Black Candle Murder Party - West Liberty, Iowa - Part 2

Small Town Murder

In this gripping follow-up to the West Liberty, Iowa murder case, detectives revisit a decades-old mystery when a childhood witness—now an a

Key takeaways

• A 9-year-old witness's memory of a black candle ritual decades after the murder provided critical new evidence.
• The case remained cold for 25 years until an unexpected meeting with a former child witness changed everything.

Main topics

• Cold case murder investigation
• Witness memory and recollection after decades

Notable quotes

You should always check for 4th graders when performing a death ritual.

Conclusion

The Black Candle Murder Party case ultimately closed after years of in

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:15) Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder Express. Yay, choo-choo! Yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed. My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you so much for joining us today on another crazy, wonderful adventure known as Small Town Murder Express. We're going to do part two today of last week's West Liberty, Iowa episode. And by the way, this was not intended. We did not intend to do a two-parter. an hour for a reason and we did not expect, you know, we didn't expect it, but I got to say out of hundreds of times, this is the first time we've done that. So it's, I'm trying my best here. I was like, maybe I can Speaker 1 (0:55) squeeze this in. Speaker 2 (0:57) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just to let people know, that's not something that's going to be a thing all the time. It's not like from now on, we're doing a lot of two parters here. It's not going to be it. So. Just so you know there. Anyway, definitely head over to shut up and give me murder dot com. Oh, my goodness. Get your tickets for live shows, everybody. We can't wait. Next one up because this is coming out. When this comes out, it'll be, it'll be, we'll be in the middle of a live show at the time at the Pabst in Milwaukee. If you're listening that night, the next night, Minneapolis, you can come to that show. Hurry up. Hurry up. October 3rd, Dallas, Texas. Get your tickets there. October 16th, San Jose. October 17th, Sacramento. And November 13th, Tarrytown, just about sold out. So if you want to go to that, I'd get them right this minute. And then November 14th. Boston or just outside of Boston in Medford. So Medford, let's go get your tickets. Get in there. Shut up and give me murder.com is where you get all of those tickets and all your merchandise and everything like that. Definitely listen to our other two shows, crime in sports and your stupid opinions, which are, they're hilarious. Let's just say, yeah. Listen to those. Get yourself Patreon. You want Patreon. Patreon.com slash crimeinsports, just like the name of that other show. That is where you get all the bonus material. Oh, yeah. And all you have to be is $5 a month or above, and you get everything, every damn drop that we put out. As soon as you subscribe, you're going to get about 400 back bonus episodes you've never heard before to binge on. Then you get new ones every other week, of course. One crime and sports, one small-town murder, and you get them all, everybody. This week, what you're going to get for crime and sports, Lawn Chair Larry, which is this guy. What a Speaker 1 (2:38) time. Speaker 2 (2:39) It was amazing. This guy, he got all these weather balloons and tied them to a regular lawn chair with like a metal and vinyl lawn chair and launched himself 16,000 feet into the air. It's the craziest story you've ever heard. Then for Small Town, he thought that was a career, by the way, after that. It didn't work out. Then for Small Town Murder, Donner Party Part 2. Oh, boy. You want to find out who's coming for dinner? It's the Donner Party. They're Speaker 1 (3:04) getting nibbling. Speaker 2 (3:04) They're getting some nibbling going on there. We've finished up the story. So Patreon.com slash Crime in Sports. And on top of that, you get every show we put out. Crime in Sports, Your Stupid Opinion, Small Town Murder, all ad-free with your Patreon. Oh, ad-free. Then you get also a shout-out at the end of the regular show, too. It's literally all we have to give in offer. We're crazy. We're crazy. So get it right now, five bucks, patreon.com slash crimeinsports. That said, I think it's time, everybody, to sit back. Here we go. Clear the lungs. Let's do this. Arms to the sky, everybody. And let's all shout. Shut up. and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. All right. Let's go on a trip. Here we go. We're going back to West Liberty, Iowa. It was so nice we had to go twice. We could not help ourselves. West Liberty, Iowa. Very Pacific, as they said. So that is eastern Iowa, far eastern Iowa is where that is. Now, the murder, just to catch you up quickly because there was a lot of players and a lot of characters here. Tons of them. Tons of characters. We'll do like when an 80s sitcom had a two-parter and they had like a minute-long recap at the beginning with some highlights. I've been watching The Speaker 1 (4:22) Office lately, James. It is crazy how many two-part episodes they did. And there was a week in between where you would forget everything. So please fucking catch me up, James. Speaker 2 (4:36) That's what I mean. You never know. So we were talking about the murder of Corey Lee Weneke. Yeah. Or Winnikee, who was 22 years old when he was killed in in 1992. He was brutally beaten in his own bed. Blunt force trauma didn't look like he ever woke up just beaten severely. I mean, horribly, horribly beaten to death. And the problem is, is there's a lot of suspects. Because he has like four girlfriends and a fiance and he's a bartender who sort of sells a little drugs and does a little drugs and has a little gambling operation going on in there. So there's like five different, you know, there's women, there's drug people. Yeah. Jealous husbands. There's, you know. I think there's so many different people, gambling people, somebody that might have not wanted to pay a debt and they thought it'd be easier to just kill the guy. Who knows what it is? Or he owes them. Whatever it is. The main people are Jody Hotz, who was one of the people that he was. Married lady, right? No, no, that's a different one here. Jody Hotz was a 22-year-old, the two that they lived together. That's his live-in fiancé girlfriend, okay? Then there's the ongoing other sexual relationships, as a police officer put it, ongoing sexual relationships with at least three women, but we know of like five, actually. Hotz, Wendy Marshall, and Annette Cahill, who we talked about. And Wendy Marshall was the woman he got pregnant, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, she was pregnant. Jody, his live-in girlfriend, knew about all these women, which makes her more of a suspect at that point. Maybe she couldn't take it anymore. Maybe she snapped and got tired of this bullshit. But she's got a pretty good alibi. Or that maybe eliminates her as a suspect because maybe she's just cool. You never know. She's got a pretty good alibi because she was at work all day, and they think he was killed long after the time she got to work. So that is a problem there. Then there's Wendy Marshall. the one who gave birth to Corey's daughter there. He didn't really have much to do with the baby. But Wendy told everybody she loved him and wanted a future with him, and so she definitely didn't kill him. Then, of course, there's the Missy Morrison, who's married to the farmer named Bob. who later on, three years after the murder, murdered her and then offed himself, Bob. Speaker 1 (7:02) So, Speaker 2 (7:02) yeah, which I mean, she was going around fucking bartenders and stuff. And I think Bob just snapped and couldn't take it anymore. So I'm sure I'm not sure. Speaker 1 (7:10) Maybe he shouldn't have been together. No, Speaker 2 (7:12) that's what I'm saying. I'm making excuses. But I mean, I think the dude probably wasn't there to begin with all that well. And then this was a messy relationship. But then there's also Annette Cahill, who is. The one who's another one that wants him to run away with her to Branson to buy a bar. Now, on the night before this all happened, he got off of work. Wendy was with him. They end up going. Annette wouldn't leave his car. Him and Annette got in a huge fight. He dumped Wendy off and then went back. Took Wendy home. Speaker 1 (7:48) Annette home. Speaker 2 (7:49) Angry sex, as she put it. Angry sex with Annette. Then went to Wendy's, talked to her for a while, and finally went home and fell asleep at 7 o'clock in the morning. His girlfriend got up, went to work, allegedly, and that was that. Wow. That's where we ended up. And of course, the baseball bat found on the road. And yeah, Annette went right to the which they believe is the murder weapon. And Annette went right to the police when she heard about all this, because she knows that she was at the house that morning. And she also knows a farmer drove by and could probably identify her. And he did, as a matter of fact, as being at the house that morning. She was there with her sister in law to to give him a note or to say goodbye or whatever the hell her excuse was. So that's where we are right now. Okay. He was going to run away with Wendy Marshall. He's going to run away with, because that was the other question. Him and Wendy were going to run away. So he had two plans to run away with people, neither of which were his fiancee who he lived with. Like, it's just a lot going on here in this whole thing. Speaker 1 (8:54) You got that much action happening in one town? You can't run away from that. Yeah, you got to stick around. Are you going to rebuild that life in Branson? Speaker 2 (9:03) It's like the Burbs. You're like Corey Feldman in the Burbs. Yeah. I love this Speaker 1 (9:06) neighborhood, man. This is fucking Speaker 2 (9:08) great, bro. Speaker 1 (9:09) I love this street. Speaker 2 (9:09) Love this street. So the baseball bat that they found had no usable fingerprints. And at the time, the only thing they could determine was the blood type on the bat, which matched Corey's blood type. And Jody said that neither she nor Corey owned a bat of any kind. And the bat was pretty new. So... Anyway, so we're looking between, is it drugs? Is it an angry husband? Is it one of his girlfriends? Is it, we don't know what the hell's going on here. So they said he was a strong young man and for that type of crime to have been committed, I think a lot of, had a lot of people scratching their heads asking for one, who could have done this? And two, how could they have pulled it off because it did not appear that Corey had fought back. Well, we knew about a long night of, we heard about his night. Angry sex. The Speaker 1 (10:00) guy Speaker 2 (10:00) just came Speaker 1 (10:01) a little bit ago. Speaker 2 (10:01) Yeah. He's talked to three of his girlfriends tonight, too. That has to be. I don't know what that's like, but it has to be exhausting. It's taxing. So he's sleeping. So, yeah, we had the Jody said she was not or Jody is not a suspect due to her alibi. Bob Morrison is dead. So, you know, and also Bob Morrison, Missy's husband who killed her and killed himself. He took the day off. The day after the day of the day of. Yeah. So that's something also that or the day of the murder. So and Annette has passed a polygraph examination as well as we know about. That happened at the end. The case has gone cold, very, very cold. In 1995, they had an investigator meeting and they came up with a guy named Jeff Murdock, who named a guy named Scott Payne, who knew something about the whole thing. By 2009, that's when they set up the cold case unit. Then they lost their funding. Okay. And here we are in 2011 after that where there's no funding. The cold case unit is closed. And this case is all but over. It's almost 20 years old. It's 20 years old. Speaker 1 (11:11) No, 10 years old. 20, Speaker 2 (11:12) 92. It's almost 24. 92. Yeah, it's 20 years old almost, 19 years old. And they have no more funding to run the cold cases. So basically. That's that. Unless some cop wants to work on this on his days off. It's really nothing's going to come of this. So they pretty much just let it die. Years more go by from December 2011 all the way to December 2017 goes by. Uh-huh. Okay. So this case is closed and over pretty much. It's unsolved. Poor Corp. There's nothing you can do. Nope. Then December of 2017 at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. OK, there's a special agent named Trent Valletta of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. He's at the hospital to interview a stabbing victim of a case that just happened. Somebody got stabbed and he goes to who stabbed you, basically. That's it. He's in plain clothes. He's standing on a floor where, you know, there's no obvious reason for him to be there. Just he's not visiting anybody. He's not, you know, he's not a doctor. So he's just standing there. And the charge nurse for that intensive care unit was a 34 year old woman named Jessica Becker. And Jessica Becker sees an unidentified dude standing in the hallway and says, what the fuck are you doing here? Essentially. Yeah. So Valetta, the cop says she came and kind of aggressively asked me what I was doing there and basically told me I told me I need to needed to leave. Which is reasonable. Speaker 1 (12:51) Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:51) Yeah. You shouldn't be here. So he then identified himself as an investigator, as a police officer. And he explained, I'm here to interview the guy in this room who's been stabbed. So then Jessica Becker changes the subject on him. Goes from you need to get out of here to let me ask you a question. Yeah. Real quick. She says, do you know anybody who works cold cases like old murders? Speaker 1 (13:17) Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:18) And he said, and I'm like, well, actually, I'm probably one of the two in the state that actually does them. There is nobody working these fucking murders. I do. Me. Nobody knows me like me. Two people working all the cold cases for a state is crazy, by the way. There is no way they can solve that shit. Speaker 1 (13:37) Unless you're Iowa. Speaker 2 (13:39) There's a lot of murders, though. That's the problem. It's not like there's no murders. Wyoming, maybe, because there's no people. But there's people in Iowa. So she said, and I said, well, or she said, well, why is that? And she said, well, because I know who killed someone back in Muscatine County a few years ago. That's what Jessica Becker said. Oh, you know. Now, how would she know anything about this? This 34 year old charge nurse who was a child when this all went down. Speaker 1 (14:08) She would have been fucking. Speaker 2 (14:11) All right. Would she have been seven? Nine. Bear with me here. Okay. All right. Lester McGowan. Remember him? The roofing guy who took Annette Cahill on the day of the murders, took him to work with him for a minute. And Speaker 1 (14:23) watched Speaker 2 (14:23) her Speaker 1 (14:23) do a shit-ass job pulling shingles. She fucking did Speaker 2 (14:26) a half-ass job of yanking shingles off a roof and then left. Yeah. Well, Lester McGowan had picked Annette up at around 7 or 7.30 that morning of the murder, drove her to the roofing job site in West Liberty where she did the shingle tearing for a minute, and then her sister-in-law came, picked her up, and that's when they ended up at Corey's house. Yeah. And the farmer passed them. Okay, just to get the timeline down. Now, Lester McGowan was married to a woman named Cynthia. Yeah. Okay, his affair with Annette Cahill contributed to the downfall of that marriage. Because Annette was having affairs with everybody. Cynthia's daughter, so Lester's stepdaughter, from that marriage was a nine-year-old named Jessica. Jessica Becker, who will be the charge nurse later on. So this girl said that this is what she saw. She said she was 1992. It was 1992. She's nine years old. Her mother was Cynthia and her stepfather was Lester. And, you know, basically by that fall, they had been divorced and everything because of Annette. Okay. So her family kind of got ripped apart by Annette. Jessica was best friends with a girl named Kayla Hazen. Okay. Kayla was Denny and Jacque or Jacque or Jackie or whatever. Her sister-in-law, that was her, their daughter, Kayla. So that would be Annette's niece, I suppose. So Annette's niece, Kayla, is over at Jessica's house, all right, or whatever. Jessica, they've hung out. Now, Jessica, on this night, slept over at the Hazen family farmhouse, which is where Annette was staying with the brother and Jack A there. Speaker 1 (16:18) Okay, Speaker 2 (16:19) Jack. Okay, now. She liked Annette, but they all liked Annette, by the way, because Annette's fun. Speaker 1 (16:27) Yeah, she's a fucking party is what she is. Speaker 2 (16:30) Yeah, this is Jessica said she would take us to get movies, scary movies, pizza. The fun lady. She was the fun, the favorite aunt, and we spent quite a lot of time with her, too. Speaker 1 (16:43) She Speaker 2 (16:43) was the cool aunt. I had an aunt like that, too. Yeah, that kind of thing. You know, when you're 14, she'd leave her cigarettes out. You know what I mean? and look the other direction. That kind of ant. So, she described Corey also as a big brother type who lived down the street. By 2007, Jessica Baker's an ICU charge nurse at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, obviously. She was an officer in the Army Reserve. She has a master's degree, a family. She's established herself. She's really Speaker 1 (17:14) doing it. Speaker 2 (17:14) Yeah. So this is what she has to say. She said that, I know that Annette killed Corey. Speaker 1 (17:21) She knows. Is Speaker 2 (17:22) what she said. Yeah. Now, remember, Annette's taken a polygraph. So essentially, she's kind of been taken off the suspect list at this point. Speaker 2 (17:31) OK, so that's what she said. I know that Annette killed Corey. Now, Valetta, the cop, says it's a one in a million chance that he goes to this hospital, meaning him, meets this person and tells him about a case that's more than 25 years old at that point in time. And then I confirm that the crime took place and that all the details essentially match. He didn't even know this was a crime that took place. Speaker 1 (17:52) Well, he's done a great job at the cold case. Who? Speaker 2 (17:55) Yeah, barely not. But, I mean, it's been – I mean, there's how many cold cases you think there are? Speaker 1 (18:00) He hasn't gotten here yet. Speaker 2 (18:02) Yeah, look up unsolved Iowa murders. There's hundreds of them. I mean, hasn't heard of them. Speaker 1 (18:06) And his last name starts with W. He hasn't even gotten that far. He's still on the Speaker 2 (18:09) Gs. That's right. Now, Becker said this. She said, for some reason, I just felt comfortable with him and that I could share that knowledge and share that burden. And at least, if nothing else, to get it off my chest to share it with somebody that had the potential to do something with it. Speaker 1 (18:27) Okay. So Speaker 2 (18:28) she's not just telling the janitor because what the fuck does he care? So here is what she said she saw here. Okay. Oh, Speaker 1 (18:35) she saw something. Speaker 2 (18:35) This is what she said she saw at the farmhouse sleeping over with her friend here. All right. Sometime after Corey died, fall of 92. So sometime in about a month after Corey died. She couldn't give an exact date or an exact month, but she said it was definitely cooler outside and was the same year. All right. She was at a sleepover at the Hazen Family Farmhouse with Kayla. They were upstairs late at night, staying up late like kids do at a sleepover, and they decided to sneak downstairs. She doesn't remember why. A snack? Who the fuck knows? To Speaker 1 (19:09) be awake when we're not supposed to be. It feels fun. It feels, Speaker 2 (19:13) just to sneak down the steps that the adults are doing, it's fun. So she said, I'm not exactly sure what we were up to, but something that we weren't supposed to be doing, being kids. Speaker 1 (19:24) So Speaker 2 (19:24) they got to the bottom of the stairs or the last step of the stairs. She doesn't know which. She doesn't know if it was the floor or the last step, which is really irrelevant. Anyway, so this is what it goes. This is from later on. They say, and you said that you heard Annette. She said, yes. And what did you hear? She said, quote, well, we heard Annette crying and sobbing in the dining area, which is fine. Corey just died. That seems reasonable. And we heard her make several statements, including Corey. I never meant to hurt you, Corey. I'm so sorry. I never meant to kill you, Corey. OK, that's and Corey, I love you. These are the things that she said. OK, so and she said she was sobbing. And they said, was there anything else unusual in that front room that she was in? And she said, yes, there was multiple candles. She was also lighting candles, black candles to be specific. What? She had like a whole candle set up of black candles while sobbing and saying, I'm sorry I killed you, Corey. Which is a really fucking weird set up. I mean, it's very. Maybe that's