Original subtitles

♪♪

-Family and friends in Mountain View

are coming to grips with the shocking murder

of a college student, 22-year-old Rebekah Gould.

-This beautiful young woman with her whole life ahead of her

goes missing, and the whole town was on edge.

-It was so unusual for something like that to happen here.

-The police found this very bloody crime scene.

-It scared everybody.

-There was a lot of rumors, a lot of speculation.

-It divided the whole community.

-There is so much "he said, she said."

What is the absolute truth? What do we know for certain?

-I thought the investigation was in serious trouble.

-The narrative that we had been fed by the police was wrong.

-He told me there are certain cases that will never be solved.

Crazy.

-Something completely random has happened,

and that didn't make sense.

♪♪

-This is a cute one. This is at graduation,

and I've got Rebekah right next to me.

My name's Larry Gould, and I'm Rebekah's father.

Rebekah, at an early age, walked to a different beat.

There was this rebellious attitude.

Rebekah was always the last one to come when she was called.

She was tough, but very loving.

She was definitely her own person.

When Rebekah was just a few years old,

her mother and I divorced.

It was kind of a tumultuous situation.

I fought for custody for years.

All right. You ready to put this away?

When you only have your kids on certain weekends...

Happy Halloween. -Happy Halloween.

-...you want to make the best and the most

of every moment that you have.

We'd take them to restaurants,

swimming,

everything you can imagine that you'd do

that would be different and fun.

You know, every parent, I think, looks at their children

and says, "Okay, I wonder what they're gonna be

when they grow up?"

There are certain types of people

that, when they make up their mind,

they're gonna go for it.

And that was Rebekah.

Rebekah grew up really all over Arkansas.

She ended up in the Mountain View area.

-The Arkansas Ozarks are very geographically isolated

from the rest of the country.

A lot of places around here did not have

paved highways until the 1960s.

Even today, there are many places up here

where you cannot get cellphone reception for days at a time.

It really is remote.

Mountain view, Arkansas, has just under 3,000 people.

Rebekah moved to the area in the late '90s.

That's where she stayed after she graduated high school.

Mountain view has a small-town vibe.

Everybody knows everybody.

And everyone knew Rebekah.

♪♪

-Rebekah was one of the most beautiful people I knew,

inside and out.

In 2004, she didn't have a place to live,

and I had an extra bedroom,

and we just got to know each other through living together.

I had too many dogs and she had her dogs,

and so that kind of bonded us.

Rebekah was fun-loving, free-spirited, feisty.

She wasn't afraid to back down from a fight if she needed to,

but at the same time, she was very caring and very giving.

-In 2004, Rebekah was 22,

and she had been dating Casey McCullough.

-Casey and I first met whenever we were working at Sonic.

We hit it right off because,

well, we shared a taste in music, movies,

and just art altogether, and we became friends.

He sang and played the guitar.

Whenever you're working, especially in fast food,

you kinda got to entertain yourself

to get through the monotony, you know,

and Casey was good at entertaining.

They had brought in a new general manager,

and he brought with him some of his friends.

In that group was Teresa Apple and Rebekah.

-I was behind the counter working,

and I heard Larron say, "Who is that walking in the front door?"

And Casey's like, "Oh, no, she's mine.

She's beautiful."

-Casey and Rebekah became inseparable.

And [chuckles] Casey kind of became all about Rebekah.

-She always said how sweet he was,

you know, how he just kind of doted on her.

-But at the same time,

Rebekah was going through a period of transition.

22 -- it's a time in our lives

when we're figuring out who we're gonna be,

what we're gonna do.

-Sometime in late summer of 2004,

Rebekah asked to talk to me privately.

She wanted to move over to the Fayetteville area

to go to a college there that would prep her

to be accepted into the University of Arkansas.

Her goal was to become a Razorback.

That's what she wanted.

She made a comment to me that I'll never forget.

She said, "Dad, I want to be like you."

She meant to make something of her life academically

and to go on and grow.

-Rebekah had a sister, Danielle.

She was one year younger and so they were very close.

She and Danielle had moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas.

They were going to a community college there,

and on weekends Rebekah would come back down with Danielle.

Danielle would stay with her boyfriend at the time,

and Rebekah would stay with Casey.

♪♪

On Friday, September 17th, 2004,

Rebekah and Danielle drove from Fayetteville

down to Mountain View.

-So Rebekah drove her car. It's about a three-hour drive.

So they're talking. They're listening to music.

And once they got to Mountain View,

Rebekah dropped off Danielle.

And then she continued on to Casey's house

just outside the town of Melbourne.

The plan was for Rebekah to pick Danielle up on Monday afternoon

to go back to school, because they had classes on Tuesday.

But Rebekah never showed up.

♪♪

♪♪

-I was at my office, and there was a phone call.

It was from Rebekah's mother, and she was frantic.

Danielle was upset that Rebekah didn't show up to pick her up.

And then there were calls made to her cellphone,

and there was no response.

So I shut my office down, drove to Melbourne.

♪♪

-After Rebekah did not show up on that Monday,

Danielle called her mother, Shirley.

They started to call friends.

They were calling Casey, everyone they could think of,

and they couldn't find her.

Tuesday morning, Shirley called

the Izard County Sheriff's Department

to ask police to do a welfare check on Rebekah.

-In a welfare check, you're just looking for a human being.

You're not looking necessarily for evidence of a crime.

At 8:30 on Tuesday morning,

that deputy who was dispatched stopped by Sonic

and located Casey, and the two of them together

went to Casey's residence.

-When the deputy arrived at the trailer with Casey,

they looked around.

♪♪

Her car was parked there.

Her purse, her wallet,

her fluffy little white dog,

a lot of her clothes were there.

All of Rebekah's things were there, but she was gone.

-They went into Casey's bedroom.

Things looked a little bit in disarray.

There was a broken ashtray.

There was a mirror that appeared to have fallen off the wall.

And Casey remarked that the sheets were not on his bed.

The deputy lifted up the mattress,

and that's when he found a large bloodstain on the underside.

♪♪

So he asked Casey if he could look in the washing machine.

And upon opening the lid on the washing machine,

he did see bedding in there.

He also noticed in the bleach-dispenser tray

what appeared to be blood.

♪♪

-Casey claimed that he had no idea

where the blood had come from,

but you got to imagine what was going through the deputy's mind.

I mean, he was sent out there to do a welfare check,

and now he's found a crime scene.

Rebekah was still missing, and things --

they were not looking good for Casey.

♪♪

♪♪

-Once the local police found the blood on the mattress,

they did exactly the right thing.

They immediately turned the case over

to the Arkansas State Police.

-When Arkansas State Police investigators

arrived on scene,

they found a very large bloodstain on the carpet.

blood spatter in the corner of the bedroom,

bloody pillows stuffed under Casey's bed,

and a wash rag underneath his bed.

-There were little spots of what looked like blood

on one of the trash cans.

And there were cleaning supplies on the counter.

It looked like someone had done a cleanup job.

-The back door of the trailer appeared to have been

broken in some form or fashion,

as if someone was trying to break in or out of it.

When they inspected the back porch of the house,

they found blood smears on the steps.

-The trailer is in a very remote location.

It's set back from the road.

You have to know exactly where it is.

Police developed the theory that there had been

some kind of an altercation.

Something bad had happened to Rebekah in that trailer.

♪♪

-I was working at a local newspaper.

I had been there for about seven months.

I had done a lot of local reporting in local government,

you know, small-town stuff.

I was young. I was just out of college.

I got a call, and a woman told me that her niece had vanished.

And so I got in my truck, and I drove south to Melbourne.

I arrived at the sheriff's department.

I met Dr. Larry Gould.

-So you arrived in Melbourne.

Did they tell you about blood in the trailer or...?

-I didn't know any details.

The sheriff told me that Rebekah --

she's at least missing.

I thought, well, we just have to find her.

We all paired up differently in the search.

-The search efforts were primarily focused around

where the McCullough residence was.

-One thing that stands out in my mind

is we were all out down this dirt road

that was up from Casey's.

We were 6 to 10 feet apart, and everybody was silent.

And so I just started screaming, "Rebekah!

Rebekah, can you hear me? Are you hurt?

Can you hear me?"

To know that Rebekah was out there somewhere --

it was just very scary.

-As the search for Rebekah progressed,

the investigation into the case is full-on at this point.

-When someone goes missing,

police always have to look at the partner,

the boyfriend, girlfriend, of the person who's missing.

Casey would have been an obvious person

police would want to talk to because,

"A," he was her boyfriend,

"B," she was staying in his home.

♪♪

-In his initial interview with investigators,

Casey said that he and Rebekah were not dating anymore,

but they would still sleep in the same bed.

Casey outlined pretty much what they did that weekend.

-He said everything was pretty much normal.

Things were good.

He had to work Sunday morning,

and then he and Rebekah went down to Mountain View,

rented movies,

and then supposedly they went back

to Casey's trailer Sunday evening.

-I woke Rebekah up. She took me to work.

-Casey said that he worked all day

after Rebekah dropped him off at work,

and that when he got off work,

that she was supposed to come and pick him up,

but she never showed up.

-Casey said he didn't go home at all that day.

He hung out with friends and stayed the night at their house.

The next morning, he went straight from his friends

to work, and that's when he spoke to Rebekah's mother.

-Okay.

-Well, the police can't really hold someone

without any evidence.

So while investigators may have had suspicions about Casey,

they had to let him go.

What they really needed to do was verify Casey's story.

-On Sunday, September 19th,

I was grocery shopping, and as I was exiting,

I saw Rebekah and Casey, and I was like,

"Oh, hey, y'all. What are you doing?"

And Rebekah said, "We're just renting some movies.

Gonna hang out and watch movies tonight."

The next day,

I was working at Sonic,

and Casey was supposed to be there at 8:00.

And I remember the opening manager saying,

"Where's Casey?" screaming from the kitchen.

Then Casey showed up.

Nothing really out of the ordinary

other than just, you know, "Sorry. I'm here."

So he went back to the kitchen and he went to work.

And I think that I saw Rebekah's car waiting to turn.

-And then apparently she stopped by the gas station.

The cashier told police that Rebekah had been in the store,

that she'd bought a cappuccino,

and that she went out and took a right

back toward Casey's trailer.

-So sometime after 8:00 a.m., that's the window of time

when she may have disappeared.

Throughout Monday, Casey's at work.

-I went in to check my schedule. I see Casey.

I don't think he got off till about 4:00 or so that day.

I say, "Hey, buddy, we're getting ready

to go to the movies this evening,"

and Casey says, "Okay, cool. I'll go."

We go to the movies. We go out to, you know,

get something to eat.

And when we get back to my house,

either his phone was dead or out of minutes.

I can't remember.

He says, "Larron, can I borrow your phone?"

He called his phone, I guess, checking his voicemails.

He comes back and he says,

"Nobody can get ahold of Rebekah.

Her mom's left messages on my phone freaking out."

We all just reassured him -- maybe she doesn't have signal.

Maybe her phone's dead.

-They smoke some weed.

Casey decides he's gonna stay the night.

So he never returns to his own residence that day.

-Casey stayed with us, and he was there the whole night.

-Several witnesses vouched for Casey.

So investigators -- they thought this was an airtight alibi,

but Rebekah was still missing.

-The police -- they've obviously found

this very bloody crime scene.

At this point, they have to find her.

♪♪

-Police in Izard County are performing

a wide-scale search in an effort

to find a missing Mountain View woman.

-Each day that passed,

the panic slowly came in each day a little more,

a little more and a little more.

♪♪

-Monday, September 27th, 2004,

I got a tip

that they are searching down Highway 9.

As I was coming on to Highway 9,

I noticed in the sky -- there was a few at first,

but I noticed vultures.

And I noticed as I got closer to the spot

where they were searching that there were more and more,

and it was really ominous

because it was, like, a perfectly bright, sunny day

and you just see these birds swirling.

And then I see cars lined on the side of the road.

So I pull in behind this set of cars.

I get out, and down this embankment,

I see a searcher.

And I asked the searcher, I said,

"Are you guys out here looking for Rebekah?"

And he points.

And there she was.

♪♪

-Rebekah's body was found very near the side of the road.

It's a steep incline.

It looked like she had been dumped,

like someone had tossed the body down.

-She was partially clad

in just a t-shirt and a pair of underwear.

She was in a what I would call loose fetal position.

-She had been dead probably for about a week.

I arrived back at the sheriff's department,

and Dr. Gould comes walking up to me,

and he asked me, he said, "Did they find my daughter?"

And I said, "Larry, you need to go talk to the sheriff."

At that point, he grabbed me and said,

"Did they find my daughter?"

And I said, "Yes."

-At that point, I mean, I just obviously lost it.

I mean, it's -- I was just in tears,

and, uh, still to this day, I mean...

I had wanted to see her,

and they told me, "You shouldn't."

And that can play on your mind if...

[ Crying ]

♪♪

-We were all hoping, you know, to get her back,

to have her back in our lives.

And the shock of knowing that she was never coming back,

you know, and that somebody could

do something so heinous to her,

it was very hard to come back from that.

♪♪

-Family and friends in Mountain View

and surrounding communities are coming to grips

with the shocking murder of a college student

-I would not say at this point that we have cleared anybody

as far as being a potential suspect,

nor have we zeroed in on any one particular solid suspect.

-I can remember, uh,

when I first heard about Rebekah's murder.

It was so unusual for something like that to happen here.

-The thought that someone would come in

and kill Rebekah just kind of rattled people's minds.

Did she know the person?

Was it a stranger just come through?

It's kind of scared everybody.

-Police, when they are developing a list of suspects,

they want to say, "Okay, was she having conflicts with anybody?"

People did say Rebekah could scrap.

Yes, she loved her friends.

But if you got in her face, there would be a fight.

There were a lot of rumors at the time.

This could have been a girl-fight-type situation.

-Problem was, there were so many rumors

that were so untrue.

I feel like the police just kind of ran with whatever they could.

Anybody that was even remotely close to the case

was a suspect.

You know, when I walked in and done my first interview,

it was like, "You did this. You know who did this.

We've been told that after the crime,

you went and helped clean up the mess."

And that just shattered me.

I-I was in shock.

The whole time, I was just shaking.

-As you're moving through an investigation,

you really have to follow every lead,

even if it's based on town gossip.

And investigators -- they found nothing concrete

connecting any of Rebekah's female friends to her murder.

But that did not stop the rumors.

♪♪

-The rumor mill -- it just really divided everyone.

It divided the whole community.

We didn't know who to trust.

If you walked in a gas station,

you'd just get these looks and, like, whispers,

and you never had any peace.

You never had any time to just sit and mourn your friend.

-When enough people buy into a rumor,

that just becomes the accepted narrative,

and that's when the real truth just gets buried.

♪♪

-We now know that it was a horrific crime.

We're in shock. It's the type of thing

that you think only happens to other people.

-Dr. Larry Gould and his daughters, Tiffany and Danielle,

hold on to each other for comfort.

Their sister, Rebekah, was found murdered

and at the bottom of this embankment.

-The State Police has the best of the best,

as far as I'm concerned, involved with this case.

I did what everybody does when these things happen.

You trust law enforcement.

But this is the preliminary aspect

of a criminal investigation,

and they're not gonna tell you anything.

-As with any investigation, only members of law enforcement

knew what Rebekah's injuries were.

None of the details from the autopsy were made public

or shared with Rebekah's family.

-The official cause of death listed by the medical examiner

was blunt force injuries of the head.

And the official manner of death was classified as a homicide.

She had basically a shattered nasal structure,

so she'd clearly been hit in the nose.

And then she also had four to five fractures

on the left side of her head.

-Whoever hit her hit her really hard.

-The medical examiner did say Rebekah possibly

could have been strangled,

but he couldn't make a conclusion on that.

The medical examiner also could not determine

whether Rebekah had been sexually assaulted

because of the level of decomposition

that her body experienced.

♪♪

-As a reporter, I get calls from people all the time,

and so I would get little bits and pieces leaked to me.

Rebekah reportedly had brought two large suitcases with her

on this weekend trip to Casey's house,

but they only found one of those suitcases.

-The other item that was discovered missing

was a leg off of Casey's piano in the living room.

-Now this piano leg would periodically just fall.

It was kind of an older piano.

Police were operating under the assumption

that she was possibly struck in the head

with this loose piano leg,

and whoever killed her likely wasn't going there

with the intention of killing her.

Early on in Rebekah's case,

the lead detective -- he got promoted.

So a new detective was actually brought in,

a guy named Dennis Simons.

-Special Agent Dennis Simons was a reserve member

of the U.S. Marines.

He was a trooper with the Arkansas State Police

for about five years before he officially joined

the Criminal Investigations Department in 2004,

and he was local to the Mountain View area.

-Rebekah was known to consume marijuana.

Dennis had a theory that this was drug-related,

and so he's trying to vet everybody in Rebekah's world

who has some type of drug connection.

He interviewed a lot of people,

and he went down a lot of rabbit holes.

And so you have a new suspect, and that's Chris.

-Chris had a reputation of being a bad boy.

He had a rough exterior, had a rough upbringing.

-Chris was in the drug scene in Mountain View,

and he and Rebekah were friends.

-He knew Rebekah from school.

They had grown up together.

Rebekah did buy some pot from Chris's friend

a few days before the murder,

and there were rumors going around that Chris

and his friend might have had something to do with it.

-There were some local residents who said

they overheard Chris make some comments

about the murder,

about not actually committing the murder,

but maybe being there

or helping to move her body with his vehicle.

♪♪

-Investigators interviewed Chris multiple times.

They gave him a lie-detector test,

which he failed.

So police became sort of convinced

that he and his friend had been responsible for it.

-Chris kept telling investigators

that he was innocent,

but the more he was investigated,

the more people in the community seemed to come forward

with these stories about him.

♪♪

-Chris's vehicle was seized

and processed for forensic evidence.

They were obviously looking for Rebekah's DNA,

and they were looking for forensic evidence

inside Casey's trailer.

-I'd get some kind of a notice

that the Arkansas State Police wanted to bring me up to date,

and they told me they had two suspects.

They wouldn't give me names.

They were being watched and that

they felt that there was -- an arrest was imminent.

And so my -- my hopes and my thoughts

were just all over the place.

♪♪

-The lead investigator in the case, Dennis Simons --

he was telling people that Chris was the guy.

-But they never found any evidence

that he had been to that trailer

or that he even knew where it was.

No evidence, no DNA,

nothing that would put him at the crime scene.

-Despite all of the rumors swirling around Chris,

the prosecutor on the case eventually told Dennis Simons

that the evidence was just too circumstantial,

and in order to charge Chris and his friend

with Rebekah's murder, he needed more.

♪♪

-As time went on,

I tried to make life go on because I had to,

not because I wanted to.

-For months, sometimes years at a time,

there would be no investigative activity.

-It was almost like they just set her case file on a shelf,

and it was never coming back down,

you know, that they'd given up.

-People just wanted answers,

and there was none being given

because the investigation was going nowhere.

♪♪

-I didn't have any updates, any facts.

None.

I knew that the only way I was gonna get information

was to become my own investigator.

And so that led me to begin the letter writing.

I began by writing a letter to the prosecutor at that time.

"As of next month, eight years ago,

I lost my daughter to the hands of a killer.

Her case remains unsolved,

so I have decided to formally request certified copies

of all records concerning my daughter's murder."

I was after anything they'd give me, you know?

Let me look at your file.

Let me see where it fits into maybe

the rumors that I've been told.

"I am writing for the second time,

as I have not received a response from you...

This is unacceptable and frankly, cruel...

Accountability and justice... are parents...

Stop hiding under the guise...

Perhaps if you have a child of your own,

you can understand my feelings."

I was pissed.

When you have a parent that's reaching out like this

after so many years, I think you can set aside some time.

"I am politely and respectfully asking you to cooperate

or provide me a no-nonsense written explanation as to why

you will not provide justice for my daughter

Rebekah's murder."

I'm pretty sure this is the one that he gave in a little bit,

maybe because of all the -- being so forceful.

But he finally released the autopsy report to me.

And that was it.

-For nine years, Dr. Gould had no idea how his daughter died.

And the autopsy report finally gave him some answers.

But it was really, in the end, just breadcrumbs,

given that they'd been investigating this case now

for nearly a decade.

-A year or two years later, I saw Dennis Simons.

We had our first real introduction,

and he told me that there are certain cases

that will never be solved.

Crazy. I mean, literally crazy.

-So Dr. Gould and I started reconnecting.

He asked me, "What can we do to force the State Police

to investigate this case better?"

I said, "Doc, there's only one thing I know of,

is public pressure."

And on March 13th, 2018, I got an e-mail,

and it was from Catherine Townsend.

She wanted to do a podcast about Rebekah's case.

-I got involved with the Rebekah Gould case in 2018.

I am from Arkansas.

My sister was very good friends

with Rebekah Gould's sister Danielle.

Danielle had been completely traumatized by losing Rebekah,

and she just felt that it wasn't being investigated.

Over the years, I would go home to visit,

and everybody would talk about this case, this unsolved case,

and it just really kind of drew me in.

And I kept wondering, why hadn't her case been solved?

When I started investigating the case,

I went to see Dennis Simons.

My attitude going in was

even if he couldn't share any information with me,

I just wanted to let him know what I was doing as a courtesy.

And he openly told me he thinks it's Chris and his friend.

He said something like, "I arrest him every chance I get."

And he said, "I'm making sure he does life

on the installment plan."

He was arresting Chris every chance that he got,

and he was gonna keep him in jail

on whatever charge he could.

And that's when I thought the investigation was

in serious trouble.

When I got to town,

people initially did not really want to talk to me.

It was difficult.

There are a lot of people here who are not used to outsiders,

maybe a little bit hesitant to accept outside help,

and it just took time to build trust with people.

It was going back and finding everyone

who said they had information, one person at a time,

one door at a time.

It was a real-time investigation.

Rebekah was beautiful, popular, and full of life.

It's been 14 years,

and Rebekah's killer has never been found.

-The podcast launched on October 17th, 2018,

and it was like a bombshell going off.

-It took a case that people had forgotten about for 14 years,

and it made it into really a national sensation.

All of a sudden, everyone was talking about Rebekah's case.

-That's the first podcast I'd ever listened to.

-Mm-hmm. -And, I mean,

it was just like you were there

and you were investigating with her,

which is I'm all about, you know?

-Well, it was exciting to me.

It was like you were addicted to something

that you couldn't stay away from.

-All these groups started forming on social media.

There were a lot of, like, theories and innuendo

that kind of boiled back to the surface again.

♪♪

-Everything in the world was being thrown out there.

At some point, there was something on there

that we had killed her and put her in --

and buried her in my backyard.

-When the podcast came out, that was a good thing

for Rebekah and for her case.

But the old feelings and the old rumors and things like that,

it made me very sick to my stomach.

-I took no joy ever in putting people's names out there

and traumatizing them in any way,

but I think it's important to remember

that it's an unsolved murder.

We've got to figure out who did it.

-As the episodes kept coming out,

it was becoming clearer and clearer that the narrative

that we had been fed by the police was wrong.

Something wasn't making any sense here.

-I was trying to find answers, so I did a local radio show.

I said, "Call me if you have any information."

I then got a call from someone whose voice was shaking.

This person was terrified,

and what they told me -- that blew me away.

♪♪

-I got a call from someone who said

that they had worked with Casey,

putting up, like, cellphone towers

in the years around 2010,

and they said that Casey was drunk

and was sort of talking about the case.

Casey had told them Rebekah was trying to break up with him.

And, you know, we aired a short interview

with this person on the podcast.

♪♪

-When the interview aired,

it stirred up all sorts of speculation,

and all of a sudden, Casey was back in the spotlight.

-One of the first things that I was trying to figure out

was what the relationship was between Rebekah and Casey.

When I spoke to Casey's friends,

they told me he described her as the love of his life.

But Danielle had told me

that Rebekah was ending things with Casey.

-Just before she disappeared,

Rebekah had told me that she was leaving

and moving to the Fayetteville area,

so she was gonna be breaking up with him.

-There are plenty of murders

where the motive is an unwanted breakup.

But in 2004, when Casey was first questioned,

he downplayed the fact that they had broken it off.

-Okay.

-There's other circumstantial evidence

that makes Casey a viable suspect.

The week that Rebekah was missing,

his behaviors were extremely odd.

-All right, so this is my statement

from when we were first

interviewed by the investigators

at Izard County Sheriff's Office.

"I had been told by Casey

that Rebekah was supposed to have picked him up,

but that she hadn't shown.

We all returned to my house at around 11:00, 11:30 p.m.

Casey used my phone. After he had hung up,

he stated that Rebekah was missing.

That's when it really seemed odd

that he didn't head out the door to find her."

You know, when you look back at all the things

that don't make sense, well, sure, it raises eyebrows.

Even as a friend, you know, it's like,

well, I don't know why you didn't leave

and go back that night to check on her.

-Immediately after Rebekah went missing,

it seemed like everyone in the town was looking for her.

Casey, however, was not part of that search party.

-I met Casey at my daughter's graduation.

He was absolutely taken by Rebekah.

So when there was very little effort on his part

to help in the search,

that became a real red flag for me.

♪♪

-[ Exhales ]

I met Casey in 2010, in Texas.

My dad was a project manager for cellphone towers,

and he had a worker from Arkansas

that he'd been working with,

and that person brought on Casey.

He was kind of a hipster dude,

cute, had a little swagger about him, I guess you could say.

I would not have guessed that he was from Arkansas

just from, like, talking to him.

He felt a little more cool than that.

He had a very fairy-tale way of looking at life.

Eventually, he just moved in, pretty much.

Casey told me about Rebekah

when we were getting to know each other.

My immediate reaction was I felt bad for him

for what he had been through.

I could tell that he cared about her a lot.

It seemed like he really loved her.

I didn't even ask him if he was a suspect.

He was such a nice guy that it was easy to go,

"There's no way he did it."

So we go to Arkansas.

We went to his house, and we went inside,

and we bring our stuff into the first bedroom.

And I hopped down on the bed, and I'm looking out the window.

All I could think about was Rebekah, and I was thinking,

wow, this is so far from everybody.

I'm like, he could get away with anything out here.

I just couldn't take it anymore,

and I asked him where her body was dumped.

He got frustrated with me and he said,

"It's 10 minutes from here. It's a different highway.

Let's move on."

I was worried because he would not tell me any more.

I couldn't trust him.

♪♪

Casey went back to Arkansas,

and then I hear nothing else until the podcast.

I remember where I was standing when I heard that.

I was cooking breakfast, and I just kind of hit the floor.

The witness said he was working on towers when he confessed.

My sister actually was like, "We know that guy.

It's got to be that guy."

And sure enough, it was.

-We went to the witness's house,

took the statement, and at that point,

it became part of the official case file.

That's when Dennis talked to Casey.

-In 2018, Casey was living back in Arkansas,

and when Special Agent Simons took the witness's story to him,

Casey denied ever working on cell towers

at the same time as the witness.

-The witness was very believable to me.

He's worked with my dad.

But I could never prove

that they were at the same hotel at the same time.

-Investigators could not find corroboration that the witness

and Casey ever worked on cellphone towers together,

and they didn't think the story was credible.

Investigators believed that Rebekah was killed

the morning of Monday, September 20th,

and Casey had an ironclad alibi.

♪♪

-Ultimately, Casey kind of just became a recluse

and sequestered himself from everyone,

and he was just different from then on, as you would be.

You know, I believe in my heart

that there's no way Casey would be involved in anything

that would be harmful to Rebekah, you know?

So the longer this goes unsolved,

you start to think something completely random

has happened that none of us can see

because it is just so random.

♪♪

-The podcast ended, and I had the feeling

that all this effort was for naught.

It's not gonna change.

But then I got an e-mail in my inbox.

It was from a criminology professor

at American Military University.

She had heard me on the "Hell and Gone" podcast,

and she became very intrigued with Rebekah's case.

-That house is remote.

You have to know it's there. -Right.

-I am a combat Army veteran

and former counterintelligence agent,

and I'm a criminal investigator

for my local sheriff's office in Colorado.

I had binged the podcast, and I was pretty much hooked.

But what hooked me is some of the specific actions

that Rebekah's killer took in the aftermath of her murder.

It's got to be someone with a tie to that residence.

They've been there before. -Yeah.

-Because they took her out that backdoor.

-They did.

Jennifer saw this case the way I saw it.

Whoever killed Rebekah Gould moved her body

and cleaned up the mess.

These are critical details that cannot be ignored.

That means that the killer has

an intimate connection to the house.

They leave all of this evidence.

They leave her car. -Right.

-They leave her dog. So they're gonna know

this was the last place she was.

-Right.

By the end of 2018, it was clear

that Dennis Simons had focused the majority of his efforts

towards trying to find things that would implicate Chris.

But why would he stick around

and remove Rebekah's body to a secondary location?

And why does he care about cleaning up Casey's bedroom?

-When you develop a theory about a case,

if your theory is wrong,

you will potentially miss key details

that could lead you in other directions.

You just dismiss them because they don't fit your theory.

-And I promised Rebekah that I would find her killer.

It was a promise to never quit.

She deserved that.

So I filed a complaint with the Arkansas State Police

against Dennis Simons.

One of the things that I mentioned was,

if this case is ever gonna be solved,

that Dennis Simons has to be removed

and another investigator brought in.

-In 2020, out of the blue, I got a call.

I saw the Arkansas State Police number flash up,

and I picked up,

and this person said, "My name's Mike McNeill.

I'm a new investigator on the case.

I hear you may have some recordings for me."

-I was told by a source inside the State Police

that they had had enough of the bad publicity.

Now their public statement was, was that Dennis was retiring,

and they assigned Special Agent Mike McNeill

to take over the case in January of 2020.

-He did the one thing nobody ever did.

He came to my office.

For the first time, I knew I was getting somebody

that was sincerely listening to what I had to say.

And he did exactly what I asked to be done in my letters --

go back to the beginning.

-George and I did have communication with Mike,

and I could just tell from some of the questions

he was asking us that he was looking at the McCulloughs.

-When Casey talks to Special Agent McNeill

for the first time, he throws out the same theory

that the previous investigator had,

but McNeill completely dismisses that idea.

-Mike McNeill clears Casey because of his alibi.

He clears Claude, Casey's dad,

because he was driving a truck in upstate New York at the time.

And then he starts going one by one through all

of the male members of the McCullough family

that had ties to the trailer where Rebekah was killed.

-At the same time, Jennifer and I decided

that we were gonna start a Facebook page.

-Unsolved Murder of Rebekah Gould.

-And we started getting a flood of members.

-We wanted as many people as possible,

and we never censored comments.

We actually encouraged people to brainstorm.

Give us your ideas.

-We followed it every post, every step of the way.

-Every step of the way, and we'd call each other and discuss it.

What do you think? Well, what do you think?

-People were constantly fighting online,

like if it was one of Casey's friends or one of his relatives,

they were defending him.

And then somebody would chime in and say,

"Oh, you must have had something to do with the murder, too."

And it was just conversations like that,

and they would just erupt.

-My sister was very vocal on the web page.

My sister is very opinionated,

and she can take so much, and then she gives her opinion,

[laughs] whether they want it or not, I guess.

-George and I hoped it would bring people out of the woodwork

who maybe knew what happened to Rebekah.

And then a guy named William Miller joined the group.

-He was from the Philippines. We could tell that,

you know, from looking at his profile.

Why is somebody from the Philippines joining our page?

-Now, we had a member of our volunteer team,

I guess you could call it,

who had mapped out Casey's whole family tree.

-Jennifer -- she texted me and she said,

"Do you know who William Miller is?"

And I said, "That is Casey's cousin.

That's his first cousin." -I thought, well, huh,

he's in here under his real name. Okay.

You would think he might be concerned

that we know he's a member of the family,

but, you know, we weren't gonna stop him.

We're just monitoring him.

It was in January of 2020

when I received the first direct message from William Miller.

The first thing he sent me was a screenshot

of a newspaper article.

So I responded like I do to everybody else.

I just kept it cordial and normal.

But we continued to communicate throughout 2020

about different topics.

Several times, he said that he hoped

I would get justice for Rebekah.

He said, "I think you can solve this."

I said, "How did you even learn about this case?"

And he just said, "podcast," one word.

A couple months later, I brought it up again.

I said, "I can't remember if I asked you,

but have you been to Arkansas?"

Like, did you know anybody, like,

related to this case?" or something like that.

And he responded with, "I've been to all 50 states."

I said, okay, so he's definitely trying

to hide his relationship to Casey's family.

We had done our research, and we knew that he'd been

living in Texas in 2004,

and he had a fiancée and a small daughter.

-And then Jennifer and I learned something that was a bombshell.

We found out that William Miller had been in proximity to Rebekah

within hours of her murder.

♪♪

-September of 2020 was a turning point

for our investigation.

That is when somebody reached out to me

and told me that William's brother, Jeremy Miller,

had attended that Mount Pleasant High School in 2004.

-William Miller's mom, Linda, and his brother, Jeremy,

had moved to Arkansas before the murder,

and they lived two miles from Casey's house.

-The other part of the tip was that

the day after Rebekah's disappearance,

Jeremy Miller was taken out of school and never seen again.

And when Jeremy was pulled out of school,

there was another guy with the mom.

He was described as definitely older than Jeremy,

but not the mom's age.

He was reported as acting suspiciously,

like, looking out the windows to see who might be around.

The mom isn't married.

She didn't have a boyfriend that we knew of.

Like, who else would it have been?

We concluded that that probably was William Miller.

That was the tip we needed.

That was the turning point for us.

And I realized his motive for joining the Facebook group

was probably much different than I originally thought.

-Now, here's the thing.

The police knew that William Miller had been

in town that weekend.

-Remember, Casey had said that a cousin of his

had come to the trailer on Sunday night.

-Back in 2004, a few days after Rebekah was reported missing,

the Arkansas police did actually follow up on this lead.

They had police in Texas track down Billy

along with his mom and his brother.

-What Linda told investigators was that shortly after

they got to the Melbourne area,

Jeremy started having trouble in school.

-So she decided she wanted to move back to Texas,

where they were from.

And so on Sunday, Billy came up to help them move.

Billy told them basically the same story that Casey does,

that he just showed up at Casey's house.

He just was there for a few minutes,

they talked, and that he left,

and that the next day,

the same day Rebekah vanished,

they decide they're gonna take this impromptu trip

to Branson, Missouri, which is three-plus hours away.

And she said the next day they get Jeremy out of school

and they pack up all their stuff.

On Wednesday, they move to Texas.

-The Arkansas State Police apparently found

the answers pretty satisfactory, and then that was the end of it.

They talked to them once.

-After that, that lead was left alone for 15 years.

As soon as we found this out,

we start going over the things he was saying on our page.

It was clear from his messages

that among all of the McCulloughs,

he was the one who really focused in

on some of these details.

-So I made sure that the person

who reached out to us went to Investigator McNeill

and told him those recollections.

Mike did his due diligence

and conducted a background check on William Miller

to see if he had a criminal history.

There had been a couple accusations made about him,

but that those accusations never resulted

in charges or a conviction.

One was aggravated assault against his ex-wife,

and another was molestation of a minor, a child.

-William Miller lives in the Philippines.

He worked on oil rigs all over the world.

Special Agent McNeill put a flag out for his passport.

He said, "He's not a suspect in this murder,

but he's someone I want to talk to,

so let me know when he comes back into the country."

-So he gets the notification in October of 2020,

and he knows William is in the country at this point.

-William Miller was in Oregon because his mother and brother

were now living in Oregon.

McNeill calls Linda Miller and he says,

"Hey, you know, I need to talk to you,

I need to talk to Jeremy, and I need to talk to William."

-And she said, "I don't know

when William's gonna be back home.

You know, he works overseas."

But Mike knows that William is in the U.S.

If William has no involvement,

why is she lying for him?

♪♪

-After Linda Miller and Mike McNeill first connected,

a couple of days later, she called Mike back

and informed him that William would be around

in the near future.

-So the State Police sent Mike McNeill to Oregon

to interview him in a little town called Cottage Grove.

William Miller goes into the interrogation room

to talk with Mike McNeill,

and they're having a pretty bland conversation

about the case, the facts.

-Mike's building rapport with William,

making him feel comfortable, all the typical stuff you do

to put somebody at ease.

And one of the key turning points is

when Mike tells William, you know,

"There's others in your family who have been willing

to take a polygraph test."

Mike basically says, "Well, you know what?

Maybe this police department here has a polygrapher on staff

that's available today."

Meanwhile, the polygrapher is already at the station,

ready to go.

-Immediately, you can tell William's body language --

he starts tensing up.

Moments later, the polygraph guy is in there,

and now William's trapped.

He is asked several specific questions about

if he had anything to do with Rebekah's murder.

-Okay.

-So he gets through the polygraph,

and then, you know, William pretty quickly asked,

"How did I do?"

You can see it.

The stress is just, like, emitting itself from him.

And then he goes, "I think Mike has some things to show you."

So they switch.

Mike McNeill comes back in the room and sits down.

-And he's got a folder with him, you know, with some files.

He opens it up,

and he shows William a picture of a rag --

the rag that was found underneath the bed.

-Okay?

-Then Mike McNeill goes to a second picture,

and it's a picture of the inside of Billy's truck,

the one that he owned at the time of Rebekah's murder.

He had had the Texas Rangers track this truck down

and had pictures taken inside of it.

-Then comes really the turning point.

You know, Mike brings out a photo of the floorboard

of William's truck.

-Mike McNeill is using a time-tested technique here --

the bluff.

He's got no evidence linking Billy to this crime.

The wash rag, the floorboard --

there's no conclusive DNA on any of it.

But he wants to see how Billy will react.

-[ Exhales ]

-You don't ever want them to leave the environment you're in.

You don't want to stop the momentum.

You don't want to give them a minute outside

to second-guess themselves.

And Mike knows, like, he doesn't have anything

to arrest William on,

but he knows William can walk right out the door.

What if I give in to this request

and his mom's like, "Let's go"?

It's very, very risky.

-And then Mike McNeill does something that I --

I'm still astonished.

He lets William get up.

-All right.

♪♪

-McNeill takes this huge risk

and lets William Miller leave the interview,

just leave the room and go outside to talk to his mom.

It was just when it seemed like he was

inching towards a confession.

He just lets him go.

-That was one hell of a decision he made.

-All right.

-But I think Mike read William well enough

that he was gonna be able to get William back in the room.

-And that's when Billy finally admits

that he was the one who murdered Rebekah.

-And then William tells him the story.

-Billy goes on to say that after he hit Rebekah,

he strangled her with a necktie

that he found in Casey's bedroom.

He said he put the tie in Rebekah's suitcase.

-When I talked to Danielle,

she said Rebekah's oversized black suitcase was missing.

Billy knew where the suitcase was.

That was hard, physical evidence

that could tie him to this murder.

-The suitcase was found on a piece of property

that was across the street from the property

where Linda Miller was living at the time of the murder.

-So next to the suitcase, investigators found a comforter.

They found some sheets that matched the pattern

of bedding found in Casey's washing machine back in 2004,

but they did not find a murder weapon.

No piano leg. No necktie.

-A breaking news update -- major breakthrough

in a murder investigation that spans nearly two decades.

An arrest has been made in the case of Rebekah Gould,

who was killed in 2004.

-44-year-old William Miller was arrested in Oregon

after living in the Philippines for years.

♪♪

-Hearing that they had made an arrest,

I was almost like, no, come on.

But then it kind of -- reality set in,

and I realize they've got somebody.

-I was an emotional wreck.

It was the sense of relief,

but then again a sense of shock

that this person that was arrested was no one

that I knew Rebekah ever associating with.

-William Miller? Who is that?

Like, you know, it was Casey's cousin.

Well, what cousin?

Like, you know, and why did I do this?

-William Miller pleaded guilty to the murder of Rebekah Gould.

The prosecutor agreed to a plea deal.

-William Miller was sentenced on October 18th, 2022.

He got 40 years in prison,

and he'll have to do most of those.

-And he did something I've never, ever seen.

He agreed to talk to her father after the sentencing.

♪♪

-I wanted to hear what happened.

I wanted to hear answers.

When I met him face to face in the jail area,

his eyes were down.

He wouldn't make eye contact with you.

I had an opportunity to ask him some questions,

and the minute he felt like he had an audience,

the minute he felt like he was in control,

his posture changed.

He puffed out. He --

and then he started making more eye contact.

The simple question he was asked was, what happened?

Why? He said that he hit her

and then immediately started giving her CPR.

So, give me a break.

He never strangled her, according to him.

And he was attempting to revive her to save her life.

His story completely changed.

And so did he rape her? Did he actually strangle her?

I don't know.

There's a lot of questions that don't have answers.

♪♪

-The one thing that we know for a fact

is that William Miller is a liar.

There were several details that William Miller gave

in his confession that did not make sense.

-He claimed that he went to the McCullough property

early on Monday morning.

He killed Rebekah, took her body,

disposed of her over on Highway 9, several miles away,

did a semi-cleanup of the trailer,

and said he was back home before his mom and brother

even got up for his brother to go to school.

So that timeline is impossible.

There's not enough time for that to have occurred

before his brother had to go to school.

But the bigger problem is, if that was the time frame,

then Casey is at the trailer, because Casey didn't go to work

till about 8:00 a.m. that morning.

So I know that that part of William's confession

cannot be true.

And this is another peculiar part.

He never actually declares

that he used the piano leg to hit Rebekah and murder her.

-I don't believe he falsely confessed,

but I think there could be more to the story.

-All right.

-It seems strange to me

that there literally is no real motivation.

It just seems like there's something missing.

-Camera speed, sound speed.

This is Nathan's interview, take one. Mark.

-My name is Nathan McBride.

I am Billy Miller's cousin.

He was one of my best friends for a portion of my life,

and for another portion of my life,

he was my enemy because of the things

he had done to family members and others.

-This is Nathan's interview, take one. Mark.

-My name is Nathan McBride.

I am Billy Miller's cousin.

Billy and I were very, very close for a time.

Billy was a very fun guy to be around back then.

When he was younger, he was a very attractive guy.

So he obviously got a lot of the ladies.

But I think his charisma

and his ability to persuade was exceptional.

Billy had a shoebox full of photographs,

Polaroids he had taken,

of women in the act of,

and without exaggeration, hundreds and hundreds of photos,

all different women.

This was his trophy, you know?

I am not related to any of the family that's in Arkansas.

That is on Billy's mother's side.

So I had no knowledge of Casey

or any of his side of the family whatsoever

until I found out about the murder.

-44-year-old William Miller was arrested in Oregon

after living in the Philippines for years.

-It's still unclear what led police

to initially suspect Miller or his connection to the victim.

-It was a shocker.

But to be honest with you,

whenever I started learning more details about it,

a lot of light bulbs went off in my head.

♪♪

Billy had been accused by a family member

of trying to date-rape her.

He had gotten her drunk and tried to take advantage of her.

Even though I knew he was a sexually driven person,

I didn't want to believe it.

No one wants to believe

that essentially their best friend

is raping their own family members.

Around 2002, there was an allegation

of Billy sexually molesting a child.

That was when we stopped

being as close as we were.

Billy was never formally charged

with any of the sexual allegations.

If they would have actually pursued this,

he wouldn't have had the opportunity

to take Rebekah's life.

♪♪

I believe Billy went to the trailer

to try to have a sexual encounter with Rebekah.

And her resistance sparked him to commit the murder.

I do believe he was the sole murderer of Rebekah.

As far as Casey or any of the other McCulloughs,

I honestly think that they were victims of this crime,

not near to the magnitude of Rebekah,

but they were victims of Billy.

-Rumors have their way of going around,

and with people insinuating or saying

that Billy ended her life,

but someone helped him,

is just a farce.

As far as me and my boys go, we did not know.

Some people can't just drop the story.

It's like a never-ending story.

I am just glad that Rebekah's family got closure.

-One of the most curious things about this case

is that William Miller got away with Rebekah's murder

for a very, very long time.

It's almost like the renewed interest in the case

lured him out of hiding, and he almost couldn't help himself.

-I think he very much enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game

that he played online,

nobody knowing that he was actually the killer,

that he could reveal himself

when he wanted to reveal himself,

and then he could go back into the shadows

whenever he wanted to go back in the shadows.

-At the plea hearing,

I was told that I had to write a victim statement.

"18 years ago, my life changed forever.

18 years ago, many lives were changed forever.

My precious daughter Rebekah Christian Gould

was taken from us.

You took away a chance for a young,

tenacious, and blossoming girl

to dream of her possibilities in life.

You took away from me

my opportunity to watch those things happen.

My daughter was dumped like trash.

You were long gone.

You have had 18 years of life, family,

children, money, a career.

Today that ends, and today I grieve.

I will leave you with this one statement.

Rebekah lives in all of us.

She will never die.

Rebekah inspires us all to better our lives

and to know that love and grace are words

I will remember her by."

[ Crying ] I'm sorry.

♪♪

For me to walk away at this point is something

that I emotionally have to do.

I want other families and people

not have to go through what I've gone through.

The problem is that if the law enforcement

labels a case like this an active investigation,

they never have to release their file.

-These cases can go on for 15 or 20 years

with one person in charge, with no release of information.

There should be a process of oversight.

-There's a point in time when this is no longer a murder case.

It's a cold case.

I'm not here to belittle law enforcement,

but I think they need to change their procedures

and get a different cold-case team

to come in at a certain point in time.

Turn it over to people

that are trained for this next phase of it.

If there's anything that's obviously been overlooked,

purposefully or not, it can be caught.

So I'm asking for change.

And to me, that's my way of giving back.

I want it to be called a Rebekah Law

to honor Rebekah.

♪♪

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