Killer Janitor Thinks He Got Away With Teens Murder (He Didn’t)

0:00Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exema. So I get how it can steal your time. But why let Exema take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce? Epglyce, lubricism ab LBKZ, a 250-mg per 2-mg leador injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe Exema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Epglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglyce. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyce. Before starting Epglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lili Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyce and visit Epglyce.com or call 1-800-LiliRx or 1-800-545-5979. Your path to pharmacy can be closer than you think.

1:02West Coast University's hybrid doctor of pharmacy program can be completed in as little as 33 months and no bachelor's degree is required to apply. If you've started pharmacy coursework elsewhere, WCU may accept eligible transfer credits to help students keep moving forward. Learn online, train hands-on at our Center for Graduate Studies in Los Angeles, and prepare for real-world pharmacy practice. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exema. So I get how it can still your time. But why let Exema take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce? Epglyce, Lebrichizema, LBKZ, a 250-mg per 2-ml-liter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe Exema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies, Epglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to

2:06Epglyce. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. I-problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyce. Before starting Epglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Pay partnership with Lilly. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyce and visit Epglyce.com or call 1-800-LilyRx or 1-800-545-5979. You know, usually when you think about the woods in the dead of winter, especially up here in the Midwest, there is this profound expectation of stillness. Oh, absolutely. It is almost a comforting quiet, right? Like a stark kind of peace. Yeah, exactly. But we are talking about January 28th, 2018. This is in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Imagine the scene for a moment. Okay, picture it. You have a couple out for a walk on this secluded wooded path. It is freezing cold. The trees are totally bare. The ground is hard. It is that isolating quiet where you can literally hear your own breath. Right. And then in just a fraction of

3:08a second, that landscape just fractures. That illusion of peace is completely shattered for them. Because of what they find. Yeah, parallel to the walkway down the shallow, kind of brush-covered ravine. They spot something that just does not belong. It is a human body. It is the ultimate intrusion of human violence into nature, really. It is. It instantly shatters that illusion of safety, you mentioned. The stillness of the woods suddenly becomes a chaotic crime scene. And the psychological impact of that is huge. It is immense, both on the poor people who find it in the community at large. And that body, tragically, is very quickly identified. It is a local 16 year old girl named Muje Dumbio, though she went by J. She was just a high school kid. Just a kid. And what makes this immediately terrifying for law enforcement is that she had been reported missing just four days earlier. Right. And we have to pause here to understand the mechanics of law enforcement in these moments. Walk us through that. Well, when a 16 year old goes missing, it is a high priority situation, obviously. But there is always this lingering hope.

4:13Like maybe they just ran away. Exactly. A runaway situation, a misunderstanding, something that will just resolve itself. But the moment that missing persons case transforms into a homicide investigation, everything changes. The investigative machinery shifts into overdrive immediately. You go from missing persons detectives, making phone calls to bringing in the homicide squad, the crime scene texts, the medical examiners, the entire weight of the state resources falls on that single shallow ravine, which honestly brings us to our real mission for you today. Welcome to this deep dive. Today, we are taking you inside that machinery. It is quite the journey. We are going to unpack a master class in police interrogation. But even more than that, we are going to look at it deep, honestly terrifying psychological study in criminal hubris. Yeah, we have our hands on the actual transcripts of this incredibly intense cat and mouse game between veteran detectives and a suspect. And this is a suspect who walks into the interrogation room,

5:15completely fundamentally convinced that he is the smartest person in the building. It is a fascinating albeit incredibly dark. Look at how someone attempts to construct an alternate reality in real time. Well, the cops are just watching him do it. Exactly. And conversely, it is a study in how season detectives let them do it, only to meticulously piece by piece just dismantle that reality. We are going to see the anatomy of a lie on a microscopic level today. Okay, let's unpack this and set the stage. Let's look at the cast of characters here. We have to start with the suspect. Right. Because the detectives do not have to look far for one. The immediately focus on one obvious glaring prime suspect. His name is Quinn James. He is 40 years old, a former school janitor. And he lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now geographically, Grand Rapids is about 50 miles straight north of where G's body was found in Kalamazoo. So it is not right next door. No, but it is a super easy drive down the highway. But you know, the reason he is suspect number one, isn't geographical at all? It is the motive.

6:17It is a screaming motive as they call it. Jay had an ongoing, highly publicized criminal case against Quinn. She had alleged that he sexually assaulted her on four separate occasions. Four times, yeah. And his trial for those charges was said for April of that very year. We were talking just a few months away. And we really need to drill down into what that means legally, you know. Yeah, how serious is that in Michigan? Extremely. In Michigan, first degree criminal sexual conduct, which involves sexual penetration under certain aggravating circumstance like the age of the victim, right? Exactly. The age or the use of force. It is one of the most severe charges on the books. It carries the potential for life in prison or at the very least decades behind bars. Wow. So this is not a misdemeanor. This is a minor dispute. This is a pending criminal trial that threatens to effectively end Quinn James's life as a free man. That makes total sense. That provides what detectives in the homicide unit called a screaming motive. The stakes for him could

7:18not possibly be higher. If she takes the stand and testifies and a jury believes her, his life is over. So the logic for the police is incredibly straightforward. The star witness against him turns up dead weeks before the trial. So they go get him. Yeah, they bring you in just two days after Jay's body is discovered. We are stepping into the interrogation room now. Let's set the scene in there. The detectives. Let's call them Bill and Cory. They sit down with Quinn. They do the standard preamble. You know, you see it on television all the time. The Miranda warnings or the non-custodial version. Right. They tell him you're not under arrest. You are free to go. You don't have to talk to us. Standard procedure. And Quinn facing the reality that the teenage girl who is accusing him of a life-altering crime has just been found murdered does something that defies conventional logic. He does the opposite of what a lawyer would tell you to do. He does not ask for a lawyer. He does not cross his arms and clam up. He sits down, casually refuses a glass of water and makes it abundantly clear that he is completely 100% ready to talk. He is eager even. Very. In fact, he

8:22immediately tells them he was expecting them to show up. This is our first major psychological tell right here. It is a brilliant window into his mindset. What do you call that in your field? It is a strategy we can call the preemptive defense. Quinn wants to dictate the terms of engagement right out of the gate. Before they can even accuse him of anything, he wants to frame the narrative. So how does he do that? He tells the detectives that his fiance nephew, a 17-year-old named Dequarius, who also happened to be J.S. his boyfriend at the time, called his fiance earlier that day. And he claims Dequarius was acting completely hysterical. Right. Quinn quotes Dequarius as supposedly yelling on the phone, J.S. dead, they shot her. And Quinn uses this phone call to explain away any surprise he might have at the police showing up in his door. He has a built-in excuse for why he is so calm. Exactly. He is essentially leaning back in his chair and saying, listen guys, of course you're here. We have this pending case. She's dead. Common sense tells me I'm your number one suspect. I get it. Yeah. It is highly manipulative.

9:25By addressing his own obvious guilt and motive before the cops can even bring it up, he is attempting to disarm them. Like taking the wind out of their sales. He is trying to steal their thunder. If he admits he looks guilty, he thinks it makes him look innocent. But there is a secondary, much more insidious layer to this tactic. Wait, what's that? Well, by bringing up Dequarius and this supposedly hysterical phone call right at the very beginning of the interview, he is subtly planting a seed. Oh, I see where this is going. He is introducing a brand new character into the narrative who supposedly knew about the murder and specifically the manner of the murder claimed she was shot before anyone else in the family supposedly knew. Let me stop you there, though, and just play devil's advocate for a second because honestly, isn't his logic somewhat sound here? How so? Well, if I'm facing a major high stakes criminal trial and the person accusing me of this horrific crime turns up dead, I am going to assume I am suspect number one.

10:28I am going to expect the knock on the door. Right, you don't anticipate it. It is like, if you are standing next to a broken window holding a baseball, you know exactly how it looks, regardless of whether you actually threw the pitch or not. That is a great analogy, yeah. You are going to prepare yourself for the homeowner to come out yelling at you. So why is his anticipation of their rivals such a glaring red flag for the detectives? It is a great question, and you are absolutely right on the logic front. It is entirely logical to assume you would be a suspect. Any rational person would connect those dots. So what's the issue? The red flag isn't his assumption. The red flag is his overwhelming over-eagerness to verbalize it and control it. Think about human nature. Okay. An innocent person in that situation, standing next to the broken window with the baseball knowing they didn't throw it is usually terrified. Oh sure, you'd be panicking. They are guarded. They are highly stressed because they realize how impossibly bad the situation looks and they know they need a lawyer to protect them from a false accusation. But Quinn isn't doing any of that.

11:30Not at all. Quinn is aggressively relaxed. He is pontificating about how the detectives are probably trying to trip him up, saying things to them like, I'm just cutting through the bullshit. He is trying to act like they're all just guys talking logic. Exactly. He is entirely too eager to show them how transparent he is being. Ah, so what is the performance of innocence rather than the reality of it? Exactly that. Think about when you make a mistake at work and your boss calls you into the office. If you immediately launch into a highly detailed 10 minute explanation of why the mistake wasn't your fault before the boss even sits down, what does that look like? It looks like guilt. Yeah. It looks like you've been practicing your excuse in the bathroom mirror. Exactly. You have prepared a defense for an attack that hasn't happened yet. And that eagerness to talk is exactly what seasoned interrogators look for. Because he's doing their job for them basically. Right. Because a suspect who wants to talk, who wants to control the flow of information is a suspect who is about to start building an alibi. You know, your path to pharmacy can be closer than you think.

12:32West Coast University's hybrid doctor of pharmacy program can be completed in as little as 33 months and no bachelor's degree is required to apply. If you've started pharmacy coursework elsewhere, WCU may accept eligible transfer credits to help students keep moving forward. Learn online, train hands-on at our Center for Graduate Studies in Los Angeles and prepare for real-world pharmacy practice. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Imagine your friend tells you she's taking an innocent family trip to Greenville, South Carolina. We'll call her Emma. The trip sounds great to you. Hiking at Jones Gap, dinner at Topsoil, a room at the best hotel in town. Harmless, right? Here's the thing. Emma and her family never return from Greenville. They disappear. You search for answers, but nothing adds up. Emma had a great life back home. You guys were best friends. What happened? Well, the truth is, once Emma realized she could have access to

13:32Michelin recognized restaurants, nature, local shops, and performing arts all in one place, everywhere else started to seem a little... Emma's vacation is a cautionary tale. If you're coming this way, don't forget to tell your friends and neighbors goodbye. Visit Greenville, South Carolina, but you may never want to leave. Learn more at visitgreenvillesc.com Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home, or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekitt.com. Slash blue. Urgentcarekitt.com. Slash blue. Does he ever build an alibi? I mean, it is a masterpiece of confusion. The detectives eventually

14:36steer the conversation to the most standard question in any homicide investigation. Walk us through your weekend. Exactly. Specifically, where were you and what did you do on Saturday? The day we believed she went missing. Yeah, there we go. And Quinn launches into a story that is so incredibly convoluted. It is honestly hard to keep straight while just reading the transcript. It is a lot to take in. He claims that on Saturday, he was driving all over the state, essentially trying to scrape together a $1,500 down payment, some earnest money. For a house they were supposedly buying in Kentwood. Let's briefly explain that earnest money concept for context. Sure. When you buy a house, you put down a deposit to show the seller your serious earnest about the purchase. It is usually a few thousand dollars. It shows you a skin in the game. Right. So Quinn is using a very stressful high stakes time sensitive financial transaction as the anchor for his Saturday. Which is pretty clever, honestly. It is a brilliant narrative choice on his part because running around trying to collect cash explains frantic

15:39movement. It explains a scattered timeline and it justifies him being in multiple locations. You can be anywhere he needs to be in his story. Exactly. But what is truly fascinating here is the sheer volume of data he attempts to drown the detectives in. This is what we call a classic kitchen sink alibi because he is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at them. Precisely. When someone is lying about their whereabouts, they often overcompensate by providing an exhausting level of trivial detail. Why do they do that though? Does it really work? Well, the psychology behind it is fascinating. A liar believes that detail equates to truth. They think if I give them 10 specific details, it sounds more believable than if I give them to. So they just pile it on. Right. They hope that the sheer density of the narrative will overwhelm the listener, exhausts their cognitive load, and effectively mask the critical gaps in time where the crime actually occurred. I want to read some of this just to give you an idea of the barrage of information. Let me just list off the people and places he name drops in the span of

16:42just a few minutes of talking. Let's hear it. He tells the detectives he went to his Aunt Betty's house down the street and got $500. Then he drove over to see his mom at her apartment on Oak view to get more money. But she didn't have any so she gave him nothing. Okay, that's two stops. Then he says he had an old college friend named Colin James at a Wendy's at the specific intersection of 28th and Byron Center and Colin gave him $200. A lot of specifics there. Oh, he keeps going. He even mentions that Colin wanted him to go shopping at the Tanger outlets down on Highway 131. But he told Colin he couldn't because he was too busy. Adding a completely hypothetical trip in there too. Right. Then he claims he was waiting around for a $250 Western Union transfer from his Aunt Kathy who lives in Missouri, which he points out didn't actually arrive until Sunday. Just listen to the administrative nightmare he is creating for these detectives. It is like a web of nonsense. He is essentially handing them a scavenger hunt across multiple cities involving multiple relatives, financial institutions and fast food restaurants.

17:45They would have to dedicate a whole team just to run this down. Exactly. To verify that story, the detectives have to track down Aunt Betty, interview the mother on Oak view, find a guy named Colin James, pull the security cameras from the Wendy's at 28th and Byron Center, check the financial records at Western Union and somehow verify a conversation about the Tanger outlets that didn't even happen. He wants them so busy chasing down Colin James at Wendy's that they aren't looking at the woods in Kalamazoo. Oh, wait. He does not stop there. Right in the middle of this monologue about earnest money, he suddenly stops himself. Oh, the self correction. Yeah, he says, oh, scratch that. And then claims he remembered that he took his 10 and 11 year old nieces to Craig's cruisers, which is a big local family entertainment center and arcade in the area. Right. He says they were there for four hours playing games. And then he had to suddenly leave the arcade because his fiance Tiara had a severe stomach virus. So he ended up rushing her to the mercy health emergency room on Byron Center. And he says he's set there for two and a half hours, right? Yep.

18:48Two and a half hours in the ER waiting room. And this right here is where the anatomy of a complex sophisticated lie really reveals itself. Quinn is not just making things up out of thin air. He's mixing it up. He is carefully, deliberately blending, verifiable, undeniable truths with absolute fabrications. Think about the locations he just gave them, a trip to the emergency room. You can totally lick that out. That leaves a massive paper trail. The hospital has triage records, admitting records, security cameras at every entrance, time stamped interactions with nurses and doctors. You cannot fake a hospital visit. And in the arcade too, right? Trex cruisers, same thing. They have surveillance footage everywhere. Credit card receipts for tokens, food purchases. He intentionally embeds these hard, undeniable, highly documented facts into his timeline to create a foundation of credibility. So he uses the real events as 10 polls to hold up the fake canopy of his alibi. That is exactly it. The psychological hope is that the detectives will go out,

19:52pull the hospital records, see that he was indeed at mercy health for two and a half hours, and then subconsciously rubber stamp the rest of his story. Like if A is true, B and C must be true. Exactly. If the hospital visit is true, human nature assumes the amp betty and Wendy's story must be true too. It is an anchoring bias. I want to ask you to do something for a second. Just put yourself in his shoes or you know, just in your own shoes listening to this. Okay. Imagine a detective sits you down right now and asks you to try to remember your exact step-by-step movements from last Saturday. It's harder than you think. Could you rattle off every single intersection you drove through? Could you remember every dollar about you spent, every phone call you made, the exact timeline of when you were at the grocery store versus the gas station without hesitating? No way. Most people can barely remember what they had for breakfast yesterday. Right. So I want to ask you, is an expert? When a suspect provides this level of encyclopedic detail, is that a fine of a genuinely great memory or is this the hallmark of a rehearsed script?

20:55In an interrogation setting, an encyclopedic memory is almost always a script. Natural human memory, especially for mundane days, is incredibly messy. It's all jumbled up. We recall things out of order. We get hazy on times. We correct ourselves based on emotional anchors. You might remember going to the grocery store, but you only remember what time it was because you know you were hungry for lunch, so I must have been around noon. Oh, that makes sense. We tie memories to feelings or needs. Exactly. Real memory is like a connect-the-dots puzzle where you jump around the page to form the picture. Rehearsed memory is like reading a grocery list top to bottom. It is perfectly linear. So when it's too perfect, it's fake. When someone provides a highly detailed chronological log of a mundane Saturday, it is because they have practiced it in the mirror. The grocery list versus the connect-the-dots. I love that analogy. It makes so much sense. If I am recalling a real day, I am stumbling. I am backtracking. Like, oh, wait, no, I went to get gas after I got the coffee because I spilled it.

21:56Exactly. You discover the timeline as you speak it. But what is particularly interesting about Quinn's script is that he intentionally acts out the process of stumbling. He tries to fake the connect-the-dots process. He really does. He says things like, what the- what did I do Saturday? He pauses, he looks up at the ceiling, and then he conveniently remembers the exact intersection of Wendy's. It's all theater. It is a performance of memory retrieval rather than actual retrieval. He wants them to see him working hard to remember it. He is working so hard to control the narrative. He is preemptively offering alibis, but he is also preemptively making excuses for things the police haven't even brought up yet. He's constantly trying to stay one step ahead. It is wild to read. Like, completely at a nowhere with zero prompting from Bill or Corey. He decides he needs to lay the groundwork for why he will absolutely under no circumstances take a polygraph test. He just brings it up himself. Yes, they haven't asked him to take one. The word hasn't even been spoken in the room.

22:56But he launches into this massive story from years ago, like 2014 or 2015. Right, because he clearly knows the playbook. He knows that in a high stakes homicide interrogation, especially one involving a suspect with a pending criminal case, a polygraph request is standard operating procedure. He knows it's coming. He anticipates the move, and he feels he needs to build a firewall against it before they can even suggest it. He can't just say no when they ask because that looks guilty. So he needs a reason, a history, of why he hates polygraphs. Exactly. He has to establish a historical precedent for his refusal. So he tells them this elaborate story. He says that back when he was working as a school custodian, three iPhones went missing from a girls locker room. And he was the prime suspect. Right, because he was the janitor who had the keys and had been in there to clean, he was naturally accused of stealing them. Now, he claims that back then, he eagerly agreed to take a polygraph test to clear his good name, but that he failed it horribly.

23:57And his excuse for failing is something else. Is just as our, he tells the detectives that the examiner asked him a baseline question, something incredibly simple like what's state or we in? A standard control question. Right. And Quinn claims he purposely lied and said something other than Michigan just to mess with the examiner and that one lie through the entire test off and made him look like a thief. We really need to break down the mechanics of a polygraph here to understand why his excuse is so absurd. Please do, because it sounded like nonsense to me. A polygraph machine measures physiological responses, specifically galvanic skin response, which is essentially sweat gland activity. Like how clammy your hands get. Yes. As well as respiration rate and cardiovascular activity like heart rate and blood pressure. The entire point of the pre-test interview, which takes a considerable amount of time, is to establish a baseline. To see how you react normally. Exactly. The examiner will ask you to intentionally lie about something obvious, like asking you if the sky is green. Wait, they ask you to lie on purpose.

24:58They do. So they can calibrate the machine to see exactly what your body's unique physiological stress response looks like when you are knowingly being deceptive. So by lying about what state he was in, he wouldn't be breaking the test. He just be doing exactly what the baseline is designed to measure. Exactly. The machine does not know if you are in Michigan or Ohio. It only knows your blood pressure spiked and your sweat glands activated when you said it. It just measures the stress of the lie. A trained polygraph examiner would easily spot an intentional lie on a baseline question. In fact, they rely on it. But Quinn's narrative requires him to be the victim of a faulty system. Of a machine that doesn't understand his complex intellect. He thinks he outsmarted a machine that was literally designed for what he did. Right. He goes on to claim that he was later completely vindicated when one of the girls broke down on the witness stand in court and confessed that she actually stole her friend's phones to trade them in for a new iPhone 6, which conveniently pains him as the innocent martyr who was nearly

25:59destroyed by a broken system. The perpetual victim. And as he is telling this walk-a-room story, his broader criminal history starts to bleed into the conversation. He starts talking about his past to justify why he's so defensive. And he has quite the past. He casually mentions that he grew up in a really rough environment with a mother who struggled with crack addiction. And he says, because of that chaotic environment when he was just a kid like 14 or 15 years old, he started robbing the drug dealers who came around his neighborhood. He admits this to homicide detectives. Yeah. He actually boasts to them that he didn't even bother to hide his identity when he robbed them, which he admits resulted in him being shot multiple times as a teenager. That is a staggering level of violence for a young teenager. He eventually went to adult prison in 1990 or 91 for armed robbery and ended up serving 21 years. I want to pause on that number. 21 years on an armed robbery charge is an incredibly long sentence. Really? I mean, armed robbery

27:00is serious, but 21 years. Typically, you see sentences of fraction of that length for robbery, even armed robbery, especially for an offender who went in as a juvenile. So why did he serve so much time? He explains exactly why. He maxed out his sentence because he was constantly fighting behind bars. He accumulated in fraction after in fraction. So he kept getting in trouble inside. Right. He tells the detectives point blank that he fought constantly because he wasn't going to be anyone's quote girlfriend on the inside. Wow. That is a brutal, primal, hyper violent environment he had to survive and serving over two decades in it clearly shaped his entire worldview. It really paints a picture of a guy who feels like he has been at war with his environment and the people in it for his entire life. It is a defensive posture he never dropped from robbing drug dealers to surviving prison politics to fighting the school system over iPhones. Precisely. If you synthesize all of this data he is giving them, the locker room theft, the decades of prison fights, the current sexual assault charges. You see a man whose core identity is built entirely around

28:04a profound victim mentality. He is the hero of his own tragic story. In his own mind he is the perpetual protagonist who is constantly unfairly targeted by others and particularly by women. Yeah. He claims the teenage girls in the locker room framed him. And later in the transcript he mentions an ex-girlfriend who he claims tried to run him over with a car and broke out all his windows for no reason. Just for no reason at all. Sure. And now he claims Jay, this 16 year old girl is framing him for sexual assault. The common denominator in his mind is that everyone is out to get Queen James. It's almost like the ultimate boy who cried wolf scenario, but totally in reverse. What do you mean? He is trying to convince the detectives that the town's people are the ones constantly crying wolf about him. He wants them to look at his lengthy rap sheet in his history of allegations and see a tragic pattern of false accusations. Rather than the obvious truth, which is a clear pattern of predatory behavior. Right. And this is where the dynamic of the interrogation shifts. Because he is so firmly established this narrative that he is a perpetual

29:09victim of false accusations, he essentially forces the detectives to address the elephant in the room. They have to bring it up now. They can't ignore the pending criminal sexual conduct case involving Jay anymore because he keeps hovering around the concept of false charges. Right. They finally ask him directly about it. They say, okay, tell us about the charges with Jay. And Quinn does not just issue a standard denial. Imagine your friend tells you she's taking an innocent family trip to Greenville, South Carolina. We'll call her Emma. The trip sounds great to you. Hiking at Jones Gap, dinner at Topsoil, a room at the best hotel in town. Harmless, right? Here's the thing. Emma and her family never return from Greenville. They disappear. You search for answers, but nothing adds up. Emma had a great life back home. You guys were best friends. What happened? Well, the truth is, once Emma realized she could have access to Michelin recognized restaurants, nature, local shops, and performing arts all in one place, everywhere else started to seem a little.

30:13Ma. Emma's vacation is a cautionary tale. If you're coming this way, don't forget to tell your friends and neighbors goodbye. Visit Greenville, South Carolina, but you may never want to leave. Learn more at visit GreenvilleSC.com. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com slash blue. Urgentcarekit.com slash blue. It's fall in Jeep country and during the drive into fall sales events, get a great deal on 4 by 4's that refuse to be contained, like Jeep Wrangler. Confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied, with the open

31:18air freedom and Jeep gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep drive into fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, Jeep and the Jeep Grill Registered Trademarks of FCAUS LLC. He gives a version of events that is honestly staggering to read. It is quite graphic and detailed in his lies. He admits to the detectives that he did indeed have sex with 16-year-old Jay, but he claims it was entirely consensual and happened on the very first day they met in person. And then he escalates the lie to an absurd degree. It is so gross. Yeah. He claims it was a massive group encounter. He says it was himself, Dequarius, her boyfriend, Dequarius's brother Demarcus, and two other unnamed guys, all of them in one room with a 16-year-old girl. This is a highly calculated tactical move on his part, albeit a deeply repulsive one. What is he trying to achieve by saying this? He is attempting to completely dismantle the victim's character in the eyes of law enforcement. In the psychology of interrogation,

32:19this is a recognized form of motive deflection through victim smearing. Victim smearing. Yes. He assumes that police officers have inherent biases. If he can convince the detectives that Jay was highly promiscuous, that she willingly engaged in group sex with multiple adult men, he believes that we can set the credibility of her assault allegation in their minds. He wants them to think, oh, she's not a victim, she's just a wild teenager. Exactly. It's a horrible misogynistic tactic, but it is one he relies on heavily. And he goes to extraordinary lengths to smear her. It is hard to listen to, honestly. He tells the detectives she was a master manipulator. He says she lied to everyone about her age, claiming she told him she was 19 and had her own apartment. When in reality, she was 16 and in the 10th grade. He's trying to make himself the victim of her deception. Right. He claims she would willingly stay at his house until two or three in the morning. And then he drops a truly vial accusation just to seal the deal. He claims that Diquarius told his aunt that Jay had a

33:23back page profile. For listeners who might not remember the landscape of the internet a few years ago, we should explain what back page was. Yeah, please do. Back page was a massive, classified advertising website that was heavily associated with prostitution and sex work before it was finally seized and shut down by the federal government. So he is literally calling this murdered 16 year old a sex worker to the cops. We have to connect this behavior to the bigger picture of his defense strategy, though. Why is he saying all this? Because he's a monster. Well, yes, but strategically Quinn is systematically trying to eliminate his own motive for the murder. Walk through his logic with me. Okay, let's hear the twisted logic. If her charges against him were completely fabricated and if he can prove she was a wildly promiscuous liar who was on back page, then surely his high priced defense lawyer would absolutely destroy her credibility in court during the April trial. Oh, I see. And if he wasn't worried about the trial because he was definitely going to win, why would he kill her? He is trying to build a logical fortress where he

34:25has absolutely no reason to want her dead. But there is a massive hole in that fortress, right? He still has to explain why she made the charges against him in the first place. Exactly. Why would she lie? Right. If she wasn't assaulted, why did she go to the police and start this whole process? So what does he do? He deflects the blame entirely onto dequeerious, the 17 year old boyfriend. He needs an architect for this grand conspiracy against him. He needs a villain for his story. So he tells this long drawn out story about how dequeerious was incredibly lazy, just laying around on the couch on Facebook all day instead of going out and applying for jobs like a man, setting dequeerious up as a bad kid. Yeah. And Quinn claims he finally had enough and went off on dequeerious, cussed him out aggressively in front of Jay and a bunch of other kids after a high school homecoming game, completely humiliating him. So providing dequeerious with a motive for revenge. Exactly. And as the cherry on top, Quinn claims he physically kicked dequeerious out of his house because dequeerious supposedly dragged Quinnjer's young son across the concrete by accident, scraping the skin off the kid's face.

35:29It is so detailed. So according to Quinnjer's grand narrative, dequeerious orchestrated this fake rape charge out of pure, spiteful revenge for being humiliated kicked out. He is weaving a highly intricate, multi-layered web here. But it is incredibly important for us to notice the underlying arrogance in the room. It is palpable. Picture the scene. He is sitting in a small sterile room with two veteran homicide detectives actively assassinating the character of a murdered 16-year-old girl whose body was just found in the freezing woods covered in bleach, which we'll get to. And he is painting himself as the innocent, upstanding family man who was just trying to teach a lazy teenager some responsibility. The absolute disconnect from human empathy is chilling. See, this is where I just have to stop and ask you a procedural question because reading this made me genuinely angry. It's infuriating. Yeah. How did the detectives just sit there and take this? He is dragging a murdered child's reputation through the mud. He is calling her a prostitute. He is

36:32blaming teenagers for a vast conspiracy. They have to maintain their composure. But does letting a suspect talk like this unchecked actually helped the investigation or is it just stroking his ego and letting him feel like he controls the room? I feel like I would want to slam my hands on the table and tell him to shut up. That reaction is exactly why interrogations are so incredibly difficult for detectives on a human emotional level. It has to take a toll. It does. Every instinct tells you to defend the victim to call out the lies. But professionally, legally, letting him talk unchecked is exactly the point of the exercise. Interrogation in this phase at least is not about shutting down a suspect's lies. Then what is it about? It is about getting them to commit to those lies permanently on the record. Explain that to me. Why do you want them to commit to a lie? Why not just correct them with the evidence? Because a lie is a tangible piece of evidence once it can be disproven. Every detail Quinn provides, every character assassination, every complex alibi about Aunt Betty and Wendy's, every excuse about a polygraph is a rope he is tying around his own neck.

37:38They're letting him hang himself. Exactly. The detectives are remaining completely passive. They're playing the role of the sympathetic nodding listener. Oh wow, really? Tell me more about that. They act like they believe him. They're letting him dig a massive, inescapable hole. If they interrupt him and say, we know you're lying, he stops talking, he asks for a lawyer and they get nothing. By letting him build his alternate reality, they're gathering ammunition. And once he is at the absolute bottom of that hole, he just dug for himself firmly on the record on tape with all his elaborate denials and his claims of being the perpetual victim, the detectives finally move. This is the moment. They spring a trap. And it is a trap they have been holding in their back pocket, just waiting for the right moment since the second he walked into the room. This is the turning point of the entire interview. It is the pivot from passive information gathering to active confrontation. The detectives bring up a police report from a few years prior, specifically from 2014. It involves a woman named Brittany Carter,

38:39who is sometimes referred to in the transcript as Brittany Thomas. Now, earlier in the interview, in true Quinn fashion, he had actually preemptively mentioned this Brittany situation. Oh, he brought it up first. He did. He claimed she was a woman who came to his house, asked him for $7,000 to start a modeling career down in Atlanta. And when he laughed and said, no, she fabricated our rape charge against him at a local applebees. Another fake charge from a woman out to get him. Right. He told the detectives that the police raided his house back then found zero evidence and dropped the charges completely. He thought he had inoculated himself against the Brittany Carter incident by bringing it up first. It is that preemptive defense again. He assumed that since he wasn't convicted, the report was legally toothless. He didn't realize the depth and the specificity of what the detectives actually held in their hands with that report. Detective Bill leans in, shifts his posture, and says there's something very similar in that incident that occurred with how we found Jay.

39:41You can just imagine Quinn's face. Quinn immediately plays dumb. I'm lost. He says. So the detectives do not mince words. They start reading verbatim from the 2014 police report. Reading his own history back to him. During that alleged sexual assault in 2014, Quinn choked Brittany. He pushed her down violently on a couch. And then he made a very specific utterly terrifying threat. A threat that changed everything in this case. The police report documents that Quinn told Brittany he was going to kill her, rapper in a blanket, call his buddy Tim to help him move the body and pour bleach all over her. You can almost feel the air go right out of the interrogation room when they read that. And then comes the bombshell, the absolute hammer drop. The detectives look across the table at Quinn and tell him that Jay's body was found dumped in the exact same manner. She had been severely doused in bleach. She was covered in bleach burns. This moment highlights a profound and fascinating psychological concept in criminology, right? The difference between a modus operandi and a signature. Oh, absolutely. It's crucial to

40:44distinguish the two. Can you break that down for us? Sure. A modus operandi or MO is strictly what a criminal does to commit the crime. It is the functional mechanics, how they gain access to a building, how they control a victim, how they escape the scene. This is practical. Very practical. And an MO can change over time as the criminal learns and adapts, you know, as they get better at their crimes. But a signature is entirely different. What is a signature? A signature is what the criminal does to satisfy their own deep-seated emotional or psychological needs. It is completely unnecessary to the actual commission of the crime. It is deeply personal. The pouring bleach isn't just about destroying DNA evidence. That's what you always see on TV, right? They pour bleach to hide their tracks. While bleach does degrade DNA, yes, the threat of pouring bleach, the specific fantasy of dominating a woman by threatening her with chemical burns and wrapping her in a blanket, that is a signature. It's about power and control. Yes. Quinn thought he was clever. He

41:44recycled a terrifying, dominating threat that he had used during an assault in 2014, assuming that because he wasn't legally convicted back then, the threat just vanished into the ether. He thought he was clean. He didn't comprehend that the 2014 police report had captured his specific violent fantasy and preserved it in amber. It created a perfect, documented blueprint of his darkest psychology. Here's where it gets really interesting to me. It is the sheer audacity, the arrogance of it. It is literally like a comic book villain leaving a calling card at the scene of the crime. He just couldn't help himself. He genuinely thought his past was erased just because the legal system didn't manage to convict him. He didn't realize that police reports do not just go away. They sit in digital databases for years, waiting for someone to run a keyword search and connect the dots. And when a homicide detective connects a documented past threat involving bleach to a current murder victim found covered in bleach, the circumstantial case suddenly transcends a mere coincidence and becomes devastatingly specific to one human being. Quinn immediately starts scrambling.

42:49You can see the panic set in on the page of the transcript. But true to his nature, he flat out denies the 2014 report. He just says it's a lie. He claims he never touched Brittany, never choked her, never said those words. He tries to argue that his defense lawyer only ever showed a one-page summary of the report from across a desk years ago and that the summary didn't say anything about bleach. He is grasping at anything. He is backpedaling furiously trying to rewrite history. But the detectives are not done. They have broken his psychological narrative, they have exposed his signature, and now they're going to shatter his physical alibi with something he could never ever have seen coming. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45

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45:01This is where modern technology intersects disastrously with criminal hubris. The detectives reveal a seemingly minor bureaucratic detail about the exact spot in Kalamazoo, where Janie's body was dumped. It turns out Kalamazoo city yards, like the municipal government, had been dealing with a major problem of illegal garbage dumping in that specific ravine. Just people throwing trash away. Right. People were throwing old washing machines, tires and trash down there. So just eight days before the murder, completely unrelated to any major crime, the city plays to camouflage motion activated trail camera on a tree overlooking the site to catch litter bugs. Think about the mindset of a killer disposing of a body. Quinn believed he had selected the perfect isolated dump site. He put thought into it. He did. He intentionally traveled 50 miles away from his home in Grand Rapids to a dark wooded ravine in the different city. He went in the dead of winter in the pitch black of night. He thought he was entirely off the grid. He thought nobody was watching.

46:04He couldn't possibly have anticipated a municipal trail camera meant to catch people tossing old mattresses. It is the ultimate blind spot. The detectives explain the science of the camera to him. This camera uses infrared technology. Now because it was pitch black darkness, the infrared emitted a light to capture the motion. And that light bounced back. That invisible infrared light refracted off the plastic casing of a tail light of a vehicle pulling into the area. It captured a rapid burst of three photos. And what did they show? And those photos show the exact distinct unmistakable shape of a 2012 Buick lacrosse tail light, which of course happens to be the exact make model and year of the vehicle Quinn James drove to the police station that very day. Let's delve into how that technology works because it is vital. Infrared light operates on a wavelength that is invisible to the human eye, but the camera sensor picks it up perfectly. But you don't even know you're being photographed. There's no flash. Exactly. When that infrared light hits the retro reflectors, those tiny angled prisms built into modern car tail lights designed to bounce

47:08light straight back to the source. It lights up like a Christmas tree on the camera sensor. Wow. This raises a fascinating point about how criminals perceive their environment versus the reality of the modern world. Quinn assumed the darkness protected him. He thought if he couldn't see anything, nothing could see him. But the camera doesn't care about the dark. Infrared does not care about darkness. Yeah. The very act of pulling his car into that space triggered a digital witness that he couldn't see couldn't hear and couldn't intimidate. Quinn panics. You can read the desperation in the transcript. But true to his nature, he tries to logic his way out of the corner. He gets highly defensive and argues, okay, if the camera saw the tail light, why didn't it catch the person walking across the woods? He's trying to find the loophole. Right. He says, why didn't it see me carrying a body? He aggressively scoffs at the police calling it his shit luck that a random camera caught a tiny piece of a car that just happens to match his. He says, there are a million buickson Michigan.

48:08He is grasping at straws, trying desperately to find the blind spot in the technology. He is hoping that if the camera didn't catch his actual face, he can still talk his way out of it. But I have to ask because I want to make sure we are looking at this objectively. Quinn actually makes a seemingly logical point here. Okay, what is it? If the camera saw the car, why didn't it see him carrying the body? If it is emotion activated camera, shouldn't it have caught the murder itself or at least the disposal? That's a fair question for a defense attorney to ask. Does a partial infrared photo of a tail light actually prove that he was there? Or is it just enough circumstantial evidence to make a jury connect the dots? Is circumstantial evidence enough? That is the crux of how the justice system operates. And we need to talk about circumstantial versus direct evidence. Walk a see that difference. Direct evidence would be a video of Quinn James carrying the body. But in isolation, a photo of a tail light is just circumstantial. It is a photo of a tail light. However, evidence does not exist in a vacuum. A trial is about the convergence of probabilities. The convergence of probabilities. I

49:13think of circumstantial evidence like snowflakes. One snowflake is nothing. But millions of them create an avalanche. Okay, walk me through the avalanche in this case then. What are the mathematical odds that a 16 year old girl is murdered just weeks before she is set to testify in a major trial against a man who happens to drive a 2012 Buick lacrosse? Very slim. Let's add another layer. What are the odds that she's found doused in bleach? A highly specific documented threat that same man made on the police record four years prior. Even slimmer. And let's add one more layer. What are the odds that a random trail camera at the exact dump site captures the specific tail light of a 2012 Buick lacrosse on the very night she goes missing? It's impossible for it to be a coincidence. At a certain point, the math of coincidence completely breaks down. It stops being bad luck and becomes overwhelming undeniable circumstantial proof. The jury isn't just looking at a tail light. They're looking at the tail light, the bleach, the motive, and the collapsing alibi all at once. That makes total sense. It is the weight of the totality of the circumstances.

50:17At this point in the transcript, the interrogation hits a complete grinding stalemate. The detectives know Quinn is not going to break down, cry and confess. He's incapable of it. He is too deeply invested in his identity as the smartest guy in the room, the perpetual victim. He continues to claim the 2014 report is a total fabrication by corrupt cops. Write down to him refusing the polygraph. He goes back to the polygraph lie. Yes. He tells this wild, easily disprovable story that he actually did show up for the polygraph in 2014 sat in the waiting room for three hours and the examiner just never showed up. So he left. But there are logs for that. The detectives literally read directly from the administrative log showing he arrived, signed in and explicitly declined the test. But he just calls it all a giant coordinated lie. He is retreated into total impenetrable denial. The reality of the evidence has breached his psychological defenses. So his only recourse is to claim that reality itself,

51:18the police reports, the administrative logs, the infrared cameras, is a massive coordinated lie designed specifically to ruin his life. It is a profound defense mechanism. Seeing they aren't getting a confession, the detectives move to close the interview. They ask him for a DNA swab. Quinn agrees, arrogantly stating that it won't match him anyway because he assumes bleached destroys everything. Unbelievable. And then as a final blow before they let him go back to his cell, they inform him of something he truly didn't expect. They tell him that despite Jay's death, the prosecutor is not dropping the sexual assault charges. The April trial is still happening. That is a crucial monumental moment in the case. Quinn thought he was playing 3D chess. He calculated that by eliminating the primary witness, he eliminated the case entirely. That is the oldest, most brutal logic in the criminal underworld. No witness, no case. But the prosecution signaled that they had enough corroborating evidence. Perhaps physical evidence, perhaps statements she made to others before her death under the doctrine of

52:20forfeiture by wrongdoing. Right. Which allows hearsay if the defendant caused the witness's absence. Exactly. They were going to proceed without her testimony. Right. It completely negated whatever twisted sociopathic logic he used to justify the murder in the first place. He killed her for nothing. And the aftermath of this case proves that point exactly. The justice system didn't let Jay's voice die with her in those woods. No, they didn't. Despite her tragic murder, the criminal sexual conduct case proceeded as planned. In October of 2018, Quinn James was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison for the sexual assaults. A huge victory. And then six months later, in April 2019, he faced a jury for her murder. And it all came out. The bleach, the trail cam, the fake alibis. He was found guilty of first degree premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It is a profound testament to the dedication of the investigators, the crime scene technicians and the prosecution team. Often tragically, when a victim is murdered, their prior cases die with

53:23them due to a lack of testifying witnesses. The system simply gives up because it's too hard. Exactly. The fact that they pushed forward, utilized legal exceptions to hearsay and secured convictions on waterfronts ensured that every aspect of his criminality was addressed. They didn't just lock away a murderer. They vindicated a sexual assault victim. During the sentencing phase, Jay's mother, Fatmata, delivered a truly powerful heart-wrenching victim impact statement. I can only imagine how hard that was for her. She stood in that courtroom, looked at the man who killed her daughter and said, cowards like him take the easiest way out. People like this do not deserve to be in the community. Her words cut right through the elaborate labyrinth of lies he tried to build in that interrogation room. He thought he was a mastermind, a tactician who could outsmart the police and the courts. That he wasn't. Ultimately, a grieving mother defined him correctly and succinctly. He was just a coward looking for an easy, violent way out of facing accountability for his actions.

54:24Despite having an answer for absolutely everything in that interrogation room, Quinn couldn't talk his way out of the physical and historical evidence. He really believed his words, his rehearsed scripts, and his aggressive confidence were stronger than a municipal trail camera meant for garbage dumpers in a bottle of household bleach. If we connect this to our own lives, obviously on a much less dramatic scale, it is a stark reminder of the digital and physical footprints we leave behind every single day. We leave traces everywhere. We often think we can narrate our own reality, that we can talk our way out of situations at work or in our relationships, or reframe our past mistakes with a good story. We spin things. But the objective data from our text messages to neighborhood security cameras to our documented behavioral patterns over years tells the real unvarnished story of who we are. Our actions leave an indelible mark, regardless of the fictions we tell ourselves in the mirror. So we have journeyed through this incredible maze of alibis, bizarre coincidences,

55:25and absolute blind hubris. We watched a killer unravel in real time because his own past threats became the exact blueprint for his undoing. It's a tragic but fascinating case study. It brings us back to that ravine in the freezing woods, the stillness that was broken by a horrifying discovery, but also by the relentless scientific pursuit of the truth. Science and persistence won out. We live in a world that is now completely blanketed by ring cameras, cell phone pings tracking our every step, and infrared trail cams hiding invivably in the trees. But beyond all the modern technology, Quinn James was ultimately caught because he couldn't help but repeat his own deeply personal violent fantasy. It's human nature betraying itself. It leaves you with a chilling thought to mull over long after you finish listening to this deep dive. Is the perfect crime impossible today because we are surrounded by an inescapable omnipresent web of digital surveillance? Or is it impossible because human nature always inevitably forces the criminal to leave a piece of their own dark psychology behind?

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