Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 4. Bombshell About this episode During the lunch rush in a Texas Dairy Queen, Janis’s five decades of lies finally begin to crumble. But Ogden, the investigator, discovers that solving this part of the mystery has left him faced with an even bigger one.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Brianna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready, and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it, and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally, do it right. Ally Bank, member FDIC.
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0:41 Speaker 03 Listen to all episodes of The Vanishing of Janis Rose ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe at the top of the page. Or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.
1:05 Speaker 02 The Binge.
1:13 Speaker 03 At some point, we've all played with being someone we're not. As a kid, you probably had a giant box of costumes in your bedroom. Or you just raided your parents' closet for heels and evening gowns. Maybe later in life, you gave a fake name to a guy in a bar. And of course, there's always Halloween. It's fun, exciting even, to imagine yourself in a different life. But for most of us, it's also temporary. Because to keep the lie going, it has to get bigger. At a certain point, your made-up story becomes your friends' stories, your family's. Which means, when your lies unravel, so do their lives.
2:02 Speaker 03 We left off with Janis in the early 1980s. At that point, she was keeping a lot of balls in the air. A new identity, Willie Joe, and all her conflicting stories about how she wound up the mother of a baby boy. Until she vanished again. That brings me to the early 2000s, nearly three decades after Janis left her family in South Mississippi.
2:31 Speaker 03 And it's here that her story begins to crumble in a chain diner in Gonzales, Texas.
2:38 Speaker 04 We were waitresses at a Denny's.
2:42 Speaker 03 Carolyn's in her 20s when she starts working here with Janis, or as her name tag reads, Willie Joe. She comes in high energy, working that short-sleeved uniform like it was made for her. Carolyn could not believe Willie Joe was so much older when she mentioned her age.
3:00 Speaker 04 She did not look 60. My parents are 60, and they don't look like they're 40. So I was like, maybe she's got good genes.
3:09 Speaker 03 Carolyn also notices she and Willie Joe seemed to approach the job differently. When customers tell Carolyn they're torn between ordering "Moons Over My Hammy" or the "All American Slam," and, by the way, would adding silver dollar pancakes be too much food?
3:25 Speaker 04 I'm like, I don't know what you want.
3:28 Speaker 03 But Willie Joe, it was like the woman could read minds.
3:33 Speaker 04 She'd be like, oh, you want this, or you want that. People would just be like, that's the person I wanted to serve me because she's, she was just so outgoing. She made everybody laugh, you know, she made them comfortable.
3:46 Speaker 03 At this point, she's been calling herself Willie Joe almost as long as she was Janis. This lie is almost bigger than the truth. Maybe that's what makes her so confident, so unafraid to get attention.
4:03 Speaker 04 We did a couple waitressing jobs together.
4:06 Speaker 03 But Janis never stays anywhere too long.
4:09 Speaker 04 She was an activities director for a nursing home. She was a waitress. She was a welder.
4:16 Speaker 03 During those years, Janis moves a lot, but Carolyn's always in her life. Janis nicknames her Sis. And one day, she calls Carolyn up. She has a kind of awkward favor to ask.
4:32 Speaker 03 See, she's got this new gig.
4:34 Speaker 04 She got a job and she's like, I need to use your social security. And I'm like, why?
4:43 Speaker 03 Because, you know, it's that number you're never supposed to give anybody.
4:48 Speaker 04 She's like, I just, I need to get this job, but I can't use my social security because it's stolen.
4:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, that really sucks, Carolyn thinks. But why are you calling me and not like the police? And is this something she's just now figuring out? And as Carolyn turns this weird, pretty illegal request over, other wild bits from her friend's past began popping up like a 2000's internet ad in her brain. For starters, her age. Is she even 60?
5:26 Speaker 04 She always had two birthdays. Like, I don't understand how you have two birthdays.
5:32 Speaker 03 Janis had explained that one as a mix-up at the orphanage.
5:37 Speaker 04 She was born in an orphanage.
5:39 Speaker 03 You know, because both of her parents were dead. And that was far from the only life-changing tragedy in her past.
5:49 Speaker 04 She had a set of triplets that died in a fire. And her husband died in a fire.
5:56 Speaker 03 It was just one terrible event after another.
6:04 Speaker 03 This is the problem with big lies. The longer they go on, the more people they involve. And by 2019, she'd involved a lot of people who didn't even know they were involved. And with each of the lives that Jan, or Willie Joe now, has inserted herself into, she's turned more from the victim to the perpetrator, swooping in, creating havoc, and then disappearing.
6:37 Speaker 03 So what is her end goal? And will she ever get there? Or is it all going to blow up? Forty years of a lie, that's a pretty good run.
6:55 Speaker 03 From Sony Music Entertainment and Wild Night Media, you're listening to "The Vanishing of Janis Rose." This is episode four, "Bombshell." I'm Larissa Campbell.
7:18 Speaker 03 Carolyn from Denny's is an observer. She's the kind of person who'll agree last minute to be a bridesmaid for a messy former friend just to end up having a front row seat to the inevitable wedding fireworks. But she's careful to keep herself out of the drama.
7:38 Speaker 03 So when her intuition tells her to take a second look at something, she does it quietly.
7:46 Speaker 03 The more she learned about Janis, who Carolyn only knew as Willie Joe, the more she started to catch inconsistencies. Like, for instance, Willie Joe's story about her triplets and husband she lost in a fire. She had confided in Carolyn about it.
8:05 Speaker 04 My dad grew up in Natchez, Mississippi. And where she said she lived, they were like right down the road from each other.
8:16 Speaker 03 Carolyn spent summers there. So one day, she asks her dad, "Hey, what do you remember about this really tragic story in town? Because it actually happened to my coworker back when you were living there."
8:31 Speaker 04 And he's like, "That's, that sounds weird."
8:34 Speaker 03 Weird because he's pretty sure he never heard this story before.
8:38 Speaker 04 You can't really hear about one thing and not hear about another, you know? It's how small towns work.
8:46 Speaker 03 Editor's note: As someone who also grew up in a small Mississippi town, I can and will recite vivid details about every untimely death that occurred in a 30-mile radius when I lived there. Though small-town gossip does carry a degree of human error.
9:04 Speaker 04 So I just decided to look it up one day. I was like, "I'm gonna check this out."
9:09 Speaker 03 She goes to the internet.
9:11 Speaker 04 I went to newspapers.com.
9:13 Speaker 03 She searches Willie Joe Streeti, the name Janis is using. She expands her search to more of the state and looks up different phrases like "house fire" or "children died." And not a damn thing is coming up.
9:30 Speaker 04 And I could never find anything about three children and a husband dying in a house fire.
9:36 Speaker 03 And she knows she didn't get the details wrong.
9:39 Speaker 04 This is odd. Like, sure you are. You've been telling this story for as long as I've known you. I was like, "Hmm, these are adding up."
9:52 Speaker 03 Then she starts thinking about those details. Like, how after the fire, the whole family was buried together in the yard? At the top of a hill?
10:04 Speaker 04 Now, maybe in the 1800s you did, but not in the 1960s.
10:12 Speaker 03 Of all Janis's lies, the one I can't let go of is the one about her children dying. Why even say you had kids at all? It's not just that the boldness of the story makes it easy to disprove. It's the casual cruelty of it, of using every parent's nightmare for what? Attention? Or was it that every time she told this story, she was really telling it to herself? Rather than letting her mind wander to those four little girls and think about how they were growing up, if they played in her same swimming hole and had boyfriends of
10:54 Speaker 03 their own, she told herself they were dead so she could grieve like they were. Of course, Carolyn didn't know this at all. Annoying as it is that Willie Joe seems to play fast and loose with the truth, Carolyn doesn't call her out. Remember, she's more of an observer. Carolyn figures it's not her business what kind of stories Willie Joe is making up about her past, until that is, one day in 2022, when it very much becomes Carolyn's business.
11:38 Speaker 03 On this day, Carolyn's at work. She's a manager at The Dairy Queen in Goldthwait, Texas. It's a fun job, faster paced than Denny's had been. It's also got a major perk. She occasionally gets to hang out with her husband, David. He's a mechanic and has helped out doing maintenance on the store's equipment lately. Or, as David put it,
12:03 Speaker 03 It's hitting noon. The lunch rush is reaching its peak. That hour when this fast-paced job goes four loco. Carolyn's in the kitchen making orders as the second cook. That means burgers, sandwiches, anything that's out of the fry cook's hands. And at this hour, it's a lot. She's got her stuff laid out in front of her on the counter. I had my phone, like, sitting right there so I could see it. It lights up. A number she's never seen. It was a Mississippi number. She still has family in Mississippi. So I answered it. A guy introduces himself as an investigator with a sheriff's department. Says he's looking for her husband.
12:46 Speaker 03 He said something like, "It was a 40-year-old missing woman case." A woman who disappeared from Mississippi. Intriguing. Carolyn's not hanging up, but she's also not buying that it has anything to do with her husband. And I'm like, "Uh, what? My husband's like 38 at the time. I don't understand how he can help with a 40-year-old missing case." Hard to find a tighter alibi than not being born yet. Carolyn calls her husband over. You're gonna have to call this person because he's been trying to reach you. Oh, yeah. He has been ignoring back-to-back calls from a random number. This time, David takes the call.
13:29 Speaker 03 The investigator introduces himself as Major Mark Ogden with the Pearl River County Sheriff's Department.
13:36 Speaker 05 Called and introduced myself. And he's like, "Who are you looking for?" And I said, "Well, her name is Janis Bullock." I don't know any Janis. I said, "Well, if I send you a picture of her, you may recognize her. Would you mind looking at it?" Sure.
13:56 Speaker 03 Because, of course, Carolyn isn't just Willie Joe's former coworker. She's also her daughter-in-law.
14:08 Speaker 03 And her husband, who Ogden has been calling over and over, is David Streedy III,
14:19 Speaker 03 nicknamed Trey, that once little boy Janis had raised.
14:26 Speaker 03 When Ogden had interviewed Peggy at the station in Mississippi, she provided some key leads. She told him Janis had this son and tells him the son's name. And that's when all the pieces came together.
14:41 Speaker 05 We was able to narrow it down to one that was in Texas. Well, my investigators looked him up on Facebook. And he had a picture in there of him with his mom and dad. And guess who the mom was standing beside him? Janis.
15:00 Speaker 03 After three years of investigating, Ogden can barely believe it. He sends David the photo.
15:11 Speaker 03 In the meantime, David's got the call on speaker and everyone's trying to find excuses to work near him.
15:19 Speaker 04 We're all trying to make food and we're all trying to listen because now we're all like, what's going on?
15:26 Speaker 03 David gets a text. As soon as he looks at the picture, he knows exactly who it is.
15:33 Speaker 05 He calls me back and says, that's my mom. I'm like,
15:40 Speaker 05 I need to talk to you, man.
15:45 Speaker 06 My heart dropped out of my chest. I didn't know what was going on.
15:50 Speaker 03 Ogden has been light on the details. All David knows is that a woman named Janis went missing in the 1970s. And she bears a striking resemblance to the woman who raised him, his mom Willie Jo. Ogden asked David to send over more photos of his mother. Carolyn turns to her husband.
16:10 Speaker 04 I tell him to go home, you know, calm down, relax, and then I'll be home.
16:18 Speaker 03 But relaxing is easier said than done.
16:26 Speaker 03 Back at his house, David drags out bins of family albums and framed pictures and documents.
16:33 Speaker 04 When I get home, we start going through those photos.
16:37 Speaker 03 As they look back and forth from Janis's missing bulletin to the yellowed photos of Willie Joe behind those albums' plastic sleeves, one thought is beating at the front of their minds.
16:49 Speaker 04 What if this person is your mom? Like, how weird would that be?
16:56 Speaker 03 On the one hand, Carolyn and David have been together nearly 20 years at this point. She's known Willie Joe since she was a few years out of high school. On the other, it would explain a few things.
17:09 Speaker 04 The more I'm looking at these photos, the more I'm looking at the photo that he sent, I'm like, man, these are so alike.
17:17 Speaker 06 I said, there's no possible way she would've been missing for this long when somebody had found out a long time ago.
17:24 Speaker 03 Except, there's a good chance David's mom is Janis, and she's done everything possible to not be found. Which means that the real question here isn't what became of Janis, but why she did all of this? Why would this mom of four give up her stable, safe life for one where she spent years on the move, cut off from everyone she loved? Why wouldn't she try to come back home to connect with her children, her siblings, her mom? Did she want to return but felt like she couldn't? Or was this new life the one she wanted? Like, Janis was just a rough draft,
18:09 Speaker 03 and Willie Joe, the final version of who she was meant to be? This new life sounds so exhausting, constantly moving, trying to stay on top of the lies about her past, and one step ahead of the truth. And at the end of the day, this network of people around her, did any one of them even know her? Or was that the point?
18:35 Speaker 03 David and Carolyn pick out a few photos and send them over to the investigator.
18:41 Speaker 06 He said, "It looks like the person they were looking for." And then he goes, "Would I mind him coming down to Texas?"
18:48 Speaker 05 "If it's tomorrow, good for you. I'll come to you."
18:52 Speaker 05 "So absolutely." Next morning, we got up and drove to Texas.
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19:17 Speaker 03 That night, David gets into bed with the knowledge that an investigator in Mississippi will be driving 10 hours to tell him in person that his life could be a lie.
19:29 Speaker 06 My thoughts were all over the place and I did not sleep.
19:33 Speaker 03 He watches the ceiling fan, studies the shadows on their bedroom walls. He turns to his wife Carolyn, asleep next to him. She stayed up talking as long as she could. The 11:00 PM train rumbles past on the tracks nearby.
19:49 Speaker 06 Feels like I was on TV, one of them TV shows, Unsolved Mysteries. Like, okay, it's not happening to me.
19:58 Speaker 03 Except David's telling himself, he's the last person this should be happening to. Yes, Carolyn called out his mom's stories as strange, but those were stories, things she said. His actual life? That was completely normal.
20:16 Speaker 06 It was pretty much average family. I would never suspect anything like that.
20:23 Speaker 03 If anything, he always felt luckier than his friends. He remembers Christmas as a kid. He wakes up and before he's even out of bed, he can smell the huge breakfast his mom's got cooking. She never held back when she cooked, especially in the morning.
20:40 Speaker 06 Eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits and red eye gravy.
20:44 Speaker 03 And always some sweet notes wafting in the background.
20:47 Speaker 06 Oatmeal and coffee.
20:49 Speaker 03 Folgers dark roast and a tray of oatmeal raisin cookies baking, one of his dad's favorites. Out in the living room, the tree is heavy with mismatched ornaments and bright lights. Willie Joe wasn't one to edit. So any combination of macaroni and glue that David brings home from school goes right up there. Being an only child has its perks. He usually gets everything he asks for.
21:22 Speaker 03 Looking back, there isn't a thing David would change about his childhood. It was idyllic. He grew up in central Texas on a big ranch with his parents. So far out in the country, their driveway was two miles. If David walked, it took 40 minutes just to get to the school bus. But being a country kid had perks. Cows, horses, then all the deer, rabbits and snakes. It smelled like fresh cut onions.
21:50 Speaker 06 All my friends come over and we all do campfires and back of our ranch, it was a big creek that runs through it. And so we set up tents and stuff and hang out in the back.
22:00 Speaker 03 His dad, David Streetey Jr., worked with machinery. He didn't just teach little David, AKA Trey, how to drive a tractor, but to fix them. Streetey was older and he worked a lot. In the evenings, he logged hours at the local bar. A happy drunk, but drunk nonetheless. So his mom was the guiding force in David's life and a lot of his friends. The ranch became sort of a home base for all the other kids who didn't have stable homes.
22:32 Speaker 06 That's why she always invited them over and they pretty much called her mom. Or her nickname Mama Joe.
22:39 Speaker 03 This woman who'd walked away from her children in this universe is now some kind of surrogate, ultimate laid back, cool mom?
22:49 Speaker 06 I came home one day, so I would like me and my friends to go to Disney World and next thing you know, we're loading up back of our little SUV and. Went to Disney World.
22:58 Speaker 03 Seriously, David says not 48 hours later, they hit the road.
23:06 Speaker 03 But what David maybe treasures the most are his solo road trips with his mom and her Cadillac.
23:14 Speaker 06 Anything we did, we did together. We just had the windows down and just sat there and just go talk, laugh.
23:22 Speaker 03 With all the talking, they never had much need for the radio, but if they did listen to music, it was always old country.
23:29 Speaker 06 Hank Williams Jr. and all that.
23:31 Speaker 03 These road trips took them all over the country, from Texas to DC, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, the beach.
23:40 Speaker 03 If they made a movie, Janis slash Willie Joe would be the manic pixie Dream Mom, played by Kate Hudson or Zooey Deschanel, telling an 11-year-old David it was his turn to drive, which, by the way, did happen, according to David.
23:57 Speaker 06 She got tired. She said, "Here, drive."
24:04 Speaker 03 For every one of David's sweet memories with Willie Joe are scenarios where it becomes clear that normalcy, as demonstrated for David by Willie Joe, isn't normalcy for everyone else.
24:19 Speaker 06 We were at a truck stop and she left me.
24:25 Speaker 03 What?
24:25 Speaker 06 She didn't mean to. She just forgot and came back.
24:29 Speaker 03 We've all had those moments where you tell a funny story from childhood and the other person goes, "Oh, God, I'm so sorry."
24:37 Speaker 06 We were coming in and it was breakfast time. We'd go in there and go eat. I went to the restroom and I came back and she was gone. I guess she was in one of her little exciting moves to get back on the road and she forgot.
24:53 Speaker 03 David isn't stressed. He goes back to the table and sits back down. The server notices.
24:59 Speaker 06 She goes, "Everything okay?" I said, "No, my mom left." And the waitress goes, "Oh, my God." And I was saying, "No, no, this happens all the time."
25:08 Speaker 03 Okay, but not to any of the waitresses in this truck stop. They're not sure what to do. They bring David one of those brain teaser games with the wooden pegs to keep him occupied. And sure enough, he says, a couple hours later, the Cadillac pulls back in.
25:24 Speaker 06 She was like, "Oh, my God, I forgot my boy."
25:27 Speaker 03 But did she? David says she was forgetful, but knowing what we know now about her habit of vanishing, it seems just as likely she could have meant to leave him and then changed her mind. But this truck stop incident, it's not the kind of thing David dwells on. That's how it goes with her. Ever since David's a kid, he knows his mom is only going to tell him what she decides he needs to know. Maybe it's because of how she raised him, or it's just in his nature, but David doesn't push it, even when his parents' marriage, well, stops looking a whole lot like a marriage. We know she left his dad's streetie when David was a toddler and told this guy Cliff
26:12 Speaker 03 he was the dad. Then they split up and she went back to streetie. But when David is a teenager, his mom starts bringing other men around, several of them as the years go by.
26:25 Speaker 06 Came home from school and everything, and mom said, "Hey, you're surprised you got a guy that's going to help out and everything?" It was a guy from prison.
26:32 Speaker 03 And he wasn't just there to help with the chores. He was her boyfriend. So was the nice young guy who everybody called Wes. His dad didn't even move out. And since his dad wasn't asking questions, David didn't either.
26:46 Speaker 06 They'd been divorced, but they lived together. I don't know how to explain that one. I think they had some type of agreement or something like that.
26:56 Speaker 03 Well, to be precise, David assumes they divorced at some point. But he's not sure because, again, he never asked.
27:09 Speaker 03 David's dad died in 2002. She sang "Amazing Grace" at his funeral. His mom had always been the dominant force in David's life. But now, as he lies there in the dark staring at the ceiling, he misses his dad in a way he hasn't in 20 years. He wants to call him up to get reassurance. "No, no, your mom is quirky, but she's not a con artist." Unless she is.
27:40 Speaker 03 The low rumble of the 5:00 AM train comes through. David hasn't slept at all. He pulls himself out of bed, hoping this is just some bizarre misunderstanding, something he can easily clear up. The investigator will be here in just a few hours.
27:57 Speaker 06 A knock at the door and two detectives came in.
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28:38 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Brianna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready, and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it, and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally, do it right. Ally Bank, member FDIC.
29:11 Speaker 03 Major Mark Ogden knocks on the door. It swings wide open to reveal David in glasses, eyes bloodshot. Ogden drove 10 hours to get here, so he can relate. David and his wife Carolyn invite Ogden and his colleague inside. They offer them a cold drink and then motion them over to the couch.
29:32 Speaker 05 Come on in and take a seat. He had all these boxes pulled out with family pictures and he had albums and, I mean, letters and newspaper articles. All kind of stuff pulled out. He said, "I'll help you any way I can."
29:48 Speaker 03 And as they flipped through the albums, David's running through the Cliffs Notes of his life with his mom Willie Jo, whom the detective believes is Janis.
29:58 Speaker 05 This is me and my birthday party and that's mom and that's dad. And, you know, just, we lived at this location here and this location there.
30:10 Speaker 03 It's emotional for David because the woman in his memories, well, she's not his mom in more ways than one. Over the last few years, she had developed dementia. It came on fast and severe. David would be working on the road, out of town for weeks at a time, and then come to see her.
30:30 Speaker 06 And there was times that she didn't know who I was. And I asked her, "I'm David," and she goes, "No, David's still a little kid."
30:40 Speaker 03 Heartbreaking, making this moment with Ogden all the more confusing. In his living room, Ogden tells them about Janis and the life she left, the big family she'd grown up in with her mom and her sisters.
30:56 Speaker 03 And that's when David and Carolyn realize that his mom's dementia didn't just delete memories, it eroded the wall that separated the Willie Jo identity from Janis. Some of what they had assumed were just dementia fantasies were actually bits and pieces of the truth, finally making it to the surface. Carolyn tells Ogden about one particular time.
31:25 Speaker 04 She had moved the entire inside of the house outside.
31:28 Speaker 03 When Carolyn asks her why she emptied the house.
31:32 Speaker 04 She was moving to Mississippi. Her sisters and her mother were coming to get her.
31:39 Speaker 03 Wow, sounds an awful lot like her actual life.
31:42 Speaker 04 When she started really showing signs of dementia, she started talking about a family that she's never had before.
31:50 Speaker 03 After all, Willie Joe had always told them she was raised in an orphanage with no family.
31:56 Speaker 04 Times where she would say that she is somebody else, or was somebody else.
32:03 Speaker 03 It started coming up more and more, this make-believe world where she had a mom and sisters.
32:09 Speaker 04 And then go back to, I have no family, I'm an orphan. There was always those two stories.
32:16 Speaker 03 And now that her dementia means she's telling these kinds of stories more and more, Carolyn had really started to put things together. That David's mom wasn't just confused, something else was going on.
32:32 Speaker 03 The investigator tells Carolyn and David the full name of his missing person. Janis Rose Swayze, her maiden name, Bullock, her married name.
32:42 Speaker 04 When he said Swayze, I was like, that clicks. Because when she would have her not-so-lucid moments, David's mom, she'd be like, my mama's name is Minnie Lou Swayze.
32:55 Speaker 03 For Carolyn, this seals it.
32:58 Speaker 04 With the dementia, came out the truth.
33:05 Speaker 03 It's all finally falling into place. Carolyn looks over at David. He's never been an expressive guy. And as Ogden talks, David mostly stays quiet, just taking in everything that this last 24 hours has dropped on him. David shows Ogden all the documents they have for his mom.
33:25 Speaker 05 She had a birth certificate and a social security card. She got a driver's license in Willie Joe's name.
33:34 Speaker 03 And as the three of them sit there, looking through these documents, the last pieces of the giant puzzle that is Willie Joe, click into place. Like, her two birthdays. She'd explained them as a clerical error at the orphanage. Now Carolyn's like, nope. She probably stole some other woman's identity. Though she was never actually charged with any crime related to identity theft.
34:01 Speaker 04 One is the one that she stole the identity, and one is her original birthday. I mean, I guess after 40 years, you just can't remember which is which.
34:10 Speaker 03 Which explains something else. How, to Carolyn, David's mom has always managed to look at least a full decade younger than she is. Because she is. Janis was born in 1950. But these Willie Joe documents say she was born nine years earlier. Making Janis maybe the first Southern woman in history to add years to her age. As they talk, Ogden tells them that there's one more bit of information he hasn't shared. David isn't Janis's only child. In fact, she has four daughters.
34:52 Speaker 03 And when she left, she never saw or spoke to them again.
34:57 Speaker 04 Wait, what? Like, how do you leave four daughters behind? We were, we were in shock.
35:07 Speaker 03 As Ogden looks over at David, he's not sure he's even there.
35:11 Speaker 05 He just, you know, just kind of blank staring, you know?
35:14 Speaker 06 She took care of me and raised me up, being the way I am now. This didn't make no sense to me that she would leave her daughters behind.
35:24 Speaker 03 Before these questions could be probed, Ogden needed to make really, really sure Willie Joe was his missing woman.
35:32 Speaker 05 I said, well, is your mom still alive? He said, yeah, she's in a home in Fort Worth.
35:39 Speaker 03 Janis Rose Bullock is alive. The woman whom Ogden has spent years looking for, whose family has been wondering about for more than 40 years. He hasn't just found out what happened to her. He's going to meet her.
36:00 Speaker 03 David tells him her nursing home is just a couple hours up the road.
36:04 Speaker 05 I said, "Well, I need to talk with her." He said, "But she's got dementia really bad."
36:08 Speaker 03 Ogden and his colleague take their chances and drive over. He walks inside and asks for a Willie Joe.
36:15 Speaker 05 Lady come walking out of the kitchen into the living room, smiling from ear to ear, and it was her.
36:21 Speaker 03 He takes in all of her features, her light eyes and her cheekbones.
36:25 Speaker 05 The middle of her face was, that was Janis.
36:29 Speaker 05 I said, "Janis?" She stopped, just like veiled, you know, her eyes cleared up, you know. She said, "No, I'm Willie Joe."
36:41 Speaker 05 I said, "Can I kind of sit down and talk with you?" She said, "Yeah, we sit down at the table."
36:46 Speaker 03 For three years, investigator Mark Ogden has been following a trail of husbands, truck drivers, murderous boyfriends, and even America's most prolific serial killer. All to uncover what has happened to the elusive Janis Rose Bullock. And now, in February of 2022, he's sitting in the break room of a Texas nursing home. Across the table is a thin, bird-like woman with silver hair.
37:17 Speaker 05 I said, "Me and you both know your name's Janis." She put her head down and, and kind of sighed a little bit and looked back up at me and smiled.
37:29 Speaker 05 "Yeah, I'm Janis."
37:32 Speaker 05 I said, "I've been looking everywhere for you." She said, "Why are you looking for me?" I said, "Well, your daughters wondered what happened to you, and they asked me to try to find you, and now you're way over here in Texas."
37:45 Speaker 03 Janis's four daughters, who are now in their 50s, moms themselves to grandchildren Janis has never met.
37:53 Speaker 05 She said, "How are they doing? How are my daughters doing?" And I said, "They're doing good." I said, "Can you name your daughters? You remember their names?" She named them off, boom, boom, boom. Janis told me, she said, "I want to go home." I said, "Well, I'm going to tell your daughters where you're at, and give them the phone number, and y'all are going to have to work that out." And then she just went off into oblivion, talking about something.
38:22 Speaker 03 Because of her dementia.
38:29 Speaker 03 The investigator may not have been able to answer the whys, but he found Janis, and that's what he came here for. Ogden steps outside and calls one of Janis's daughters. She's here. She's alive. She remembers your name.
38:46 Speaker 05 A lot of silence. She couldn't believe it. Didn't believe we found her. Hell, I couldn't either.
38:53 Speaker 03 Then Ogden makes a very different call to Janis's son, David. Ogden says it's true. Your mom isn't who you thought she was.
39:03 Speaker 06 He explained that she was in the right mind and told him the truth of what happened.
39:12 Speaker 03 For David, the mystery has just begun. The scenario David had been playing over and over in his head that whole sleepless night was one thing, that Willie Joe was Janis, that his mom's life had been a lie. But now David's questioning what this means for him, his childhood, even his adoption.
39:35 Speaker 06 That it was all a lie, pretty much how I thought, that my whole life was a lie.
39:41 Speaker 03 Ogden listens on the other end.
39:44 Speaker 05 He's like, well, who am I? Where did I come from? I said, buddy, I don't know. I said, you need to get all of that sheriff's office and get a report done. And I suggest do it a 23andMe or something like that, you know?
40:03 Speaker 03 As much as Ogden might feel for David, he can't offer more than advice. Technically, his job is done.
40:15 Speaker 03 Now it's up to David to start asking questions, because the lies she told weren't just about herself.
40:22 Speaker 06 I don't even know. It's my original birth certificate. The detective said it was forged.
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40:59 Speaker 03 The Vanishing of Janis Rose is produced by Wild Night Media for Sony Music Entertainment's The Binge. The show was written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Larissa Campbell. The executive producers for The Binge are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. The show's senior producer and story editor is Lindsay Kilbride. Shiba Joseph provided production support. And Aleah Papes is the story's fact checker. Mixing and sound design for this series by Scott Somerville, with music from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. The show's theme song is Shake Me by Lydia Ramsey. Legal review by Davis Wright Tremaine.
41:54 Speaker 07 Ally here with cash when you need it. Like when your stylist just did the most. Fresh cut and zero cash. Don't be in Ally has 75,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide, so you're never without cash. Ally Bank Member FDIC.
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