would need to confirm Charlie's alibi, but if he was at work, then he obviously did not kill Joy himself. Now, he could still be involved. It was possible he'd hired someone to do it. But if this were a hit, Joy's murder would have likely been more colder, more efficient, rather than frenzied. So the next thing Wisniewski asked was if Charlie could think of anybody close to Joy that she was maybe fighting with, or if anybody had ever threatened her or their family. And this made Charlie frown, like something had just occurred to him. And he said, not really, but in the last two months, there had been some vandalism at their house.

20:14Joy's tires had been slashed and somebody broke their back door. They just sort of assumed it was their daughter Angie's friends, but maybe it was something else. Wisniewski immediately asked Charlie if he had the names of these friends. Now, of course, this could be nothing, but it could also mean that someone or multiple people had been threatening Joy for months before her murder, and Joy simply hadn't realized how serious it was. Charlie told Wisniewski he could ask Angie himself, because his kids were waiting in the lobby. Moments later, David and Angie joined their father and Wisniewski in the interrogation room.

20:49Their eyes were red from crying, and Wisniewski decided not to reveal the fact that their mom had been murdered. Their dad could eventually tell them that. Instead, he just asked them if they knew of anybody who might have wanted to hurt their mother. Now, what Wisniewski expected was that these kids would just say no, and that he would just start in on Angie, asking about her friends and the vandalism. But that's not what happened. Instead, Joy's son, David, spoke up. And he said yes. He knew someone who would want to hurt his mom. It was their former neighbor, Robert Atkins. After David said this, he sort of froze and looked nervously at his dad, like his dad might be upset with him.

21:26But his dad just looked confused and told David to continue. So David turned to Wisniewski and said that Robert was the scary guy and his parents bought weed from him a few weeks ago. And he said he knew this because he actually overheard his mom on the phone with Robert asking for a refund since apparently the weed had been so bad. And when she asked for that, David said he could hear Robert get really mad on the other end and literally threaten to kill her and blow up their house. Wisniewski couldn't believe what he was hearing. Not only was Joy's life being threatened just before her murder, but it was over a drug deal.

22:01It was not what he expected out of somebody he'd assumed to just be a typical suburban mom. And if Charlie or Joy were frequent drug users, that could have put them in touch with a rough crowd. And so now Wisniewski could kind of understand why David had been hesitant about what he just said. Back in 1991, marijuana was still very much illegal, and David probably did not want to get his parents in trouble. But Wisniewski said he didn't care about the drugs at all right now. He told David and Charlie that, you know, the weed was not his priority. His priority was figuring out what happened. And so Wisniewski turned to the dad, Charlie, and asked him to tell him everything he knew about Robert Atkins.

22:40Charlie nodded and took a shaky breath. Then he admitted they did buy some weed from Robert. It had been a crappy batch, and he had known Joy tried to return it, but he didn't know anything about the threats that followed. By the end of the interview, Wisniewski did still want to talk to Angie's friends, who her dad had suspected of vandalism, so he got their information from Angie. But far more pressing than that was tracking down and speaking to Robert Atkins.

23:11Later that evening, Wisniewski sat in his office strumming his fingers on his desk. He had spent the whole day following up on the drug-dealing neighbor, Robert Atkins, and what he had learned was that Robert definitely had a bad temper. In fact, one of Robert's neighbors had just called into the police station to say that Robert had threatened to kill her when she had accidentally left some tree branches in his yard after trimming her hedges. Wisniewski also found out that Robert had a criminal record. Although the charges were all minor, you know, nothing violent like what happened to Joy. But it was all certainly enough for Wisniewski to consider Robert a strong suspect.