Knock Knock

This is Knock Knock. The unsolved murders of Betty Jones and Katherine

Crickler. My name is Jason B. Jones.

I was 10 years old. The phone rang. Something was wrong. A very wrong. That call was

about my grandmother. She was dead. And not just dead, but murdered. I will never

forget that night because it was September 3rd 1990 was the night that I was

introducing evil. It was a very unusual crime for our community and of course a

very brutal crime. It would take me 27 years to finally get up the courage to

ask all the questions about that night. I'm kind of freaking out a little bit.

Not gonna lie. It was important for me to see where it happened as I was

documenting this and trying to understand it. It was two girls hanging out

watching TV, getting ready to sleep. Being here I feel like I had a standoff

scary that would have been with the knock on a door. Betty goes and asks

the door and the guy comes in and immediately Katherine starts hearing

screaming and knows something is wrong with Betty and then he attacks Betty.

And then he kills her. He immediately went toward Katherine. Right here strangled

her, thought he killed her. I could hardly wrap my head around it. The fact that

there was somebody that had actually committed a murder and then to just

write my grandmother so nonchalantly. You know and just leave her to die. I miss her.

What was done in that house was as bad as anything Jack the Ripper ever did.

Standing in front of this house today 28 years later, what's it like for you? Knowing

that you still don't have your man. It's frustrating. It's no doubt about it. I

always assumed that Betty and Katherine's case was cold and dormant. What I

learned is that Sergeant Lot is no ordinary police officer. Even though I'm a

dinosaur I'm constantly getting on the internet and looking at science.

Parabond, what they do is they take the DNA and they developed a DNA facial

recognition of the killer. We're able to give them a prediction of what that

person looked like. So it's essentially a genetic witness. You remember the

moment when the picture revealed itself on your computer screen? It's like now I

know what she looked like. I'm gonna get you. Even as a child I learned what the

monsters fear. Whether imaginary or real monsters today still fear the light.

When we started this podcast I thought that real answers would be years or decades off.

Never in a million years did I think that we would get answers so quickly.

Jason Jones has a job he loves. He designs album covers and produces music

videos. I think something like this. In Nashville but for more than a year he had a

second passion. He had a podcast a dark podcast. I will never forget that night.

And it was personal. I remember waking up in the middle of the night sweating.

Jason launched his podcast in September 2017. It had an odd title, Not Knock. It is about a

particularly vicious crime that had been unsolved for nearly 30 years. I can't

imagine the terror that Betty and Catherine felt. When they realized behind that

Knock Knock stood a monster. For Jason this was more than just a murder tale.

It's the story of his family. Betty Jones was his step-grandmother. I think that

there was this this hum of fear throughout our family after Betty died.

It was Labor Day 1990. Jason was 10 years old and living outside of Houston.

That's when his family got that phone call telling them Betty had been murdered.

In Starkville, Mississippi. Were you scared? Oh yeah. I knew enough to know that there was someone

out there that killed my grandmother and they may want to kill me too.

Jason's parents Bill and Colleen Jones struggled to explain it all to him and his younger brother

Simon. Do you remember the words you used? We don't know why but God called Betty home and

we'll see you again someday. Betty came into their family late in life. She was a widow when she

married Jason's grandfather. He already had two grown children including Bill Jason's father.

She was wonderful. She took us in as her own children you know and was just warm and loving and

just an angel to me. Sadly Betty's marriage to Jason's grandfather did not last long.

My grandfather passed away from a heart attack just a few years into their marriage.

Although Jason only knew his step-grandmother for a few years when he was young, she left her mark.

She was the lady that came over and took us to nice restaurants and smelled really good.

That's how I remembered her as a ten-year-old. She was the grandmother that was really into

baseball which I don't know for a little boy having a grandmother's into baseball is pretty cool.

Betty Jones was more than just a baseball fan. She was a team mom for the Mississippi State

University Bulldogs in Starkville. Her job was to keep the players from getting homesick

and wanting to leave. Betty's sister Anne McQuater says Betty often brought the players chewing gum

to keep them from other vices. Now honey I want you to be sure and chew that gum now don't you get

into that tobacco. She had a real connection with his baseball team. She did but she had a connection

with any age person. Catherine Kriegler was one of the people to whom Betty felt connected.

Betty was 65. Catherine was 81. A retired school teacher. She was taking some new medication

and Betty volunteered to keep her company in case she fell ill.

What was the basis of their friendship? Church.

Julia Kriegler Holt, known as Juki, says her grandmother and Betty were active members of the

first Presbyterian church which was right next door. Betty was a church elder. Catherine

sang in the choir and she played the piano at home. I think that was her dream for me to be a

pianist that didn't happen but I took lessons for her. To this day Juki has warm memories of her

grandmother's house. Catherine raised two children there and it was a gathering spot for extended

family. This is me. And there's my granny. Her house was a quite little house. I never in a million

years would ever feel scared in that location. That night in 1990 started out peacefully enough.

The two friends were just settling in after a supper time. But that changed around 9 pm.

They had taken baths. They had their gowns on. They were getting ready to watch a parking.

When did I knock on the door? The monster came to the door. David Lindley is now retired but he

was the lead investigator at the time. He says when Betty opened the back door and intruder forced his

way in. As best we can tell in her into a physical confrontation with her and she tried to defend herself.

Catherine Kriggler was all but helpless. She was an amputee and was in her wheelchair in the bathroom

when she heard Betty calling for help. She tried to see what was going on in the attacker appeared.

He ended up liking her going to her bedroom and told her that he did not want to hurt her like he

had hurt her friend. He in fact did write Miss Kriggler.

And he left the residence sometime shortly after we surmise.

Catherine was left bleeding. She had fractured ribs and a broken hip but she somehow managed

not only to survive but to call for help. Miss Kriggler was able to rally her spring.

She couldn't get to her wheelchair so she took a pillow. He used it to kind of glide or slide

into the kitchen area where there was another fountain and she was able to reach up.

Catherine was rescued by EMS but in the living room with the baseball game still playing on the TV

and the brothers and sisters. Betty was dead on the floor.

Her throat was slashed. She died trying to save Catherine.

She was a fighter and I know that when this guy started attacking her Betty felt like a wild cat.

Betty's death left a hole in her family's life and everyone in the small university town

was on edge. As it turns out the police wouldn't have to look far for a good suspect.

There was one right next door to Catherine's house.

To look at these pictures I might say sad.

Even now it is hard for Juki Kriggler-Hull to think about the details of what happened

to her grandmother Catherine. How horrible it is to know that at the very last part of her

life something so horrible would happen. But Juki is still amazed by the courage and the

strength her grandmother summoned after she was attacked to get help for herself and her friend Betty.

It makes me proud of her because she could have totally just given up right there and most people would.

That's pretty amazing.

Sadly Catherine was unaware at first that Betty was killed.

Clearly what I can remember her saying all the time was you know if anything ever happened to

Betty I don't want to live. Betty's stepson Bill Jones visited Catherine in the hospital

after she learned her friend was dead. It was an emotional visit.

She was upset that she survived and Betty had gone. Do you remember what she said?

She said I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. Please forgive me.

Did you feel the truth responsible? You know it tore me up but I saw I could say or do

and that's what she wanted. So that seemed to help.

In November 1990 two months after the attack Catherine Kriegler died of complications from her injuries.

There's no doubt that whoever killed Betty that night killed your grandmother just took longer.

Yeah absolutely. But Catherine had lived long enough to give the Starkville police

a description of the assailant. She said he was a young man short hair that was almost cut like a

crewcut spiked I guess you would say these days. He had blue eyes and light blonde hair or brown hair.

Police released this rudimentary sketch. She described his complexion as swarthy and we

imagine that to be something either as a skin tone or a suntan.

Investigator David Lindley says the killer left a few clues behind. We collected fingerprint

evidence. We collected hair evidence. Blood. We found some cigarettes there. We did and

neither the women smoked. So we of course assumed that the perpetrator left the cigarettes at the same.

But police could not figure out a motive. The killer took 28 dollars from Catherine

but nothing else and Lindley didn't think a petty thief would commit a crime this violent.

But in this particular case there was just no ram or reason for it. This is a crime of violence

purely for the psych of violence. The hunt for a suspect was intense and police had a lot to work with.

Lindley provided an update soon after the killing back in 1990.

Residents to start with are extremely helpful in providing leads and right now we have

several leads that we are pursuing. Many of those leads like a report of a drifter spotted in the area

went nowhere but a good suspect soon emerged. A young neighbor of Catherine Criglers was having

a party at his house the night of the attack and he had blonde hair and blue eyes. Just like the

killer Catherine described. Where was the house? The house is just over in this area here.

Over there. It's not there anymore. It's not there anymore but it was about 150 feet away.

The more police investigated the more their suspicion grew. He did leave the party for a period of

10 but nobody at the party could recall for exactly how long he was gone from the party.

What's more the young man was known to carry a knife and he smoked the brand of cigarettes

found at the scene. Well that must have caught your attention. Certainly. The suspect also

reportedly made a cryptic and possibly incriminating statement to a witness when asked about the crime.

He stated that he did not do it but his other sleigh off might have done it.

Police had a lot of suspicion but did not think they had hard evidence to arrest him.

There was never enough probable cause to make an arrest. I think a lot of people in the community

naturally believe that this individual committed this crime. They wanted it resolved quickly

but unfortunately it didn't occur that way.

Police were back at square one and after three years of dead ends investigators turned to

America's most wanted which agreed to feature the case. Yes, America's most wanted.

Everyone had high hopes. Well I was hoping that somewhere up in Chicago or California someone would

brag in a bar. You know I was in Mississippi at that time and hey I did it. I did it.

David Lindley helped man the phones at the show's headquarters in Washington DC.

Or you're saying many many tips from all over the United States. It looked promising but only for a while.

Anything pan out? They did not. It was unsuccessful. A good attempt but again unsuccessful.

The level of hope that you must have felt this case has been a heartbreaker over the years.

So disappointing is a good word. In 2004 Lindley who by then had been promoted to Chief of Police

handed the case over to an enthusiastic detective named Bill Lot and Lot was intrigued by this case.

When I first got a sign this case I didn't know anything for the first year but read it six times.

I bet Chief Lindley thought, what is this kid going to start working this case?

But as Lot dug in he became confident that this case could be solved.

And I knew at that point I had a critical piece of evidence.

Sergeant Bill Lot's roots run deep in Starkville, Mississippi.

And he has struggled for years to solve the mystery that has hung over his town since Labor Day of 1990.

To think that somebody would do something as heinous as this to only look people just

it made me angry. Lot feels a personal connection to Betty Jones and Katherine Kriegler.

Because my parents had divorced at an early age and aunts and uncles. It helped raise me and

they were older and had an older aunt that you know played a role in my life. It just didn't sit well

in me. When Lot took over the investigation in 2004 he inherited boxes of evidence,

hundreds of pages of police reports and a decade and a half of frustration.

But let me tell you something, there was a lot of great, great detective work done.

The only advantage I had over those guys was DNA.

That's because when the crime was committed in 1990 not much was known about forensic DNA.

But with new knowledge and new technology, Lot knew he had potentially critical evidence.

Because doctors had extracted DNA from Katherine Kriegler using a sexual assault kit.

They may not have known it at the time but that was a key moment in this case.

There's no question about it. That is the key to the gates.

Police kept the evidence and in 2005 Lot sent it to a lab.

What did that lab do for you with this evidence?

They got a same-and-base DNA profile.

With the DNA profile of the killer in hand,

Lot's first order of business involved an old suspect.

That blonde-haired blue-eyed man who was partying next door to Katherine's house.

What is this?

This is contains the original kit of the number one suspect that supposedly did this crime.

Lot had the killer's DNA profile compared to the DNA of the young man

who many in Starkville still believed had been responsible.

What did it show?

Not a match.

Not a match.

Right.

The one-time prime suspect was almost certainly not the man who killed Betty Jones and Katherine Kriegler.

But in 1990 there was a lot of pressure to arrest that man.

And Lot believes if he had been arrested he would have been convicted and executed.

Is this case changed the way you feel about the death penalty?

Can I say it this way?

I used to be 100% pro-death penalty.

Now?

Now I think it would have to be on a case by case basis.

Sounds like a shift to me.

Yes, because he could have been put to death for a crime he didn't commit.

Lot went on to test the DNA of 60 other potential suspects.

None was a match.

There was also no match in Codis, the national DNA database of violent criminals.

I had resolved that it would probably never be solved.

Betty Jones's sister and McQuarter.

That I would code to my grave without knowing who did this.

Hours away in Tennessee, Jason Jones and his family, who had grown distant from Betty's over time,

knew little about the investigation.

There's no one was calling us.

We were the extended family.

And Jason says over the years his family hardly ever spoke about Betty's death.

It becomes this taboo subject where people don't really disclose information because it's hard to talk about.

But now, as an adult, Jason was more curious than ever.

I wanted to know what had happened.

And so I googled it and nothing came up.

It was shocking to me that I couldn't find information about this case or my grandmother's murder or her life or anything.

He had questions about Betty, but he had even more about Catherine Kriegler.

I don't think I knew the name Kriegler, to be honest.

You didn't know the name of the other person?

I don't think so.

But in August 2005,

when Jason was getting married, there was a huge, almost unbelievable development.

His fiance's mother held a bridal shower and invited some of her friends.

Stories frequently come out of bridal showers, but not like this story.

I was busy playing mother of the groom.

And so I was introduced to a lot of people that day.

Jason's mother, Colleen, was chatting with a young art teacher.

When they discovered that even though they were both in Nashville,

they had a Mississippi connection.

I told her that I had married a guy that had gone to high school in college and start full.

And she said,

Start full, my grandparents lived there.

What's your husband's last name?

What were your in-laws last name?

And as soon as I said Betty Jones, it was just like she had seen a ghost.

And I was it.

Standing before Colleen Jones was Catherine Kriggler's granddaughter,

Juki.

Well, how did you feel?

It's just a wow.

You know, like what is the chances?

You tell me what are the chances?

Yeah, one in a rebellion.

You know, it's amazing.

Both women were quick to see a larger meaning to the chance meeting.

This cannot be coincidental.

Happened stance.

It's like the angels went,

Oh,

But it wasn't until 2017 that Jason, who was inspired by true crime podcasts,

decided that he should spotlight this cold case.

Monsters today still fear the light.

The podcast was not only a way for me to learn more about

the life of a grandmother that was taken for me too early,

but also a way to try to seek justice or to make sense of what happened.

Working on the podcast would force Jason to return to the place he last saw

when he was 10 years old.

Starkville, Mississippi.

It's always been a story.

And on this trip, it's just progressively became more real.

But it's always been real to Sergeant Lot, who has never given up

and believes one of Starkville's oldest cases will be solved with the newest technology.

I want to get this guy.

And this is a good two.

This is as good as two as we've had in a while.

In early 2017, Jason Jones traveled to Starkville, Mississippi.

It's a place he had long associated with only death and sadness.

This just feels like a pleasant bill USA.

But visiting the home where his step-grandmother spent the last moments of her life

brought back those familiar dark feelings.

I just feel overwhelmed here.

It's not even sadness.

It's just a magnitude.

There's a...

I don't know.

It's hard to describe.

I hadn't visually put together that this was a real place with real walls and real windows.

Now that I'm here, I can really understand what it would be like.

That sense of being trapped and the overwhelming panic.

Being in this place, knowing what happened here made it even more important to Jason

to find out who was responsible and to share the search with his listeners.

How is it that we could have untampered DNA evidence

yet no matches had been made?

If we couldn't find a match, honestly, could this case ever be solved?

But Sergeant Bill Lot was still working this case, often on his own time.

I told my wife I said, if I retire and I still haven't solved this case,

you're going to be rolling me up to the police station in a wheelchair.

I'm not quitting.

And DNA technology is improving quickly.

In June 2018, Lot had the suspects DNA profile sent to Parabond Nano Labs

in Reston, Virginia. Parabond works with cutting-edge technology, performing what is called DNA

Fieno-typing.

DNA phenotyping means predicting a person's appearance from DNA.

Dr. Ellen Gray-Tack is Parabond's lead scientist for DNA Fieno-typing.

How new is this technology?

It's very new. It's been available to law enforcement for less than four years.

And at the beginning, there was a lot of skepticism.

DNA was seen as having this one purpose for matching.

And we were saying, no, there's all this other information you can get from DNA.

That's because DNA is like a blueprint for a person's ancestry and physical characteristics.

There are DNA codes that tell the color of your eyes, your hair, and your skin.

The codes also tell your face shape, and even if you have freckles, and how many.

And we've trained our computers to recognize those genetic signatures.

And then if we run a crime scene sample from an unknown person through that model,

and the computer recognizes one of those signatures, it can say,

there's a high probability that this came from someone with blue eyes.

And then as you add each trait, you end up with a smaller, smaller group of people.

If I'm a cop looking for a needle in a haystack,

it seems to me you've just taken away a lot of hay.

Absolutely. It is extraordinarily helpful with eliminating a lot of suspects and focusing

on investigation. Parabond showed us how they came up with a composite in the Starkville case.

We've got the predicted face shape. We've got the predicted skin color on there.

But we don't have the predicted eye color, predicted hair color.

But this process is part science and part art.

This is sort of a blank canvas.

Exactly. To use an artistic analogy.

Tom Shaw is a forensic artist who interprets the computer's conclusions

and makes the image more life-like.

The computer had concluded that this killer would most likely have some freckles, brown hair,

and light blue eyes.

And so then I can go to that collection of light blue eyes and pick out,

okay, this is the one we like.

We're not producing a photograph of that person.

We don't know the person's age.

They're weight, anything that they've done with their hair or tattoos, scars,

things like that. But we can give a description, which is something that these detectives

didn't have before.

In late August 2018, just a few days shy of the 28th anniversary of the Labor Day murders.

Parabond sent Sargent Lot to composites.

One showed an idea of what the suspect looked like back in 1990.

That's him.

The time of the murder.

And the second one showed what he might look like now.

When you look at this picture, what goes through your mind?

Where are you?

Now how am I going to find you?

But other experts at Parabond were using another method to find the suspect.

Genetic genealogy.

In genetic genealogy, we're uploading it to Jedmatch, which is a public database of people who

have explicitly chosen to publicly share their DNA for other people to search

and have explicitly consented to law enforcement usage.

There are roughly one million people on Jedmatch.com all searching for family members.

The DNA of the Starkville killer was compared to the DNA of all those people.

To see if one of them might be at least a distant relative.

And they found something.

In this case, we were able to find some good matches.

These are people who genetically match our unknown subject and we're trying to figure out

based on knowing approximately how much DNA is shared.

Can we build their family trees and figure out who this unknown person is?

Genetic genealogy helped police catch the alleged Golden State killer,

who's believed to have murdered 13 people and raped 50 women across California in the 70s and 80s.

So lot hopes it can help him too.

I've been obsessed with it looking at it to see if I've got the genetic genealogy.

The Jones and Crickler families sensed investigators were on the verge of something big.

And I've just felt an electricity about, you know, that this is going to be

solved sooner than later.

And they were right.

At a rest made in Starkville in the 1909 belief they may have the...

I was asleep here at home and about 4 a.m. I received a text from Sergeant Bill Lott.

He said we've got him.

But it wasn't very eloquent.

I believe my exact quote was your s*** me.

Hey there. I'm Kendra Adachi and my show The Lazy Genius Podcast

helps you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't

and you get to decide what matters.

I'm not here to tell you what to do.

I'm here to give you a new way to see episodes of The Lazy Genius Podcast are full of

compassionate time management tips and permission slips to do what makes sense for you.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow and listen to The Lazy Genius Podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the course of this season we've unpacked Betty and Catherine's life.

In the summer of 2018 as Jason Jones was completing his podcast series,

we've seen setbacks and huge opportunities for moving this case forward.

He was hoping among other things that a listener would come forward with information about the murder.

A listener did come forward but with a completely unexpected story.

We got a message from a girl by the name of Betty Hong. Her story was

hard to believe honestly.

What was it?

Betty emailed us and let us know that she was actually named for my grandmother.

Betty Hong told Jason that in the 80s her family having escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in

Cambodia, sponsored by Betty Jones and several other members of the first Presbyterian Church

to come live in Starkville.

Betty's mother Kim Hong says her family came to the US with their freedom, but very little else.

But then I come, I don't have nothing. I only have two bags.

You came with just two bags?

Two small bags, yeah.

It was before Betty Hong was born, but she says Betty Jones took care of her family

and helped them get settled in America.

She truly impacted my parents' lives directly by holding them, bringing them out to eat,

and did it out of love.

And we got to come to America and have this American dream.

So it's really Betty Jones, like one of those angels that lived upon us,

but now that she's passed, I feel like she's someone who watches over me.

What is the emotion you're feeling now?

It's this burst of just thankfulness.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

In the summer of 2018, 48 hours brought Jason and Betty Hong together for the first time.

We're like family.

We're totally family, yeah.

The Hong story became part of the seventh and last episode of the podcast

that aired in August 2018.

My name is Jason B. Jones.

But although the podcast had its finale, it had no finality,

because still no one knew who killed Betty and Catherine.

What I would hope is that if we did a season two of knock knock,

that it would be about the conviction and the trial of the person who killed Betty and Catherine.

And just weeks after that interview with Jason, it began to look like the story would have the

ending he wanted after all.

Because finally, Sergeant Bill Lot had a suspect.

What was it that led you to this guy?

Genetic genealogy.

Lot's faith in science paid off.

A genetic genealogist at Parabond had completed weeks of detailed work,

building family trees based on those DNA matches on Jedmatch.com.

And she gave Lot a name.

It seemed surreal.

It didn't seem like I was dreaming.

It wasn't a dream.

It's real.

This was Lot's suspect, 51-year-old Michael Wayne Devon.

Devon is a twice-divorced father of three.

He'd worked in construction and farming most of his life.

And he was being held in jail a few hours away.

On drug charges.

Why wasn't his DNA in the national database?

He had no par criminal history until recently.

He's never served time or anything like that.

No, he's not.

Lot believed Devon had features similar to the ones depicted in the Parabond composite.

But he needed to make sure he had the right man.

So he sent a cigarette butt that Devon discarded while in custody on the drug charges.

To a lab for DNA testing.

The result, the DNA on the cigarette,

was a match to the DNA taken from Catherine Krigler,

the night of the attack.

You went up and got him that day, that Saturday?

Oh, yeah.

This town.

It was time.

It was time.

On October 6, 2018, 28 years after the crime,

Betty and Catherine's suspected attacker was brought in shackles to Starkville, Mississippi.

Do you have anything to say at all to their families?

Or about your arrest?

Michael Devon was charged with Betty Jones's murder and the rape and sexual battery of Catherine Krigler.

It's been a long, long journey.

But I would do it all over again.

And later that day,

Lot visited the man who had worked the case first.

Did I just tell you my friend?

Retired police chief David Lindley.

Congratulations.

Congratulations to you.

You did a lot of great work.

I just finished it.

Investigators were finally able to give the victims families the news they wanted.

Betty Jones's sister and McHorther.

I looked at her picture this morning for the first time in a long time.

The tears just flowed down my face.

It was just bad.

I miss you.

Even 28 years later.

Did you think that you would see this day?

No.

You can't believe it because 28 years is a very long time.

But there was a bit of excitement there that it's finally done.

He's finally been found.

Jason Jones was trying to absorb the news so soon after his podcast final episode.

But his reaction was not as simple as he expected.

I thought that I would feel either happy or mad, but the feelings are a lot more complicated than that.

I feel a sadness towards him that he was a guy that made a series of terrible choices that

resulted in taking something away from us that was irreplaceable.

Juki Kriegler-Holt wasn't quite as understanding.

He looked like a man to me that probably had no empathy whatsoever.

He could care less about anything he did to anybody.

Did I feel sorry for him?

No.

We may now know who knocked on the door that Labor Day night and attacked Betty Jones

and Catherine Kriegler.

But even if this case has been closed, there are still some questions that remain open.

Why did this guy choose Betty and Catherine?

What were the circumstances that made him do this?

And I know that it won't help and I know that it won't make anything better,

but I think the storyteller in me just needs to know what the end of that story is

in order to be able to put it away.

In 2020, Michael Devon pleaded guilty to killing Betty Jones.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

Without parole.

The critically acclaimed series Colin from accounts returns for a brand new season.

He proposed to me drunk out of nowhere at my best friend's wedding.

I was being spontaneous.

He didn't have a ring.

It was just awesome.

All episodes streaming September 10th.

Still will they won't they?

Who is?

But what is it?

We're friends.

We are together Lee.

We're friends.

We're Lee together.

With a dog.

Colin from accounts new season streaming September 10th, only on Paramount Plus.