Missing Farmer Dylan Rounds' Alleged Killer Arrested — The Story So Far

I don't even know I fully grasped what's happened sometimes yesterday hit me pretty hard coming back from lcan we do a breakdown of the chilling case of Dylan rounds the teenage farmer who suddenly disappeared in Utah then we bring in legendary homicide detective Phil Waters to discuss the criminal case against the man allegedly responsible welcome to sidebar presented by law on crime I'm Jesse [Music] Weber tragic story of Dylan rounds and what we know so far in this criminal case so Dylan rounds was a 19-year-old farmer originally from Idaho that decided to start a whole new life out in Utah pretty amazing pretty amazing to think about that and by all accounts he loved farming he had a true passion for it in fact law and crime Network Sierra Gillespie actually interviewed Dylan's parents Justin rounds and Candace and here's what they had to say about their son Dylan just he from the time he could toddle around with his dad and his grandpa um that was just it we knew you know he was going to be a farmer and that's what he was going to do I mean he didn't his Hobbies were farming it sounds kind of odd is kind of odd a little bit but that's what he liked since he was little that's all he ever wanted to do was pretty Gog her and didn't hard work be in the bom and people might think we just say that CU it's her son it's it was absolute true so when he turned 16 and got to go do that stuff like it was better than getting his driver's license just to be able to go work on a farm he was just a worker he was just a good-hearted worker that's all he you know ever wanted now according to his family Dylan saved up money from fixing up tractors doing custom work selling trading farm equipment and he actually bought himself a farm down in Lucen Utah with his grandfather and that's pretty amazing to think about someone doing that a teenager doing that but apparently again he had this love for it now Lucen is in Box Elder County this is near the Utah Nevada border so let's go to May 28th 2022 when everything just changes this is right when Dylan's first C first crop was to be harvested by the way he's right at the start of this so Dylan speaks with his grandmother on the phone on that day and when they hang up that is the last time anybody heard from him he just suddenly disappears two days later Dylan's mother reports a miss this just comes after not hearing from him and especially after they discover something very important it was Monday that um Dylan's best friend called me and said have you heard from Dylan and I said well now I talked to him on Thursday and he says well kind of told me Karen said I talked to him this day and so I called him and I called and text him a couple times and didn't hear anything back over that weekend which was nothing out of the usual I knew he was planting it was nothing for Dylan to break a phone not have a charger you know nothing out of the ordinary until myself his father grandma grandpa friends everybody kind of started talking and nobody had heard from them and that is not normal um so that's when we headed we all headed to Lucid to go see what was going on it's because he would have left his boots there they weren't old they weren't bad they I mean old and worn out for Dylan would be basically his toes sticking through a hole I mean it would there would have been no reason for those boots to have been there in my mind at all but it's when we found the boots when we found the boots there is no other explanation for them to be out there besides brener put them out there and the only way you would get Dylan's boots off of him is if he was not alive to keep you from doing it and that's when we knew now apparently local law enforcement didn't take this seriously that's according to Dylan's family in fact they say that the sheriff's office told them that they thought Dylan might have just gave up farming and wandered off they even said that the police mocked them for their concern and that officers didn't want to make the long drive to the farm to check out what was really going on but eventually that changed and law enforcement actually began to look more into Dylan round's disappearance and in July of 2022 Box Elder County Sheriff's Office announced that then 58-year-old James brener was considered a suspect so who is James brener well according to Dylan's mother Candice brener was an acquaintance of her son actually he was his neighbor really he was a trespasser if we want to be honest brener was squatting in a trailer that was a few miles away from Dylan's property and Mr brener has quite the history or maybe I should say criminal history you see according to various reporting brener shot a man in the 1980s over a work dispute and back in 2012 brener was sentenced to over 2 and a half years years in prison for a legal possession of a firearm because he was a convicted felon and then in June and July of 2022 he was hit with federal firearms charges now what's interesting is that Dylan's parents apparently had a weird feeling about James brener especially because of alleged comments that brener made about Dylan in the past Jim was talking to a kid that works for me I was watching him on the cameras he was telling the kid what a spoiled kid Dylan was I doesn't treat anything very good you could just see a lot of jealousy in him and I called Dylan and I said you know Jim brener isn't your friend he's sitting there talking about you and he said ah Jim's just kind of an ass so then when we got up there you know Brer was telling uh myself and my husband about how you know Dylan couldn't fight his way out of anything he shouldn't even had a gun he didn't know how to use it all he could do was throw it at somebody like just all this really weird like it's just not stuff you say when and then and then I said you know because we originally thought hey maybe dlan left the shed and he's walking back to his farm because brener didn't give him a ride he's out there bit by a snake you know fell broken ankle whatever a couple years ago I introduced myself to brener he was at my grandpa's house my son had bought a bunch of pigs and across the road from your grandpa's house was a v clinic and Jim brener was there I was pretty upset that they bought the pigs and brought them to that property and I was pretty upset and I left and Dylan text me and says Jim R's gonna shoot you and he's gonna do he's he doesn't like to be talked to like that like said well then I'll have to come talk to him and I came back to talk to him at the farm and he was with my dad my dad was calming him down calm me down and it kind of just blew over so law enforcement takes a closer look at brener and what are they find you remember the boots that his parents mentioned well deputies discovered those boots Dylan round's boots where brener was squatting and one boot had a blood stain that DNA analysis confirmed belonged to Dylan rounds in addition to DNA belonging to brener they also found Dylan's farm truck but that's not all cell phone records show that Dylan's phone moved near where brener was squatting on the day that Dylan vanished and they also find Dylan's actual phone at Lucen Pond and when investigators do a digital forensic download of the phone they find a video timestamped at the time of Dylan's disappearance and in this video you see brener with quote blood stains on his arms and shirt as he is cleaning a gun and guess what investigators finded and test that shirt and Dylan's DNA is on it and according to Fox News after Dylan went missing a neighbor claims that brener asked him to hide several guns for him saying it was for his own safety and that quote the last time he had trouble with the law they took everything from him and he didn't want the things that he had left to be taken away according to authorities quote brener was interviewed and made several claims that corroborated forensic evidence in addition to making numerous demonstrably false statements well it may have taken almost a year from when they said brener was a suspect but this month the Sheriff's Office announced that James brener had been officially charged with aggravated murder and abuse or desecration of a human body in connection with The Disappearance of Dylan rounds and by the way he was actually charged while still behind bars on those guns charges on those gun charges I mentioned as well now sadly at the time of this recording Dylan's body has not been recovered the sheriff's office has indicated and confirmed that the search will still continue as for Dylan's parents you can imagine that the charart charging of James brener has been a long time coming people don't realize how big of a fight when I say how much of a win these charges are because this has been such an extreme fight to get to this point felt good to at least finally have charges pressed on them and then to find out didn't feel good to find out about the video but it but it did the video of him cleaning the blood off off of the gun in his hands if I don't how it f I can't really describe it it wasn't happy cross B pass with a really bad horrible guy that just is I don't know what I can say other than it's unfortunate well as we discuss the criminal case of James brener and the alleged murder of Dylan rounds we want to get a little bit more into the details of this investigation what to expect next so joining me legendary former homicide detective Phil Waters who has worked over 400 cases is an expert interrogator and he's back here on sidebar Phil good to have you oh well thanks for being uh it's good to be back with you Jesse it's been a while it has and and you know this is a really disturbing case again one we can't really get all the answers to so James brener is arrested almost a year or so since he was offic officially a suspect what do you make of his arrest well I I'm certainly as the family I'm sure and everybody in that community it's it's reassuring to see that we've got detectives that are out there you know hitting the bricks and and getting these cases that seem to be prolonged solved and bringing a little bit of peace to the family and the friends and then later on serving of some justice in this thing so I'm I'm really really in terms of of a detective who's worked these kind of cases that have kind of stretched out over time it's very uh very satisfying to see that they've accomplished this and made an arrest is it abnormal that it took you know such a long period of time or you between suspect and ultimately arrest or given you know what they actually found in this case you would say that timeline is make sense the reason I ask is because um Dylan R's parents were quot critical of investigators in the early days of this investigation they said they didn't take their claims very seriously then they obviously did and now they seem to have built a pretty strong case against brener so the time between when he was a suspect and the arrest is there anything that you look at as maybe a little strange well not knowing the details as to what the detectives had and what they didn't have and the family's perception of what they had and what they didn't have and of course the family's perception is always that they should be doing things that they may be doing behind the scenes and they're not going to compromise their investig ation by sharing everything with the families and I've been in that position as well it's it's a it's it's a tough road to hoe but it's one that has to be maintained to maintain the Integrity of the investigation so I don't know that you had asked the question is this normal I don't know that there is any any normal in a homicide investigation they're all unique and so these the the steps that are taken in this particular one why it may have taken a period of time and this may have been a result of of of what they were doing in the investigation to to get to the suspect and then what they had to do once they got the suspect so let's talk about the suspect and why he might have allegedly done this so the parents have theorize that maybe there was bad blood built over time maybe there was a snap I believe Justin rounds uh Dylan round's father says that there was nothing to gain over killing his son and he you know they got got the impression that with based on past experiences that brener maybe you know was not a guy to mess with and maybe they had some sort of beef I mean that's the part that we're trying to understand was what would be the why here does any of that make sense to you well my understanding of of reading what I read about this particular case this brener character was squatting on their property on their land and for lack of a better term that's the way it was described that he was squatting which means he's he's occupying the land not in a legal sense but the laws allow this type of activity to go on and Dylan finds him and he's out there my my impression certainly of this young man is he's a hardworking guy he's uh it appears to me to me to me that he is mature Beyond his age 19 years old so he's out there working hard he comes across brener they are acquaintances of some kind I know that in one of the reports it was talking about him being a family friend but then the family says no that's not true he was just somebody that we' known and so forth and so on so when these things happen I've said it before it's either sex drugs or money and this is going to be the money aspect of this thing and that Dylan is out there trying to develop this property he's trying to out there farming and so forth and so on bringing in crops and you've got a guy that's on the uh the squatting on that property so this is a this becomes we'll put it under that category of a money issue this guy is occupying a place that he is not supposed to be in and given the guys the suspects ped it looks like he is kind of one of those guys that reacts very quickly when he's confronted about something that he doesn't want to do and he's being told he needs to do which is move off of this piece of property we also seem to know that there was a conversation that he had with investigators where they said that he made f false statements to them and that whatever he said lined up with the forensic evidence that they have what do you think that those conversations were in that interrogation room well in those in that interview I would of course having not seen it but reading kind of what's going on here the my impression would be that he made some admissions in the room perhaps not a full confession of any kind but he he did make enough admissions that led those Detectives to where they needed to be so when they started down that road with him they're able to take some of the admissions that he made and then later on they're able to affirm those things with some physical or forensic evidence and let's talk about the forensic evidence because according again I think it was um Dylan R's mother who said this is a really strong case she would be shocked if there wasn't a conviction uh obviously we have to see what the whole evidence is and what the case would look like and what the defense would be but from what we know so far the DNA is pretty strong I mean particularly if they have a video of the defendant with blood on him they find the shirt and has Dylan's DNA on it that feels like you know great police work and and I'm not sure where a defense attorney can go because it seems like the phone records and the DNA are pretty strong walk me through what do you think that was like for investigators to gather that material well that's all about finding those clues that lead them to where they need to be finding that evidence that leads them to where they need to be and it's always I say it repeatedly it's always a journey for the truth so it leads them with the forensic evidence with the this video what I have read is that the video was kind of an errant event it wasn't something that I don't think even the Su suspect may not have known was actually occurring so he's got this he's they've got this uh affirmation that he's on a video he's got blood and then when they have accumulated or recovered that particular evidence that DNA comes back to Dylan so it's it's pretty it's pretty hard for the suspect to dispute those findings and and in this particular kind of a case when you have DNA that is this strong it will become if if he is denying if he is denying it that becomes a stronger case for the prosecution when he's denying that he was in Dylan's presence but yet we have indisputable evidence that he certainly was oh those interrogations uh can really make or break a defense I'll tell you that much um and I wanted to end our conversation on one of the most chilling aspects of this is that we really don't know what happened to Dylan we his body hasn't been recovered at the time of this recording what are investigators you think doing behind the scenes in order to find his body and do you feel confidence that they would well I would imagine that given the location of where they believe that the murder occurred they're going to have to form a grid and let's let's possibly tracking his phone to see where the suspect if he's going wherever he is going where he stops where that phone is for a prolong now he may be very clever and just turns his phone off and they have no idea but they're going to have to start at Ground Zero which is where it occurred and then start taking a perimeter forming a grid and they may have to expand it and then go into a search so I don't know how big of an area I'm assuming it's a pretty big area this is an agricultural area so I'm I'm sure there's a lot of land out there and there's no telling where he has put the body so that's going to be a that'll be the next hurdle and if the body is even in a state to be found and if brener even said anything to investigators that would give them a road map to find the body these are still outstanding questions Phil Waters thank you so much for taking the time and breaking down this case with us we always appreciate it too bad Jesse thank you for having me back and that's all we have for you here on sidebar everybody thank you so much for joining us please subscribe on Apple podcast Spotify YouTube wherever you get your podcast I'm Jesse Weber I'll speak to you next [Music] time

Channel: Law&Crime Network

Views: 321,210

Keywords: law and crime, law and crime network

Id: Aa5sMOhUPfM

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023