Case File 11: Shadows of Love: The Carmen Thomas Disappearance

hi everybody and welcome to another episode of crie document wow wow that was beyond ridiculous and that was your idea yeah no that was funny as funny as that was great that was great that was great what are you talking about that was awesome yeah it was pretty good do the other one yes um yeah the other one yeah listen to this guys this is great hey there hey everybody you want to see you want to see crime documentaries do uh little what's what's that singer's name who's got their really really low voice oh my gosh I forgot his name I know exactly who you're talking about D Darth Vader oh my God yeah like do Darth Vader L I am your [Laughter] father oh that's that's great okay enough for this anyway guys sorry we're having too much fun yeah no for the people for the people on the uh podcast side of things uh AJ's got a little uh fun little toy yeah connected to his soundboard which is awesome so yeah what but what is that singer's name the one with a really really low voice I can't think of it off hand if anyone knows put it in the comments because honestly I'm stumped oh God what was his name because you sound that sounded a lot like him so may you know what because and I know you can sing so maybe should do that yeah sing a little bit for us go ahead no no not no no go ahead no no like oh oh I know who you're talking about actually ready like yeah yeah's what's a song hold on what's that Christmas song you know what I'm talking about it's like uh I don't know just chestnuts roasting on an open fire it makes you sound so stupid yeah makes you sound so stupid if you try to sing because it try to like fluctuate the pitch so it's terrible that's good stuff but I will let people know in the audience that AJ AJ really can sing oh thank you yeah oh you're seeing that yeah I'm seeing that baby Ola Ola yeah that's thank you for coming and watching yeah I her name is uh uh elen Ilana Ilana I think yes Ilana ha sure yes all right I'm Gonna Leave it to you because if I screw it up she gonna kill both of us so I'm just going to let you do it seea nice to meet you yeah nice to meet you very nice first time in the room I think yeah well very nice to meet so uh we we see she said c so that means obviously yes I said it right and that was good Iana yeah so uh thank you for thank you for stopping by um we really don't have much to say we just no we're gonna jump into this documentary but we have just a couple things we're GNA talk about probably but other than that yeah whoa that was nice well that was cool thanks appreciate that thanks hey how you doing hey hey hey Elana how you how you doing yeah so sorry I had to mess around had to mess around anything going on you is there anything you want to talk about before we move forward here you know not too much man I just want to give a shout out real quick that we are live right now on paril network Central if anybody doesn't know parel Network Central head over there live on Facebook every Sunday night 7 PM we show documentaries of crime cases that are fascinating very heinous and just downright wrong sometimes and you know what it's great to bring it out in the open because some things need to be discussed and that's the reason why we do the show so uh what else do you have to say brother well apparently she's seducing both of us I know I know this is how you doing how you doing uh yeah so we go it we actually uh I saw this one I've been going back and forth on two okay all week and finally uh finally I decided last night okay let's show this one because we haven't really shown something like this before so this is this is a good one I watched some of it not all of it but I watched some of it so I W I think I watched the first 20 or the first 15 minutes of it and it was it was really good so um this is why we're watching it today uh Carmen Carmen Thomas um real real unfortunate uh tragedy that happened to her uh she was kidnapped and obviously murdered and I was just reading a little bit of info she was actually uh last seen on June 27th um it doesn't say the year but I'm sure we're going to say that see this in the uh in the video but that's the day after my birthday oh no way yeah so and they believe that she was murdered two days after she was oh well I guess well you know what I won't say she was really taken or kidnapped I'll you guys can just watch the the video and um uh yeah um I'm sad because she was obviously a very attractive woman and and uh Gone Gone Too Soon unfortunately so let's start up the video and I hope you guys enjoy this thank you Pam for sharing it out appreciate that and thank you for stopping by and uh I just noticed a buddy is in the room who um Mr Chris lak oh and uh he's an uh a very good friend of mine great and uh yeah nice to see him in the room awesome I hope you stick around Chris I hope you have some time so basically what we do we show documentaries on uh True Crime stuff so here we go this is on Carmen Thomas here we go guys Shadows of love shadows of yes operation Keele a missing person's case that rapidly becomes suspected murder when blood spatter is found in her apartment police have a Prime Suspect but no body what has happened where is the evidence and will science provide the crucial links in solving the case a crime scene is a puzzle that has to be solved who done it a scattering of Clues to be deciphered by clever detective work and the power of science [Music] in the Suburban streets of Hamilton a resident investigates a car that appears to be abandoned they found it strange just the way it was sit there unlocked and um from what they saw in the car they thought this is not right so they rang police the car wasn't reported stolen but the registered owner 30-year-old single parent Carman Thomas had failed to make the scheduled pickup of her child the following day she's reported missing the circumstances of the car being left in Hamilton abandoned and then also the fact Carmen hadn't come back to her child suggested something wasn't right immediately detective inspector Mark Benfield sensed this was more than just a simple missing person's case the alarm Bells were ringing um six sense you know your gut feeling that you have a few experience it had a feel about it that suggested that we need to get onto this urgently police canvased the area for further information regarding the vehicle and its missing owner it's basically identifying any witnesses that may have seen the car being parked there her her exiting the car or any involvement around the car uh when did they first notice carbing in their street speak to everyone on the street and identify anyone in the household that may have seen something the car is taken back to Oakland and examined by ESR scientists for Clues as to what had happened to its owner we were looking whether there's any indications that something sinisters occurred uh in the car the items in the car themselves looked like the kind of car um any one of us could have with the exception of the fact she had a packed suitcase in the back we went through um the items that were in there we item them out and and looked at them them all and we found there was blood staining on two of the items in both cases the DNA profile came back as M Thomas um she's allowed to have her own blood on her own clothes what we don't know is whether that's come from an event that's unrelated to to her disappearance DNA samples were taken from various places in the car to determine if anyone else other than Carmen had driven it recently we didn't get any useful results from that we're unable to actually answer that for in the glove box were two Clues to the last people to have seen kmen there were two notes found in the car quite different in context but linked linked in the sense of they sort of linked to car's um occupation one was regarding a debt that needed to be paid once we established who that note came from we completed interviews in and around that person and they they told us what they did and how it came about that note was regarding a debt to a manager of an escort agency the second contained cash and that suggested that she was paid some money for services and it was addressed to misty misty that turned out to be a trade name for kmen where she worked she was known as Misty interesting impression that she' gone to Hamilton for work or had received cash to you know to do do what it she had to do Misty was carman's alias in the sex industry investigators need to determine who is the author of the note containing the money we got the envelope for that note submitted to ESR and took samples from it with the view of trying to figure out who may have actually handled the item itself one of the samples provided a partial DNA profile that corresponded to Miss Thomas's DNA profile and there was an additional trace of DNA from someone else the trace was such that it was insufficient to use for Meaningful comparisons this combined with a lack of fingerprints suggested that whoever had written the note may have worn gloves why yeah that's weird they're right yeah kman lived in a flat in all walk with her young child she had shared custody with her ex partner Brad Callahan it was he who had filed the missing person's report okay was a civil engineer Bing and living in a a relationship with a partner who was seven months pregnant he was generally speaking a clean cut young man um with a good background uh to his life with kman missing the young son they shared is now in Brad's full-time care here the next step of the investigation was to check carman's home forensic scientists began a scene examination with this kind of Examination for a missing person you're really looking for inconsistencies in a pattern of living is there something there that shouldn't be there is there something missing nothing particularly UNT in the the living area we locked in the bedrooms nothing necessarily UNT in there but once we got to look in the bathro bathroom and there was blood staining in there that you know is indicative of something happening that probably shouldn't be happening in a in a missing person case there was smears of Blood on the the front of a basin and dilute Blood on the top of the Basin next to the sink there's also we found uh quite a quantity of dilute blood spots inside the shower round about from you know waist height sort of down in a fan kind of pattern much like I'd expect to get if someone turn the tap on and then wash something under the shower that's got blood on it and it's that doesn't mean anything yeah I know we looked in I is the front door little kit we found small Sports of I I completely understand that cops have to you know obviously do their job but I always find cops when they're coming to these type of shows they assume a lot yeah and I don't know that's I don't know if that's necessarily their job to assume no it's supposed to not be yeah it's supposed to be probable you know but that's kind of not how it works know I mean down near the floor level of a washing machine and the type of petting we're finding was very small spots of blood and to get really small spots of blood you need a certain amount of energy being applied to an open source of blood oh come on we also had spots of blood all over the the edge of the the front door but it we weren't sure at that stage whether it was um the same event that had created the pattern on the front of the washing machine because although they're very close to each other there was nothing sort of connecting the two the areas were swabbed and sent for DNA analysis it became apparent that we were looking at something sinister occurring we've got impact spatter on the floor in in the kitchen um and by the front door and we've got evidence of clean up in the bathroom so that creates a rather um unfortunate picture yeah that indicated that something had gone on I major concerns for k wellbe sure you did you had no [ __ ] cl to understand more about pattern analysis and how scientists can determine what it happen from that patterning I'm at esrs ockland lab blood is a very unique fluid when it reacts with oxygen it immediately starts to congeal which makes it behave differently from any other liquid today we're using animal blood three main types of blood stain pattern um passive kind of events which is just where gravity is the primary force involved if blood was to drip from a weapon and fall to the ground it would be a passive blood drop they're generally round and fat and have no tails projected where there's an additional Force whether it's pressure from like an artery or whether it's been flung off a weapon these are more elongated in shape and more directional looking what we can tell by looking at the the size of these and the width and the length uh we can tell how they've actually struck that surface so we can get the the angle of impact um and directionality through that the center of that oval which means we can use a collection of these to give us an idea in space have a nose bleed or something like that that's pretty powerful information for what happened the crime cly AG the Reconstruction in some cases until we until they find out it's blood or not scientists had seen the very small droplets of impact spatter a spatter pattern requires quite a bit of um of an input of energy to break the blood up into really small droplets looking at what we've got there we can get a lot of information about what kind of events occurred and where it's actually originated from there's a lot of features in this that are consistent with what we've SE seen at the apartment where collections of these very very fine spots like this and what is that actually tell us so they're spots that are traveling really quite fast created with a lot of energy cuz they're really small and they're flying horizontal to the surface so across without any influence from Gravity so they're projected pattern and created with something like an impact to create the the very small size of them on the wall we've got these lovely directional spots here so if we use this spot as an example we can see that it's got an oval shape that indicates that it's struck the surface at an angle the line that's been thrown off at the top end is part of a wave cast off pattern and if we draw a line through the wave cast off down through the center of the oval we can use that to get an idea as to where it's actually come from and then there's the sort of Gap we have between these and then the spatter pattern that goes up the wall here which is actually again very um consistent with the the patter we pattern we saw on the the door in the apartment the blood pattern raised my concern about car's welfare some sort of force physical Force had been used in the scene where someone had bled and Bar M car was missing I had to you know add that to the complete picture that night the investigators used luminol to sh up any signs of blood in the flat there were quite clear white marks and luminol um on the wall immediately opposite the bathroom door and down the edge of the the doorf frame into that bathroom so someone's made some effort to clean up but not enough that they've actually taken away any of the blood staining that was immediately visible in the shower and clearly missed some very other obvious patterns of blood staining we found luminol patterns that looked a lot like footprints on the carpet that was in the sort of Lounge dining area just show the that someone had walked in Blood and transferred it onto the carpet they showed quite a bit of activity of someone moving around with probably dilute blood on their feet through that main living area of the unit wow but on the kitchen floor underneath the high impact spatter where they expected to see a large presence of blood there was nothing on those smooth surfaces of the [ __ ] tiles there was just a a greasy residue of some type interfering effect with the luminal examination itself some type of substance on the floor was masking the presence of blood was that intentional I couldn't figure out what it might be at the time we thought initially that it might be some sort of ignitable liquid that's left to greasy residue such as kerosene so we we took samples from a number of places and brought them back and had our our physical evidence group try and analyze them in real crime scene investigations there are no magic machines that can determine what any substance is the chromagraphic mass spectrometer can only look for matches to over 200,000 substances on file and there were no [Music] matches one more piece of information came to light at carman's apartment the landlord actually said oh look by the way you realize her Bin's missing you first scan of the address you wouldn't have thought so because outside where rubs spins belonging to the number of the stre so that Sunny said oh that's interesting where is the wheelie bin the size of the bin it was The Logical way to transport a body so one of the items of significant interest was where is this bin every Council rubbish bin has a serial number that identifies exactly which address that bin belongs to if we find it somewhere it might link the murderer to the scene because it is taken from the scene it's another piece of information that sits in the file so until you find the bin and then the circumstance that add context to it it's just one piece of information DNA analysis matches the blood spatter in carman's apartment to DNA on her toothbrush the missing person's investigation is now stepped up with any person that's missing you start tracking um their their course of business to try and get some sort of feel for where they're being what they're doing where they work who their friends are their neighbors and you you just build up that complete picture about that person bank records were examined to establish the last time carman's account was accessed so we were able to go back and get the CCD footage that puts Carman at a point in place all what we know she's alive this day because we've got crit of evidence to show that she's stand standing in a supermarket with her son spending money well that's the last known physical sighting of kmen I expressed to the family that I was uneasy about K's disappearance but we asked K's mom public for appeals on her sightings a to glean information and B um try and Advance investigation really just yet to St trying find my daughter if she's out there her son misses her he also needs to see his mom and um yeah I just really wanted to come back it's hard for Mom obviously um to go on public they would have had their own fears about it because they all knew that she loved her son so I can not to discuss good afternoon please communication yes hi it's great K speaking um uh K Thomas she was she was Drew back yesterday to pick up her son and she never turned up um I've been trying to ring her all week and having to get hold of her okay what relationship are you to who um I'm uh we have a son together okay so partner or yeah partner yeah with any missing person file you have to eliminate the people that report the missing history is lited with people that have been reported missing that subsequently find out the person that reported them missing is the perpetrator sort of a catch 22 phases between a victim and and a person of interest um so uh Mr Callahan being the ex partner uh was definitely a person of interest um to us he's also next of Ken and now the sole charge of his and carman's child so by rights he's a victim so we assigned someone to to leaz with them and and keep them appraise of the investigation I asked them that we get elimination prints and DNA from the Sun and himself so that we could eliminate anything in the scene so would like to have access to your um phone records and bank records which he agreed to give us data from carman's phone was also accessed forensic and alysis identified some strange anomalies the first was a change in her phone activity the key things are the volumes so how many calls and texts did she do traditionally on a day if you look at that a month before she goes missing it's it's fairly consistent that pattern and then it's very infrequent she went from say 50 Communications to five or less in a 1 day period and that tailored off after about 2 weeks the biggest change in volume happened weeks before she was reported missing and there was a notable a difference in the texts the language appeared to change it was very subtle changes but it was significant everybody communicates in their own way people talk and text speak they'll write letters or phrases she used the word h a lot h n and it was the way Hospital appeared it would have been hosp as opposed to the full hospital and what was interesting was that that changed so that indicated to us that something's wrong and and that someone's pretending to use her phone those are all red flags if you like to something's not quite right here she's not missing she's she's possibly dead if she's dead then who's pretending to be kmen and why and are they the killer potential Clues could lie in the polling data polling data is basically telling you in a general location where someone is it won't give you a specific point of where they are it's not like GPS coordinates it's not an exact science but it gives you an idea of of where someone is or the the location they're in when they're making the voice call or text message the first anomaly was that her phone had never pulled in Hamilton where her car was found abandoned we know she's in Hamilton at that stage or the car has been in Hamilton so why is there no polling data for Hamilton on her phone and why is it still all the pollen data in ockland and exactly where her phone was in ockland was of even more interest what became apparent When comparing say K's phone to kahan's phone they appeared to be communicating texting each other but when you looked closer at the polling data she appeared to be in exactly the same location that his phone was in on one occasion he traveled to the NorthShore and we can track him um as he's traveling to the shore and the polling data it's going you know K's phone Brad's phone as he's traveling up the motorway not the brightest character in the world phones are in the same vehicle I mean there's a text conversation I like what he was saying about the polling of the phone because that is so true like I had an incident where I had to do that actual thing to find out whose phone number was calling a friend that was really trying to hurt them and I had to use a thing online where it did that exact thing it pulled the location of the phone and found out their location and I was able to scare the people away by sending them their location through the pole of the phone it was pretty pretty cool to see that and then him just talk about that so that was pretty pretty wild yeah domestic argument but when you look at the phone pulling data for it the phones are in exactly the same location so they're having this this alleged argument when they could be in the same room Brad Callahan moves from Person of Interest to Prime Suspect police investigate Callahan's activities up to and around the time kman is reported missing through his bank records they can determine where he's been we had the CCTV footage from the day that she went missing kah arms crossed head down walking into the supermarket you could see he was under some extreme pressure or something heavy on his mind it's me in the middle of a working day his colleague from work suddenly joined him out of the blue things just don't look right we obtained what they' bought and was cleaning products and plastic bags that whole picture did not look good his work colleague becomes a person of interest and Callahan is now being closely monitored his pattern of behavior was to wake up in the morning take his son to school and then he would usually get to work at about 9:00 in the morning further investigation revealed he did something out of character we established that he'd gone to work one early morning when you spoke to these contractors on site said this was totally out of character he came out from the from the depths of the site in the middle of the night they thought you know early out the morning they thought they were we've never seen him on site he was wasn't his vest he was you know you know didn't make sense but hey he's a structural engineer he can do what he likes they then reported that they were putting in the foundations to uh the site which were quite massive they said that when they went dropped the steel on one particular hole it was a meter prow which these companies work in exacts they don't drill a hole and make it a meter short when they brought it to kahan's attention you know that there was a meter proud of the steel poging out he just said I'll cut it off and that'll do they thought that was weird and didn't follow protocol so we thought how that doesn't match clearly there's something down there it shouldn't be there and this the timing of Brad being on site early in the morning when the concrete was going to be poured into this large hole and it was a logical place from our point of view for a body to be disposed of police shut down construction work and excavated the footing there's a big hole put down the side of that particular foot cut a hole and dug it all out take all the concrete out of there and um see if we can find the spot at the bottom of this hole screed every piece of bit that came out of there and you ultimately it led to nothing evidentially significant so um that was a bit disappointing but had to be done just as they were losing hope an unexpected lead was discovered so at the end of that stage with the site we were tidying up in the foreman and came to us and told us about this strange bin they then purported that their Caravan which they used to have smoko and had a horrible stench and they thought it was their Caravan so they they thought they better clean the Caravan out so they did as I went to fill up a willin nearby they LIF it up the worker described it as just like piss and [ __ ] it was such a terrible smell and there was these bags in this Willie bin but they didn't you know they clothed will and move the willin away and the stinch away could this be the missing bin from Carman Thomas' flat they found that the serial number been sced out of it so we'll get that to the ESR staff went there and collected it is this the missing bin will science reveal the serial number and can that identify carman's killer police had suspected a wheelie bin was used to transport carman's body from her apartment now scientists needed to establish where the bin found at Kahan work came from most serial numbers are typically stamped into things like Metals um engine blocks from Cars uh chassis numbers so we don't get an awful lot of them in plastic but the fundamental principles apply but you didn't know it would work on a wheelie bin did you no the research that's out there that's been done on Plastics is typically done on small items that get numbers put on them and the techniques are usually they put them in an oven and heat them up slowly I didn't have an oven big enough for the wheelie bin so we sort of had to adapt the practice just a little bit Ryan was in Uncharted Territory he had one wheelie bin and one chance firstly he started preparing the surface right so the purpose of the sanding is just to take off the the rougher areas of the plastic just get it smooth enough so when we start to heat it the plastic starts to relax and the stress underneath allow it to sort of become proud again if we take too much off we lose that he added some gentle heat these are just photography studio lights that's our light well that's warm isn't it yeah it gets quite hot and the thing is too much heat will destroy everything so we've just gently started to warm up the surface and try to get it to relax and for the the mechanical memory of the the polymers that have been stressed behind the serial number to sort of come back to the original shape and because there's been plastic removed when it's ground off that original shape sits proud of the surface and pokes out at that just the right position look at that light you should be able to see the numbers wow just got to get the light in the right spot and easy number done 1 2 3 8 6 5 live very good it's so clear isn't it when it works it works all the numbers that come back perfect restoration when it works it works had to call to give them results the serial number was matched to council records that bin belonged to where Kahan lived next door it was a bin sign signed to that to the neighbor so I said we go around to the address and see whose bin they' got and then we found carman's bin two doors up from kahan's address so the obvious question well how did her Willie bin get so close to his address and why is it not at her address so we've got a dance of the wheelie bins occurring around Mr K's place that certainly raises some questions we're able to clearly show that that bin could only got there by one person the bin belonging to carman's Flat was sent to ESR for DNA and luminol testing as you can imagine examining a bin itself is actually quite difficult so we cut the bin in half lengthways and open it up in order to do that exam and found a number of areas where we got positive results with aluminol which indicates that there there could Well Be Blood present and one of the samples from the inside of the bin near the base did give us a DNA profile for Miss Thomas it wasn't definitive evidence but it supported the theory that the large bin could have been used to remove her body from the flat the hunt was on to try and where is where we still haven't got a body where is a body cuz most homicide investigations that's where you start from you've got the body from day one and it's very rare that you get into a situation like this where it's a missing person you've got no idea where the body is you've got you've got your Prime Suspect um who's doing very odd things but he still don't know what's he done with her where where has he put her police traced Callahan's movements through his phone polling data had he been anywhere unusual somewhere he could have dumped the body he went into the fur fors and it misses cuz there's no coverage and then he comes back out on that Bombay side of the perfs and the next night he's up on the Bombay side of the perf hims and then comes back and pings out it the other end you know he's a working guy he works Monday to Friday um he's got a pregnant wife at home um and then in the middle of the night he's circling the fif attemps doing these massive drives we thought she was somewhere there so we had eagle fly over it we had the the night vision camera on we were looking for any property that may have been discarded along the road had he stopped anywhere had he driven off track an extensive search of the F of temps turns up nothing the police investigation now established that Callahan has started operating a second mobile phone these phone records are accessed to track his movements finding that phone was essential and as we're scrolling down you're getting the addresses is going Auckland Huntley and then Hamilton and that that was you know that was gold that was absolute gold that shows that Kahan was in Hamilton near the time the car was dumped there as was one of his associates he ultimately helped pick him up after to depositing the car down in Hamilton and we able to track the fact that you know they traveled you their phones traveled to that area the time had come that we had enough evidence to basically go and make their rest 3 months after kman Tom thas was reported missing Brad Callahan is officially arrested but the investigation is still far from over we were building up our strategies around keeping the right amount of evidence and putting it into some sort of case police continued with the task of gathering evidence the note found in carman's car was always thought to be a clue to the last person who saw her alive had some links uh to Callahan through the nature of the word used in h his handwriting was similar similar enough to be scientific evidence samples were gathered for document examination we searched his address for handwriting samples and uh we took every document we could find whether it's a diary whether it's just a scribbled note to discover more about the science of document examination I'm meeting with Gordon sha so Gordon I brought you a couple of documents a couple of things that I've written how would you go about analyzing this writing we go through the material making notes on the size of the letters the spacing measure the slope but we also look at the individual constructions of each letter so for example your letter e you make that with a c shape and then a stroke off the center whereas someone else might make it worth an l and then two strokes or four separate Strokes or upward movement then two strokes with an O you can make it in a anticlockwise direction or you can make it in a clockwise Direction so you can tell the direction of the pen Stroke by microscopically examining the inkline we can see characteristics in the inkline that tell us which direction the p is moving in under the microscope the detail of my writing style can be examined here we can see uh heavy deposit of ink there been a change of direction from the pen coming in you can see what we call a a match stick and that denotes the start of a stroke because what's happened there is the pens finished the previous stroke and then was moved up to this this new letter and so there's not very much ink lift on the ball until it starts rolling again and so you get this non- ining start and we can see these little white lines which are called stations what are they exactly they're caused by fults on the bull housing and a bullo pin that actually wipes the ink off as it's rolling around with the T you're getting a a station which runs off the end of the line so that shows that this t- stroke is being made from left to right rather than from right to left there's a lot of information there isn't there it's a very long process to through to check on how it's made are some words more significant than others words that you write often often become like a miniature signature like and or on or the the yeah for some people these become yeah very identifiable even though they're so small because they have a a uh a mental pattern as to how they write it and those are words you don't think about you start and then the motor program takes over in your brain and runs runs your hand this is this this is what we're looking for when we're doing a handri comparison these habits which are happening subconsciously so the envelope that was found in the car what were you able to tell from that envelope so this is the court comparison chart um after the D A examination you can see the high back on the the a um this construction of K with the staff drawing into the Bowl here we're looking at um L connections so the S and the T connection coming through in the specimens as well can you say that they are both written by that person and found a number of similarities between question writing and B kahan's um handwriting it strongly supported that he had placed and written the note in and placed it in the car with the cash to leave the impression that she'd gone to Hamilton for work the case is building but investigators still need stronger evidence and haven't lost hope of finding carman's body Brad Callahan is arrested for carman's murder but with no body and a case based on circumstantial evidence investigators hope the forensic examination of his car will reveal more it became immediately apparent that something wasn't right with his car a piece of household carpet that had been cut out and inserted cut to shape and inserted into the boot where the original boot lining would have would have been he had painted some areas black quite obviously because there were runs of paint looking in the boot of his vehicle at the back edge of the back seat we started to find some blood staining soaked into the foam on the seat back we followed that by taking the the actual back seats out and underneath the back seats there was blood staining all over the underside and runs of blood blood down the inside of the chassis of the car wow so there was enough blood in there at some point for it to be flowing and running under the seats onto the Chassy samples were taken of uh the blood staining that we found and we got a DNA profile from this Thomas the stench was Unreal cuz the blood had soaked straight into that foam and started to rot and uh started to break down and it was yeah it was massive so there must have been a lot of blood in that bin and what he did to mark ask that smell which was fairly horrific was use air freshener so the can of air freshener sitting in the passenger well of the vehicle and he would just get into the car spray the air freshener as he transported his son to school and and went about his Daily Business we did a rment with the bin seeing if we could get the bin into the car by yourself and and it was yeah very Chuck the seats down very straightforward very easy one other thing we did find on Mr Keller's car was on the inside of the rear windscreen there were a couple of little marks about yay far apart just smudge marks on on the inside of the glass that looked like they you would expect from where the wheels of the wheelie bin would contact it um if it were put under the boot with the the wheels up against the windscreen when we did the reenactment and when you place the wheelie bin in the vehicle you could see with the wheel marks lined up perfectly on the glass with the wheelie bin marks and you could see the way the bin was placed in the vehicle with the wheels up that the lid opened at the bottom and then the blood would have just flowed straight back into the car the examination of Callahan's address fails to find anything of significance but his computers are seized for forensic examination the search term perfect murder was done on the 28th of July 2009 one year ago to the date he researched how to best knock out someone and kill them so there was some really key evidence of some mot or premeditation he'd researched how to get rid of blood how to dispose of blood from a house there was uh nearly 2 and a half th000 entries for the term blood some searches on how to clean up crime scenes and looking at police investigative techniques to u to cover cover Your Tracks he had looked at things on his computer I had of his remains and sorts of Search terms and also um how to um dismember a body researched that so quite clinical police now knew from a witness account that Brad had tried to involve his friend in disposing of the dismembered remains he contacted his mate who he knew had a boat and he basically confesses to his mate that this is what I've done she's in the back of the car at that stage carman's body is been dismembered and it's in concrete and plastic containers Brad's plan is to pick up the containers and put them overboard and dispose of their body that way Brad's plan to dump Common's body at C fails and the mate basically has the gumption to say look I don't want to be any part of this plan I'm not getting involved in this you're on your you're on your own this friend was later granted immunity from prosecution kellan's Behavior was becoming noticeably different alive what he done I don't think it was so much about pause this pause this for one second I have to ask this one question I think the mate literally he went to the mate and said I killed a girl please let me use your boat so we can dump this body the guy says no I'm not up for it and then they Grant him immunity why would they even Grant him immunity he didn't do nothing wrong he did the right thing he walked away from that situation so why would he even be looked at as a suspect that's no what well no they said he did drive the boat but it didn't work oh that's what he said oh okay because I was I was like I didn't hear that part I was like that was a little weird yeah it didn't work out so that's why he got was more I'm going to get caught and and he was trying to get his way out of it and it just he was he was digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole 9 days after his arrest Callahan through his lawyer finally reveals to the police where he buried carman's remains it was in thick bush it was reasonably steep ter rain it had been raining for a we while beforehand so the ground was wet so the ESR arrived and began um basically hands and knees sech of that particular grid there were two holes or two burial sites very close to each other one had the main um main storage bin the 40 L bin and the other one had the other um Parts in it there's particular particular cases that will always probably stand out uh and this was one of them one because it was such a unique scene or the um tuo that goes with a site like that we got the local Kato to come through and that's an emotional feeling you know getting to bless a [Music] sight it was actually really eerie because the bush with its own canopy and its own sounds and light filters and things like that it actually created a sort of an there's an eerie science so that made you sort of stop and and and take stock of of what you were hearing carman's remains were respectfully removed and examined by a pathologist the concrete had actually sealed most of the the air out of of the bins themselves as did the plastic bags and the body itself was was not in what you would consider very good condition so that the postmortem was a particularly grueling Endeavor for those that were involved cause of death was determined as blunt force trauma the Fatal blow was such that it it radiated right around and split the the skull s didn't get and lie but she was dead before we started it so we're never going to do that Carmen Thomas had been murdered 12 days before Brad Callahan reported her missing during that time he'd used her phone to keep up the pretense of her being alive he driven her car to Hamilton planted notes to make her disappearance seem linked to others and he'd involved three Associates in his complicated web of Deceit so why at trial Callahan alleged kman had asked him to her place to discuss their child's schooling and this led to a heated argument he made submissions that it was um the fact that she told him he wasn't the father of the child and lost the plot and it was a rage and he picked up the first thing he could find which was his son's baseball bat and hit her but he hit her more than months Brad Callahan pleaded guilty to murder and attempting to pervert the course of Justice he got the the strongest send off that you could for the nature of his crime not only killing Carmen but the extent that he went to you know pervert the course of justice and that added to his sentence a non parol period of 13 years 7 months we were very satisfied with the outcome though we take no satisfaction in a victim dying you know but all we can do is the best for the victim and get some justice for the family members and I thank my team and all the police that attended for a fantastic effort hi yeah there's an element of passion that the crime scene people bring to this work and once we get involved we we put that passion into ensuring that everything we can answer as far as the scientific questions does get answered she was a a good mother sad sad with the boy especially his father and now his mother but both taken out of the picture so tragedy around right no s last both parents yeah you know there is no averting the tragedy of this case but it's thanks to the hard work of forensic investigators that cases like this are solved bringing some sense of justice to all of us that's it wow I tell you go ahead sorry I was just going to say like what a sad sad case but at the same time the way that they portrayed everything out scientifically and to hear about that scientific base behind everything was very fascinating but this whole case in general is just so sad a child lost not just a mother but a father as well I mean you know and this like I mean not the father deserved to go away but you know what at the point of after the mother's gone it's like you know now the kid suffers even more worse over it you know he tried to be smart and he tried but didn't work out tried to be smart yeah he tried all right everything he tried backfired on him right yeah or everything he was doing somehow they found it like uh you know like I never knew that about the plastic bins like you if you scrape it off or something the number and then all of a sudden you reapply just a photo light from a studio a photo studio heat and it'll reappear the image on this on I never knew that that is the coolest thing I've ever heard in my life yeah yeah and you know I never knew they could do that you never use your own computer when you're well duh I mean and you don't ever tell anybody obviously either if you're smart you know what I'm saying but these people are that we that we've encountered so far man on this show for the past 11 cases it just some of them are very intelligent but then some of them are so intelligent they're stupid and it's just like what are you doing you know driv good okay do the voice again the high one the high one what would you like me to say goodbye to everybody that watched today thank you everybody for watching crime documentaries case close

Channel: Crime Documentaries

Views: 50

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Id: RE8K5P4_Uig

Length: 56min 21sec (3381 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024