Episode 340

27:53Mike Boudet:It seemed like John Warren was kind of a grandfather to Cassidy. He tried to help her, but she stole from his wife. And he continued trying to help. A recovering addict, he told Jim Phelps that to use his property, there was a zero-tolerance policy for drugs. He told Cassidy the same thing before he allowed her to stay on the property with Jim. By the time Cassidy was staying there, Amanda had already been in and out of the cabin. Their time overlapped, and Amanda remembered Cassidy as quiet and uneasy, not comfortable with strangers coming around. Apparently, John, the property owner, felt the same way.

28:36Mike Boudet:Yet another friend of Tim's was making herself at home without getting permission. And this little gal has not got anything on from her waist up. And I said, you might want to put something on her hood and fuck you. And she told me, well, I'm Tim's friend. I said, well, Tim's friend, you need to get your ass down here and get your stuff back because you're leaving. Because that's not part of the deal. Where's Tim? He's up in Canton or some place. He's working there all week and she's staying there. That's okay. to apply. But to find out, the reason that they called me was because Jim was in the hospital.

29:32And this person was in the cabin. I would come and see getting her out of there and as soon as she walked out the door, I put the lock on the door because Tim's in my hospital. Jim has the other key. Mm-hmm. So Jim's at the hospital, and you kicked Tim's friend out. Yeah, I did kick Tim's friend out, and most amazing thing, Tim was able to come down and pick her up. Mm-hmm. And he wasn't supposed to be there until two or three days. Mm-hmm. I think it was over. Mm-hmm. And imagine that. He actually was able to show up a couple hours later. Mm-hmm.

30:13Mike Boudet:None of this was sitting well with John. He made it clear he doesn't like Tim hanging around the property. Tim always seemed to be lurking around the corner, quick to show up, always in Jim's shadow. John said he never wanted him out there in the first place. Meanwhile, on September 16th, Jim was already in custody. Deputies sit him down and ask about Cassidy. He doesn't give them much. He sticks to his story. She talked about going to Colorado. She left in the middle of the night. Someone picked her up, and he hadn't seen her since. When they press, he deflects, even whining about his dog. And then he shuts up completely.

31:00Mike Boudet:He wants a lawyer, he says. Investigators still have an angle, though. His friend, Tim Norton. It seems pretty clear he's a big player in whatever happened to Cassidy. And if he isn't an active participant, he at least knows stuff. A lot of stuff. Detectives bring him into another room. Compared to Jim, he is easier prey. Where Jim had clammed up, Tim talked so much that he couldn't hold his story straight for more than five minutes. At first, he flat out denies knowing anything about Cassidy's disappearance. He says he didn't see her, doesn't know what happened, and doesn't have a clue. But when asked about her relationship with Jim, he's got a lot to say.

31:51Were they in a sexual relationship? Not that I know of. I know he talked about that she said she was going to do certain things, whether she would spend the night and sleep with him and stuff. But sort of no nothing ever happened because he was always aggravated after she left because she didn't do what she said she was going to do. Okay, so it's your understanding that Jim thought that the two of them may at some point have a romantic or sexual relationship. Okay, but you don't think it ever happened based on what Jim told you? No, I don't think so. Okay.

32:27Mike Boudet:Both Jim and Tim were annoyed with Cassidy for different reasons. But the property owner kept sticking up for her. I didn't like her. Okay, what about Jim? He tolerated her because of John. He tolerated her because of John. Yeah. And John, again, being the person who owns the property. See, Jim tried to keep her out of the property after a while, after she'd thrown the rings. Okay. But she would go to John and get John to look okay or come out there and stay in the cabin. Jim's hands were tied. They believed John when he said she had stolen jewelry from his wife. But John was willing to forgive her.

33:08Mike Boudet:But later, a collection of Tim's knives went missing from the cabin, and Tim blamed Cassidy. Tim and Jim's plan escalated quickly. What started as talk of confronting her turned into restraining her and ended with killing her. By that point, Cassidy had already spent time locked inside a dog cage. How did that progress? That one, I do believe, progressed with him saying he wanted her dead. Okay. I was about to tell you that she was accusing me and or Mr. Phillips of kidnapping her or killing her or... I'm not sure exactly what she was. Cassidy accused them outright of kidnapping her and planning to kill her.

33:54Mike Boudet:And that, according to Tim, pissed Jim off even more. And so during that planning process between you and Mr. Felt, was anyone else ever a part of that? Yes, there was. One person, one time, maybe two times. No, it was there. Her name was Amanda Kelly. Don't let Amanda's small baby voice fool you into thinking she was innocent. She insisted she wasn't his girlfriend. He was too old for her. She had her age limits. No sex. Nothing to see here. But she was much more involved than she said. She did either Lorcan, Phelps, Jim or Tim. Neither of them ever talked about Felix. um they talked about you know like hunting and stuff like that like uh deer and stuff fish um fishing and stuff like that but never killing anyone

34:58they made jokes they're like oh she's pretty i'll take her home that kind of stuff but you know i never thought anything of it because like i said when i met these two men they were sweet

35:14Mike Boudet:But their jokes may not have been jokes at all. I mean, who jokes about that? Detectives were already on to the fact that they weren't joking. They had text messages and Facebook dialogue between the two of them. If there was any doubt about how dark Jim and Tim's conversations got, the messages they sent each other erased it. Jim told Tim flat out, You need to bring me a woman. I don't care where you get her. Tim didn't push back. He asked, Where do you want me to get her? Jim's answer was as casual as it was chilling. Parking lots are good. Big lots is a good place to people watch. I can watch women all day.

36:04Mike Boudet:And it didn't stop there. Jim bragged, I've been watching the girls in town. One day, I'm going to have one tied up out here. Then came the line that made investigators' stomachs turn. I want fresh meat. You know what I mean. We here at Sornscale did a little digging and found someone who almost got caught up in Tim Norton's web. This is Wren. So, my name is Lauren. Um, I, at the time was in college in 2021, I believe. I can't remember what month he got arrested, but I do remember that it was about two weeks after I had met him, uh, after I had met Timothy. I was working at a Buffalo Wild Wings in like middle of nowhere college town, South Georgia.

37:00But whenever I was there, I had the patio section in the morning, which was typically nobody was really out there. And so I was just trying to make conversation, see if I could get a tip. And he didn't really want anything from me, but he wanted to talk more than I think most people want to talk to their waitress. And when he had come through, he had said something about being a truck driver from Missouri.

37:31Mike Boudet:Wren described Tim as looking much older than his 50s and having what she described as a strangely flat face. The conversation started somewhat normally. He started off asking if I like my job. And I said, not really, but it pays the bills. He had told me I should get a rich boyfriend so I don't have to work this job anymore. and he wouldn't let a woman work like that. And that's when it started getting kind of weird, but it got creepy when he started asking me if we had any cameras in the parking lots and what time I got off work. The text messages alone suggested that Tim and Jim were a team, just as they'd always been.

38:17Mike Boudet:There's not a lot of information out there about who they were, but they described each other as brothers. Within the team, it seemed Tim was the scout or maybe more like a predatory lion, hunting during the day and bringing the kill back to share. He had ended up telling me that he was a truck driver from Missouri and he knew I-75 like the back of his hand. And like, when I say that it sounded like a threat, sometimes people don't understand what I mean. but the way that he looked at me and the tone that he said it was like, I know where I'm going. I don't need to leave a trail to tell you I was there.

39:01It was weird. And the way that he looked at me and also at a lot of the other girls that were working there just seemed very predatory.

39:15Mike Boudet:We haven't even scratched the surface here. Back at the investigation, detectives had a broad idea of what actually went on the day that Tim and Jim decided to make Cassidy go away. Still, they had no idea how many details Tim would give them, and it all corroborated what Amanda was finally revealing. However minimized, she presented herself. What did they tell you that he killed Cassidy? He didn't tell me he killed her, no. You sure about that? But I know that there were jokes made. Okay, tell me about those jokes. That jokes that were made was that if they were to kill someone, they would cut them up in little pieces and put them in the woods.

40:02Mike Boudet:Good joke, right? He never told me he killed her. I swear, he never told me. Because if he told you, then that's not on you. As far as I can remember, he never told me. As far as you can remember. Yeah. Because if he told you it's okay, we need to just... Hold on. I'm trying to remember that conversation. If we had that conversation involving... I don't know about you, but if someone told me they wanted to get rid of somebody and then joked about how if they did it, they'd cut them into little pieces, I'd kind of remember that. But, oh wait, just kidding. She did remember. Oh my God. I did. Tell me about this.

40:47She was talking about how she had stolen something from him and that he had helped restrain her and that him and Jim, like, apparently Jim looked at her and Cassie looked at him and said, why? He said, because you said that I've done it before. I didn't think anything of that. Oh my god. It's okay. I thought he was joking. I seriously didn't. Did he tell you that they killed him? Me thinking it was a joke, yes. And how did he say that? She's dead.

41:37Mike Boudet:I guess. It was all too easy for Amanda to play dumb when the story lined up exactly with what Tim admitted to telling her. Unlike Amanda, Tim didn't have the luxury of hiding behind just joking. When detectives pushed, the thin wall denial cracked. First a slip, then a fragment. And then a flood. What he finally confessed, piece by piece, is the kind of thing you can't unhear. Okay, so it's 8 o 'clock in the morning in late July. Yeah. So the sun is up. Sun's up. Okay. Okay, so you can see. Yeah. You think you can see clearly, okay? And the person whose legs that you grabbed, it was Cassidy. Yes.

42:28Okay. All right, so you were holding her legs. You already described how you knelt down and were holding her knees, I think is what you said. Yeah, right under her knee area. Okay. So it immobilized all of her leg. I mean, I've got enough training and stuff, and I know how to do that. Sure. And then what did Jim do? Well, there again, like I said, I had my head down. But I really didn't see what he originally started doing. I did look up, and he was trying to get the back of her head. Not this way, just this way. Mm-hmm. And she was, I may say she was yelling, but she was talking a little louder than normal.

43:15Okay. Asking why, why, why. And that's when I looked at him to see what he was going to say. Mm-hmm. And I seen his eyes, and at that point, like I told you, at that point, I wasn't sure about my life. Mm-hmm.

43:32Mike Boudet:At first, Tim said he just held her legs. Well, Jim used a bag and then his hands. But as the questions kept coming, the details got darker. He finally admitted he joined in, his own hands tightening around her throat until she stopped struggling. All in all, it took 30 minutes to strangle the life out of her. Afterwards, they left her body lying there before dragging it outside toward the gantry. This was the same gantry that would later show up in those photographs. The gantry stood in the Ozark woods, where it held captive numerous corpses of deer, cattle, pork, and who knows what else as the blood drained from them.

44:21Only this time, that would be a human.

44:24Mike Boudet:It would be a mother. At least, this is the only time the detectives knew about. That night, the two men worked methodically. Knives, buckets, plastic wrap. Tim told the officers how they cut her legs apart piece by piece. He described it flatly as if they were reading instructions off a page. Tim acted like he had no vested interest in doing this. But he was lying. He thought she was a liar and a thief. And in his words, he didn't deal with people like that. And then he walked over to the crank. If you remember correctly, that was a rope on the crank. He cranked it up, raising her up like a sunbeam.

45:15He referred her to like that, but there's no better way to put it. And took her head off first, pulled a wash basin. I don't know how country-fied you are, but a big tub. Might get a big around, might get anything. Slead up underneath her, which would be nothing unusual if it was processing a deer or whatever. He took off her head, put it in there, and then he started cutting her up down the center. So all the blood and the guts and everything went down there.

45:46Mike Boudet:Piece by piece, Cassidy's body was carved apart, dropped into buckets like waste at a slaughterhouse. And so he handed you the camera and asked you to take a picture. Yep. And what did you take a picture of? Him standing next to her. Okay. It's not coming in real clear. I think he reached out and grabbed her head and pulled it up. Like posing with the body. Yeah. I mean, he was standing up almost straight. Jim even had Tim take a picture. He was posing with Cassidy's head like a trophy buck. Tim claims he was emotionless and just following Jim's orders. Hand me this. Take away that. Like a butcher's assistant.

46:32He started cutting one off, and then after he split her down the middle, not just the gutting room, but the splitting, and he went to the corner parts. There again, knowing what we did with regular carcasses, he just became natural to do it.

46:49Mike Boudet:We know you love true crime, but if you ever find yourself saying it feels natural to cut a human into pieces, I'm sorry, but there's no help for you. You're fucked. Jim wasn't finished. What he did next crossed the line from killing to desecration, The kind of act that makes investigators question whether this was about murder at all, or something far more primal. He cut off her boobs. Okay. And her genitalia. Okay. The genitalia he put in the bowl. Okay. The boobs he threw in the bucket. When you say the bucket, you're talking about the bucket. The washband. The washband. That we had all the guts and everything in.

47:36Mike Boudet:Jim was all about trophies, apparently. They got rid of her like she was nothing more than a carcass. According to Tim, Jim had him dig a hole and bury her head The visceral remains, the guts were carried off in buckets and dumped in the woods Let the animals do their jobs, in Tim's words The rest was butchered, quartered and handled piece by piece When investigators later served a warrant they opened a freezer on the property Inside, they found packages of meat. Some were labeled deer, some coon, and every other form of wildlife you could imagine. But they also found neatly wrapped packs labeled simply 724, the day they murdered and processed Cassidy.

48:35Mike Boudet:This raised a question darker than anything investigators were prepared for. Was this murder for murder's sake? Or had Cassidy Rainwater been killed, butchered, and prepared for something else? And then, the biggest mystery of all. Why would anyone, whether it was Tim, Jim, or another accomplice, send those pictures straight to the FBI? It could only have been for some kind of sick bragging or proof that more people were involved. And there may have been more victims. Now, there are more questions than answers in the disappearance of a 33-year-old Missouri woman. Cassidy Rainwater hasn't been seen or heard from since at least July 25th.

49:24With Rainwater still missing, two men, Timothy Norton and James Phelps, are in custody and charged with kidnapping in connection to the case. They're accused of locking her up in a cage and inside this small cabin near Lebanon, Missouri, adding to the mystery just hours before both men were scheduled to make their first appearance in court, that same cabin burned to the ground. The Dallas County Sheriff's Office has been tight-lipped about the case. In a lengthy post online, the sheriff condemned rumors about the case, adding, quote, no, you are not entitled to a play-by-play of an ongoing investigation.

49:59If you want to be in the know, we are hiring along with every other law enforcement agency in the country.

50:05Mike Boudet:The property was burned to the ground just days before their first court appearance. To this day, by the way, no one has been charged. Officially, investigators said it was a propane tank explosion. But for a community already buzzing with rumors of cages, body parts, and cannibalism, it only deepened the paranoia. The sheriff's department was frustrated and issued a harsh statement to the public. But here's the problem. The stories weren't all wrong. The cage was real. The pictures were real. The meat in the freezer was real. It wasn't hard to put two and two together. If Cassidy was packaged like venison, where exactly was this meat going to end up?

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52:08Mike Boudet:The Ozarks are creepy, put it that way. You've seen the TV show, I hope. It's a great show, by the way. And the characters in it are pretty spot on. Those hill people are weird, man. There's no other way to put it. By late summer of 2021, Dallas County, Missouri was giving the best example of what is dark and creepy about the Ozarks. A lonely cabin on Moon Valley Road surrounded by thick Ozark woods seemed like just another rundown property, hidden from view like so many others in the backcountry. Jim Phelps lived there, a reclusive man with interests in BDSM. His closest friend was Tim Norton, a truck driver who hovered around Jim's orbit.

53:00Mike Boudet:More follower than leader. At least, that's how he described their relationship. Both men had reputations for keeping to themselves, but also for letting strangers, especially young women, drift into their lives. Cassidy Rainwater was one of them. She was a 33-year-old mother trying to put her life back together after years of setbacks. By August, she was staying at the cabin because the property owner told her she could. Within weeks, she had disappeared. What happened next was no mystery of the woods. Jim and Tim got tired of her existence and strangled her to death. They quartered her body on a gantry, like game, and left investigators with photographs that looked more like hunting trophies than evidence of a crime.

53:53Mike Boudet:They say she stayed willingly, that she climbed into a dog cage willingly, and stole from them freely. But these allegations weren't true. She had no idea what she was getting herself into, and before she knew it, she was a captive. If this could happen to her, who else could it or did it happen to? Text messages between Tim and Jim suggested they were constantly on the prowl, looking for women. Worse yet, probably underage girls. They even suggested that Tim may have been bringing women or girls back after being on the road as a trucker. The messages were always cryptic and coded. Wren, the young woman you heard from before, remembers her firsthand experience.

54:44One of the first things that I thought after he left was, there's no way that man doesn't have people in his basement. He's weird.

54:53Mike Boudet:What Wren didn't know was that Tim Norton was worse than weird. He was, in fact, a predator of young women. I thought that he was like a little too old to be doing all this and especially too old to be hitting on women who were, God, I was probably 22 at the time. like he was the conversation that I had with him I have never had anybody speak to me that way so I remembered him um but when that mugshot came up I remember being in my college apartment and it had come across like CNN or some like big it was a mainstream thing and I saw it and immediately I texted my friend um that I worked with and I said do you remember that creepy guy that I was telling you about.

55:48Like, I swear to God, this is him. And then I read kind of more about who he was and what he did. And when I saw a trucker from Missouri, I was like, oh my God, that's, that's him.

56:00Mike Boudet:Fortunately, Wren had enough life experience and confidence to keep Tim at a distance. And she immediately reported what had happened. I had talked to my general manager and I said, this guy is weird and he's asking me all these weird questions. I need you to like, let the other girls know that they need to have somebody walk them to their cars tonight. I don't know how long he's going to be here, but he doesn't seem like he has a lot going on. And he kind of blew me off. And then, you know, one or two-ish weeks later, I came back in with the mugshot pulled up and I said, you know, this is the guy that I was telling you about.

56:39Like, I'm serious. We need more cameras.

56:42Mike Boudet:Right before Tim left the restaurant, after staying way too long without ordering food, Wren remembered the feeling she got from him. I noticed that he looked sort of satisfied that I was uncomfortable. Like, he really enjoyed that what he was saying was kind of making me squirm. Like, I really obviously didn't want to speak to him. and he knew that and I think that that was kind of part of the game for him. Wren's experience offered a glimpse of how Tim would operate in public. Unsettling, inappropriate, and just weird. But in his own words, he gave investigators an even darker view of what was happening back at the cabin where he and Jim hung out.

57:32Mike Boudet:During his interview, Tim admitted that both he and Jim were into BDSM. But Jim took it even further. He interacted online with all kinds of women, including minors, in his sick fantasy world. According to Tim, Jim was more to blame. He maintained he had only stumbled across the content on Jim's hard drive. He described it almost casually, like it was just another hobby. He ever talked to you about those chat rooms? Yeah, he even mentioned what they were about and stuff, like what kind of chat rooms? Some of them were more of the darker VDSM and that type of lifestyle and some of our lifestyles.

58:15I mean I know a little bit about it, mostly known for him, as far as what it is. It's a little odd isn't it? What did he get into it? I suppose maybe, but maybe you continue to stay with it. What did he think in particular? I don't know if he got into it or not. I mean, he talked to you, you know, he had pictures with you. You know. Like, what was some of the weirdest stuff that he would talk about in there? I don't know what I could tell you what he talks about in the chat rooms. No, but he told you about what that was. Some things he would. I mean, he mentioned, you know, this person from Sweden or this person from this country or some other country that he was talking to about it.

58:56That was about it.

58:58Mike Boudet:But that wasn't all of it. Tim downplayed everything. what they thought about, what they talked about, and what they actually did. But investigators compared his story against the phone records and Facebook messages, and the reality looked far worse than what Tim admitted. Jim's collection of bondage pictures and messages, all contained in labeled folders, included women hanging on crosses and women in cages. There was even a folder named Milking. This contained sick images of women tied up, with their breasts connected to cow-milking devices. There were other folders labeled kids in cages and nude babies.

59:47Mike Boudet:No description needed. He didn't ever mention that she might be into it, but that he'd be willing to try it with her. I mean, I know he had some DDS himself. Like what? He had a harness, he had some handcuffs. Ankle shackles. You have a toolbox full of stuff like that. Adult enjoyables. That's what I can put it. I don't know if there was a tail in there and some whips and other things. To each his own, right? Live and let live, right? All that shit. But there's a big difference between consensual role play and being a predator. An older man waiting for vulnerable women to be delivered to him. Or to stumble into his trap like a fly in the grips of a Venus flytrap.

1:00:44Mike Boudet:Like Cassidy did, for example. And it's an entirely different matter for someone to end up the way Cassidy did. In a freezer. You've heard the phrase, where there's smoke, there's fire. Well, where there's a freezer full of human meat, fill in the blank. Jim had even written a macabre story on the topic. Not only that, it's clear he did some intense research on the subject of cannibalism. I was like, no, I do not want to know why he's doing this. Okay. Because that made me rethink the story he'd read when I was kind of stupid and hard drive looking for movies and stuff. And I seen it and was like, what's this?

1:01:34So I looked at it and read it. It's like, no, I don't want to know if that's what he's planning on doing because I don't know. Okay. You know, if you remember correctly when you said something about cannibalism when you first interviewed me, I said, Tim, take my blood sugar. Tell me if I have. Because I myself didn't know I had. If I had.

1:01:56Mike Boudet:Hard to hear, but that was Tim telling the detectives that they might want to analyze his blood for human DNA. Like someone else's, if that's possible. Because if he had partaken in Jim's sick cannibal fantasy, he didn't know about it. Yeah, sure, he's been to a few barbecues at Jim's since the murder, but who was to say? Do you know if his intention was to consume, to eat some of that flesh?

1:02:28At the time, honestly, no. But since then, maybe. Okay, why maybe? Because he cut the genitalia out and he kept it. Do you know what he did with the genitalia? No, I did not. Okay. As far as I know,

1:02:49he threw it away. I don't know. Have you told someone else something different? No. I've had several people and it's a running joke in the pods that I was a camel and that he used it to make a sandwich with and several things like that. Like I said, it's a running joke. I've done my best to inform everybody. I didn't eat it and I had no idea what you're talking about. But yet they still make a joke out of it. And sometimes we make jokes with other people, just playing along with the cannibal situation. But I didn't eat any of it. I didn't touch it. I don't know what he did with it. I know what I've heard.

1:03:35I know what I've seen on the news. Beyond that, I don't know anything else.

1:03:41Mike Boudet:Here's a good example of the way Tim would minimize. He pretended that he only went along with the jokes about cannibalism in jail because he didn't want any trouble. But he later admitted to signing autographs for money under the name Hannibal the Cannibal. While Jim stayed silent through the days following Cassidy's murder, all of Tim's minimizing and Amanda's beliefs that it was all a joke couldn't change the overwhelming evidence that both Jim and Tim had viciously murdered Cassidy. And Amanda knew about it. Eventually, the courtroom knew about it too. Appearing in person for the first time since being charged in mid-September, James Phelps was escorted into a Dallas County courtroom and asked if his defense was aware of the new first-degree murder charge filed against him.

1:04:34The judge quickly took up his attorney's motion to set a bond. with Phelps public defender arguing Phelps is not a flight risk, having spent most of his life in the area. Mr. Phelps does have significant ties to the community. He is a lifelong residence of the area, with the exception of a brief sent to the military, and he did live in St. Louis for about three years. Attorney Sam Gearhart says Phelps had only faced charges of writing bad checks and illegal hunting in the past, but prosecutors argue Phelps poses a danger to the community, especially those that are caring for Cassidy Rainwater's children.

1:05:16Prosecuting attorney Jonathan Barker tells the court Phelps co-defendant Timothy Norton confessed to deputies he and Phelps would search for potential victims online and at a local Walmart.

1:05:36to appear at his location or to make themselves available to be picked up by himself or a defendant to be brought back to his location where he discusses with them that he will, in fact, harm them or kill them. And prosecutors also said tonight they are weighing all options in Phelps' case, including possibly seeking the death penalty.

1:05:59Mike Boudet:By 2023, the courts had delivered their verdict. In April, Jim Phelps entered an Alford plea to first-degree murder, meaning he knew that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him, but he still maintained his innocence. The judge sentenced him to life in prison with the possibility of parole. In June, Timothy Norton pleaded guilty to the same charge and received an identical sentence, life without parole. As part of his plea agreement, charges of kidnapping and abandonment of a corpse were dropped. Cassidy's son Aiden has spoken about his mother, saying that even though his parents gave him up for adoption at the age of four, he loves her and knows she did her best.

1:06:52Mike Boudet:He admits that adoption was probably the best thing for him. He's had a good life. Aiden has grown up to be a very intelligent and talented young man who plays 35 different instruments and loves theater. This is what he said at his mom's funeral. Think about the memories and just how great they were. She always loved the river. It was her favorite place, and I remember her always singing to me as a baby. She was a great person. She was the hardest working mom I've ever known. And I'm so proud of her. And I wish she could know that today. Cassidy Rainwater died in the most horrible of circumstances.

1:07:41Mike Boudet:And what they did to her body after was beyond despicable. She may have fallen through the cracks at the time she landed on Jim's doorstep. But she was a mother, a daughter, and a friend. She just happened to be a woman who trusted the wrong people. But the question that lingers is bigger than Cassidy. Jim and Tim weren't just two isolated monsters who snapped one day. They were predators. And like all predators, they hunted where they knew the vulnerable lived. For them, it was mostly women on the margins. Alone. Struggling. Sometimes with no place to go. But this was changing. They started stalking in parking lots and restaurants.

1:08:32Mike Boudet:That's where Ren's insight becomes so important. It could have been her. She crossed paths with Tim before he was caught and put away. And her story shows how monsters like Jim and Tim operated. Not just with violence, but with patience, with manipulation. They looked for weakness, tested boundaries, and moved in slowly until it was too late. Fortunately for Wren, she knew what to look for. She works as an EMT. I don't think I've ever ran into another murderer. but I have you know worked cases where people are being trafficked and like on the side of the road we're getting people out of cars who are being taken against their will and it's a lot of the same behavior it's a lot of that like I'm out to make you uncomfortable and I'm betting that you're not going to say anything about it they look for people who kind of don't hold themselves high who kind of you shrink your shoulders you make yourself small you stay out of the way and a lot of people think that like being out of sight in a way makes them a little safer and it just makes it easier for the people who don't want to do horrible things to you to not notice you to not see you when you need help and like a lot of I've read a lot of studies about um serial killers and the way that they pick their victims is who's the smallest person in the room that doesn't look very sure of themselves.

1:10:17Mike Boudet:Cassidy may have been vulnerable, but she was strong-willed and stubborn, according to everyone who knew her, that is. But see, Jim and Tim didn't seek her out. She landed there and she became a problem for them because she didn't want to give in to their demands. She didn't want a sexual relationship with Jim. Even Tim acknowledged that. And she paid for it with her life. Another thing that I wanted to touch on is like the packaged meat of it all. The cannibalism was the craziest part of it for me to read because it was one of those things, especially like again as the information is coming out you see it and it's so out there and weird and wrong that you kind of don't want to believe it but then again like and especially getting in the line of work that I'm in now there are definitely people that like beyond your worst imagination will do things like that or kind of surround themselves with people that are cool with stuff like that.

1:11:33I don't know. I don't know if society as a whole just wants to push all the ugly stuff under the rug and don't think about it. And that happens far away and, you know, it'll never be my problem. And a lot of this stuff is happening like in these tiny middle of nowhere, They're unincorporated towns and like counties that have just woods forever. It's hiding kind of in plain sight.

1:12:01Mike Boudet:Dallas County police didn't find evidence that the human meat in Jim's freezer was ever shared or sold. But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Bon Appetit!

1:12:32Mike Boudet:That's gonna do it for another one. If you're new here, head on over to SwordAndScale.com for more. Until next week, stay safe.

1:13:06Mike, you are so funny. You crack me up, dude. Keep doing what you're doing. You're making so many people laugh, but we don't speak out. You know what I mean? So all you hear is the negative From the neg-y You know Negative Negative Take care Mike and thank you Don't believe they hate us

1:13:53Thank you.

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