Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 5. Then Who is David? About this episode Ogden passes off the baton to a new investigator, David, because for him, it’s personal. After a major break in the case, host Larrison Campbell and David set out to answer the question of how Janis pulled off decades of lies and deceit.
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1:01 Speaker 03 Listen to all episodes of The Vanishing of Janice 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.
1:25 Speaker 03 The Binge.
1:31 Speaker 03 David, if you could sum up your mom with one word, what would it be?
1:40 Speaker 04 You know, I can't use that one word.
1:43 Speaker 04 Loving.
1:45 Speaker 03 That seems like a departure from the word that you first, that first came to you.
1:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, crazy, I don't know if it would be an accurate word, but yeah.
1:55 Speaker 04 But loving, she was a loving mom.
1:58 Speaker 03 I mean, it sounds complicated, you know?
2:03 Speaker 04 Very.
2:05 Speaker 04 Originally, it's been very complicated.
2:10 Speaker 03 I asked David this question in 2025, three years after an investigator had shown up at his house and told him that his mom, who he knew as Willie Joe Streetey, was actually a woman named Janis Rose Bullock. And that essentially, his life was built on a foundation of lies.
2:34 Speaker 04 That motion's been all over the place since that day happened. Sad, anger, being lied to and doing that to our daughters. And then lying the whole time around me. Or was our bond a lie? Or is it true? Was my childhood a lie? But I still love her because she raised me my whole life.
2:59 Speaker 03 For most of David's life, he's had his mom on this pedestal. But now he's finding himself having to interrogate his mom in a way he'd never had before.
3:16 Speaker 03 Not long after this all came out, Janice's daughters reached out to him. They had questions.
3:22 Speaker 04 They just started talking about how my life was with her growing up. Was I happy? Did she treat me right?
3:31 Speaker 03 He was happy. She was a good mom, he thought. But now he's having to interrogate that too. Was she?
3:43 Speaker 03 How could she be a loving mother to him and an absent mother to another set of kids?
3:50 Speaker 04 But this seems like they just came for a while she left them.
3:56 Speaker 03 It's a question David wants to answer too. Because he's on a mission to figure out just who he actually is, how he became Janice's son, how she pulled off this con, and how tangled up in it he is. Especially because he's realizing that her lies about him go all the way back to the day he was born.
4:21 Speaker 04 I might have a forged birth certificate.
4:26 Speaker 03 After all, how does a woman on the run from her past with a fake identity, who supposedly had a hysterectomy, suddenly manifest a newborn baby?
4:39 Speaker 03 But it's more than that. Long before anyone found out about Janice's lies, people had whispered that something seemed off about her new baby. Those whispers had made their way to the investigator looking for Janice.
4:59 Speaker 04 Detective said I was probably bought for $1,000.
5:02 Speaker 03 David may have been bought for $1,000?
5:08 Speaker 04 Her and dad went there and dad gave nurse or doctor $1,000 and that's how they got me.
5:15 Speaker 03 Like purchased on the black market?
5:23 Speaker 03 This is not the story Janice had told David growing up. But of course, so many things she told him turned out to be lies.
5:33 Speaker 04 Who am I?
5:34 Speaker 03 Is maybe the most fundamental thing, who David is? Another lie? What's the truth about how Janice got David? And how did she get away with all she did?
5:53 Speaker 03 Turns out, some of those answers were sitting right there in front of David the whole time.
6:05 Speaker 03 From Sony Music Entertainment and Wild Night Media, you're listening to The Vanishing of Janis Rose. This is episode five, Then Who Is David? I'm Larissa Campbell.
6:28 Speaker 03 David doesn't know where he came from.
6:33 Speaker 03 Any plans Janice made, documents she signed, real or fake, that all happened long before David could hold up his own head, much less remember. But figuring this out would help us understand the mystery that is Janice. It's a big piece of her puzzle. So David starts with what he does know, that his mom claimed he was adopted. He learned this when he was about 13.
7:05 Speaker 03 David was getting picked on by some kids at school.
7:08 Speaker 04 One of my friends was teasing, teasing about that I didn't look like, nothing like my parents.
7:14 Speaker 03 Saying he doesn't look related to his mom and dad. This isn't the first time David's heard it. Normally, these comments roll right off his back, but this time it sticks. So when David gets a chance to talk to Janice about it, he just asks, "Mom, am I adopted?" And to his surprise, she tells him, "Yeah, actually, you are." And she doesn't get too into the weeds.
7:41 Speaker 04 She just said that she came to the hospital and they handed me over. She told me I was 24 hours old when she brought me home.
7:52 Speaker 03 He's got the baby pictures to prove it, ones where he's tiny and wrinkled in his mom's arms, like he could have just left the hospital hours ago. She tells him she adopted him from Charity Hospital in New Orleans as a newborn.
8:09 Speaker 03 Over the years, through high school, David would be curious.
8:13 Speaker 04 If I turn 18, will it be okay if I find my biological family? And she goes, "Well, back then, they had a thing called closed adoption, so they have no records of you."
8:25 Speaker 03 No records of David? Like, anywhere? Nope, she says. No records.
8:32 Speaker 04 Maybe I want to know who, where I came from.
8:34 Speaker 03 But he doesn't push.
8:37 Speaker 04 It's okay. There's no records of my family. They just, I guess they just want to give me up that bad? And it was just drop ever since.
8:49 Speaker 03 David puts these questions out of his mind. Never even asks his dad about the adoption. He cements himself in the one family he knows. He's happy here, anyway. One thing I've come to know about Janice is that she was a force field. Witty and charming, she convinced dozens of people who knew better to trust her. And David was one. Because now, as David looks back, he can clearly see that this Willie Joe identity she was using was an illusion, long before any detective contacted him. As David recalls, this is what happened.
9:33 Speaker 03 One day, David's mom tells him she needs his help with something.
9:38 Speaker 04 She got a letter in saying something about her food stamp. She need to go to the social security office.
9:44 Speaker 03 He decides to take his mom down to the social security office himself. At the office, she hands her social security card to an agent. They take it from her and disappear.
9:57 Speaker 04 And they came back and said, "We can't give this back to you because it's stolen."
10:00 Speaker 03 Her social security number is stolen, they say. Janice having problems with her social would soon become a regular thing. Remember, she'd even asked his wife Carolyn to borrow hers once. But his mom was the victim, David thought.
10:17 Speaker 04 Always thought that somebody stole her identity.
10:20 Speaker 03 At the office that day, David sticks up for his mom.
10:24 Speaker 04 I told him, "No, it's not. It's hers. This has been a social security card for years."
10:30 Speaker 03 But they're not listening to him.
10:32 Speaker 04 And they argued and kicked us out of the social security office.
10:37 Speaker 03 Logically, the one holding the stolen social security card is likely the one who stole it. The staff have to wonder this, right? And even David. But according to David's recollection, they just let her walk right out. No outright accusations. No one ever shows up to arrest her or even question her, which might have solved the whole mystery years earlier.
11:07 Speaker 04 I tried to figure out what was going on, but nobody gave me a straight answer.
11:15 Speaker 03 David's wife Carolyn says she contacted a lawyer who took their case, only to turn around and say, "Actually, there's nothing I can do." I asked her to talk to this person.
11:27 Speaker 05 I could not even tell you the name of this lawyer. That was 12 years ago.
11:33 Speaker 03 So how would she get like credit? Like, how would she open a credit card? How did she? Did she have a bank?
11:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, we never understood that.
11:41 Speaker 03 One bizarre scenario after another with her. I don't think it's likely that Janice created this Willie Joe identity out of thin air. If she totally made up the identity, wouldn't she have made it more like herself? For instance, Janice is white, while the Willie Joe identity is a black woman, who was also a decade older than Janice. And this Willie Joe identity seems to correspond with an actual person. When you search the social security number Janice was using for her alter ego,
12:23 Speaker 03 it links to a different woman, also named Willie. This woman seems to have been born in Louisiana. She's black, and her birthday is listed as the same fake birthday Janice had been using. Records show this person even voted within the last few years in Louisiana. I reached out to her because I suspected she was yet another person whose life Janice had upended. Were there loans she couldn't get or government services? But the woman I reached said she didn't know what I was talking about. So I kept sifting through databases and documents.
13:06 Speaker 03 And that's when I landed on something that kind of shocked me, even in the context of Janice's shocking life. What I found opened a door I didn't even know was there. One that could help solve this even bigger mystery about David's origin. I immediately called David.
13:29 Speaker 06 Okay, so the reason I am calling you at 8:30 on a Monday night with COVID is that I found a marriage record.
13:40 Speaker 03 Actually, it was a few of them. While Janice had been using this fake Willie Joe identity, she'd also married three different men in the 1980s and 1990s. First up was, of course, David's dad. Turns out, she divorced him when David was four. Then she actually married that guy Cliff from Poplarville. He's the real handsome one she tried to pass off as David's biological dad, who she'd lived with in that big old house behind the Sonic Drive-In. And if this information surprised me, well, it really surprises David.
14:20 Speaker 03 He tells me he doesn't even know who this supposed stepdad Cliff is. By the way, even after all this, Cliff still wouldn't return my calls. But then I found Janice married another man while she was legally married to Cliff. Yeah, bigamy. This next husband's name was Wes. David did remember his mom dating Wes, but didn't know they'd actually been married.
14:54 Speaker 06 So, um, yeah. Um, I, I feel, I feel kind of weird breaking all this to you over the phone.
15:07 Speaker 06 Is, how, how do you feel about this?
15:11 Speaker 04 I'm just worried because my whole life's been a lie.
15:17 Speaker 04 So I don't know what's going on.
15:19 Speaker 03 There was an upside to this discovery, though. A husband would have seen a very different side to Janice than her son would, and maybe know more about who Janice really was.
15:33 Speaker 06 Hey, is this Wes? Hello?
15:36 Speaker 02 Yes, this is him.
15:37 Speaker 06 Oh, it is. Great. Hey, this is Larrison Campbell, the journalist.
15:41 Speaker 03 And this husband was more than happy to talk.
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16:46 Speaker 03 I've finally tracked down one of Janice's husbands.
16:52 Speaker 03 As I dial his number, I look down at a list of several dozen questions in front of me. There are so many things I'm hoping he can tell me about Janice, what she told him about her past, and what he knew about David.
17:10 Speaker 03 It's Saturday afternoon when we jump on the phone. And right out of the gate, I realize the version of Janice that Wes knew was very different from the one that her son and I are unraveling. He tells me he can't imagine why someone would want to report on Janice, a woman he'd only ever known as Willie Joe.
17:30 Speaker 02 When you told me you were doing a story on her, I was like, it's gotta be something good because she was a good person.
17:39 Speaker 03 Turns out Wes knew nothing of the betrayal and lies she left behind in Mississippi and Louisiana. He'd lost track of her after they split up. Wes tells me he was about 22 years old when he met Janice, and she was about 50. Or so she said. They met at a bar. Wes was about to get into a fight, and Janice hustled him out before things got bad. They spent a night together, and a few days later, she invited him out to her family ranch. She told him she worked as a child psychologist. They were married for over two years, even bought a house together. And he thought that was their story, until 30 years later, when some reporter shows up in his inbox.
18:23 Speaker 02 And then it hit me with that. I'm like, whoa, what the hell?
18:27 Speaker 03 Where do I even start? There's the fact that she was already married when they wed.
18:32 Speaker 02 Wow. So she didn't get divorced from that dude until after we divorced?
18:38 Speaker 03 Right.
18:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, we got marriage certificate, marriage license, everything.
18:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. And there's the fact that, for a time, Wes lived with Janice at the ranch, where David's dad was also living. And Janice didn't tell Wes who he was.
18:56 Speaker 02 I didn't even know what relationship she was to him. I don't know if he was an uncle, dad, you know, I never... He was just an old man that stayed at the ranch.
19:06 Speaker 03 Had no idea that he'd been married to Janice. And then there's how she, again, erased her past.
19:17 Speaker 02 Let me ask you this before you start. She never had twins?
19:20 Speaker 03 She did.
19:22 Speaker 02 She did? So that was true?
19:25 Speaker 03 Okay, wait, did she tell you about this?
19:27 Speaker 02 Yes. She told me that she had had twins before. It was either they died in a fire.
19:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:37 Speaker 02 The twins and the father died in a fire.
19:43 Speaker 03 I told him about her four daughters, her first husband, all very much alive. And then I asked him about the one kid he did know, David.
19:56 Speaker 02 When I met him, David was 14, and my dad gave him a car for his birthday.
20:02 Speaker 03 What was Willie Joe's relationship like with David?
20:06 Speaker 02 Oh, man, she loved him. Oh, my God. Yeah, he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
20:14 Speaker 03 What did she tell you about David's adoption?
20:18 Speaker 02 That they adopted him. That was, this is it. I mean, she took in kids.
20:24 Speaker 03 Took in kids. Yeah, Wes tells me. Aside from Janice supposedly adopting David, she took in others while they were married. How old were they?
20:39 Speaker 02 The youngest was probably six. The oldest was probably nine, maybe 10. I mean, it was just for a few weeks. Supposedly, we were watching them for the state, I guess, as part of her child psychologist thing.
20:58 Speaker 03 Though now that he thinks about it, he never actually saw her work as a child psychologist.
21:04 Speaker 02 I'd never seen a child caseworker. I'd never seen anything. I mean, I never signed papers to be a foster parent, but then all of a sudden, the blame was never gone. She might have kidnapped those kids now. I don't know what to find.
21:18 Speaker 03 By the way, Janice was never charged with kidnapping, but I can see why Wes would be suspicious because Janice had apparently obtained other children under mysterious circumstances. I mean, actual foster parents undergo interviews, a background check. To Wes's knowledge, that didn't happen.
21:42 Speaker 03 It feels like both a clue and another layer of mystery. No one seems to know for sure where David came from. But if Janice were bringing in other kids and passing them off as foster children, could David have been one of those kids? And if so, why did she keep doing this? Wes never gets those answers. He trusted this force of nature he's married to and didn't stop to question her decisions. Remember, when he and Janice started dating, he was in his early twenties.
22:21 Speaker 02 It was me, a young kid, and her, an older woman, and we just had a little fling, you know?
22:26 Speaker 03 Until, he says, their little fling turned into a lot more.
22:30 Speaker 02 Couple of weeks later, she knocks on the door and tells us she's pregnant. And I'm like, oh shit, here we go.
22:35 Speaker 03 Which is how he ended up married to a woman decades older than him. And Janice doesn't just tell him she's pregnant. She tells him she's pregnant with triplets.
22:49 Speaker 02 It's a family heritage thing, I guess, that they're known for twins and triplets.
22:55 Speaker 03 Wes and Janice buy a house together in another town, under her alias Willie Joe, which, again, is the only name Wes knows for her. And they move, along with teenage David, as they prepare to welcome triplets, which she'll later claim to miscarry. I tell Wes she wasn't actually pregnant, that that was a lie too.
23:19 Speaker 02 Why do you say you didn't think she was pregnant? Oh, she had a hysterectomy. Oh, that she wasn't pregnant? Yeah. But she had a huge belly? I mean, just weight in the stomach. Just the pregnant belly. She had ultrasounds. I never went to the doctor with her, because I worked. But she had ultrasounds?
23:44 Speaker 02 Pictures of the babies, you know, pictures of the fetuses, you know, all this.
23:48 Speaker 03 He reiterates, he saw her bare stomach. It looked pregnant.
23:54 Speaker 02 We were married. I seen her naked. What the hell was it then? A basketball she sewed in or sewed it? This is freaking my life out.
24:03 Speaker 03 The investigator searching for Janice told me that she had had a hysterectomy, that he'd seen paperwork and proof. And in the police file, one of Janice's sisters says that she had endometriosis and their mother had signed for a full hysterectomy. That's pretty detailed. But as I talked to Wes and hear those details about her stomach and the ultrasounds, I actually start wondering if I were wrong. Was Janice actually pregnant?
24:38 Speaker 06 I mean, I gotta be honest with you. Your details are so clear that it's making me want to go back and just confirm that she really did, in fact, have this hysterectomy. Because that is...
24:50 Speaker 02 I'm telling you, I would check that out.
24:53 Speaker 03 Or was Janice finally doing to me what she had done to so many others?
25:01 Speaker 02 I'm not saying she was three months pregnant when we supposedly lost the babies. It was like right to term. So I don't know how she did it.
25:09 Speaker 03 He remembers the day she lost their babies.
25:12 Speaker 02 I was at work one day and I got a phone call.
25:15 Speaker 03 It's Wes's dad on the phone.
25:18 Speaker 02 Saying, hey, we gotta go to the hospital. And we took off to the hospital and I said, what's going on? He said, I'm not gonna tell you that. Now, we'll tell you when you get there. We'll tell you when you get there. And we got there and she's standing outside. And I'm like, what the hell is she doing here? You know? And then I looked and I noticed, hey, she's not pregnant. What's the puzzle? She had lost the babies. So we're going home and my brain was just screwed up because I just lost three triplets, you know?
25:46 Speaker 02 Like I say, there was no, I don't know how she pulled it off.
25:51 Speaker 03 Wes is devastated, too devastated to notice something that now, well, seems like a glaring inconsistency. He says she was seven months pregnant when she lost the babies. That's third trimester. At that stage, losing a pregnancy is considered a stillbirth, three times over.
26:15 Speaker 02 She's an hour later waiting on me outside the hospital. It's so crazy because I had that thought, and then I guess I just let that thought go, that nobody's that hurtful to say, "Oh, I'm pregnant with your kids," and then, you know, trick you into this catfish and shit, and then, and then you have a miscarriage and you lose them at seven months. Yeah, this is, this is freaking me out now.
26:44 Speaker 03 Impossible as it might seem that Janice could just fake a pregnancy, she didn't just do it this one time. She's done it before. The elastic pants Janice sported, her changing stories about if David were adopted, or if she birthed him. I wonder if she had a medical condition that might make someone look pregnant, that might help her sell this story. That's total speculation, but it's just so hard to understand how she could have pulled this off. What is clear is that, at least some of the time, these imaginary babies seem
27:27 Speaker 03 to help secure her to a man, Wes, of course, and it seems cliff. It even makes me wonder about her high school pregnancy scare.
27:41 Speaker 03 Her best friend remembers Janice rushing to get married because she thought she was pregnant. But her first child wasn't actually born until more than a year after she had married her high school sweetheart. It's like an extreme version of trad wife, believing a woman needs a man to be safe and secure, and that a child is the only way to make him commit. I called Wes, hoping for a window into who Janice really was. But it seems like Janice kept much of her real self locked away in this relationship, too.
28:23 Speaker 03 So I was the one cluing Wes in, not the other way around. Were there any clues he could conjure to help me better understand her? Like, was the woman he was married to the kind of person who would create a new identity and leave four kids? Did she ever seem like...
28:44 Speaker 02 The type to do that?
28:45 Speaker 03 Like, yeah, or like haunted?
28:48 Speaker 02 No. If she'd have been 24, or I'd have been 53, we'd probably still be together.
28:56 Speaker 03 Janice's and Wes's marriage ended the way most of her relationships did. A firm cutoff.
29:04 Speaker 02 She told me that they were going back to the ranch. And I said, okay, if y'all go up there, I'll come up there this weekend. And she goes, no, don't bother. I'm not coming back.
29:14 Speaker 03 The breakup is abrupt and confusing for him in the moment. "What the hell are you talking about?" he says to her. Though now he looks back and remembers shortly before Janice broke it off, David's dad, who again Wes didn't know was David's dad, had moved into the house and Janice had started sleeping on the couch. The night of their split, she and Wes got into a bad fight. So Wes says he left and stayed at his parents' house.
29:46 Speaker 02 I went back over there one time after that to get my stuff. And that was it.
29:52 Speaker 03 Over the years, he's remembered mostly the good things about his ex-wife. He'd shoot a hog and she'd have it cleaned immediately. The way she cooked, her beauty. He says she reminded him of an older Sophia Loren. But that period of his life now has a less glossy finish. He's admitting to himself he did wonder if something weren't right.
30:20 Speaker 02 I mean, there was times that I thought, man, this girl, who she says she is. I think if I was older, I would have figured this out on my own back then. I would have put pieces together. I, I was the 23-year-old naive kid, dude. It's crazy. You've straightened three or four years of my life out now that, that were kind of a weird, kind of a weird vibe.
30:41 Speaker 03 Straightened out some of Wes's questions, but added to mine.
30:48 Speaker 03 When I found Wes, I'd hoped he'd be able to answer where David came from and who Janice, his ex-wife, was deep down. But the version of Janice that Wes got wasn't the same one that she showed to David, or probably David's dad, even when all four of them were living in the same house. One thing that seems clear, though, is that Janice had this way of making children who weren't hers into hers. The alleged foster children, yes, but also her friends' kids, like teenage Peggy from Poplarville, or Cliff's niece, little Karen, who called Janice "her Aunt Willie Jo."
31:34 Speaker 03 They idolized Janice, and she seemed to love them back. David recently found this picture of little Karen from the early 80s. It was tucked into the bins of family photos. Janice had kept it all these years. There's a bitter irony to this, that it seems like the only children she didn't mother during those years were the four she gave birth to, who had to grow up with a Janice-shaped hole in their lives. So these other children, was Janice trying to fill a hole herself in the shape of her daughters? Which brings me back to David, and all the rumors that seem to attach themselves to his adoption.
32:18 Speaker 03 Was this need to be a mom again so powerful that Janice was willing to do something illegal? Or was she just helping kids who needed her? Or could it be both?
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33:38 Speaker 03 I bring all this new information back to David. He tells me he remembered having other kids around, but he figured it was above board. Learning that Janice may have been involved in a sort of off-the-books foster care practice did raise more questions about whether he could have been brought into her life in an off-the-books way.
34:00 Speaker 04 I thought I was actually adopted the right way, not the illegal way.
34:08 Speaker 03 It's time to look into this rumor the investigator just dropped in David's lap that he might have been purchased for $1,000. I decided to try to go back and find the source. I start with someone who'd known David when he was really young, Karen Sullivan from Poplarville, the little girl Janice had kept the photo of, who thought David was her new cousin. Remember, at the time, everyone called David Trey. Something was out with Trey. I knew something was up with Trey. Karen was seven or so when Janice had started dating her uncle Cliff. David was just a toddler when he and Janice entered Karen's life. And Cliff had treated David like his biological son.
34:53 Speaker 03 But Karen can remember her parents trying to convince Cliff that David wasn't his child.
35:00 Speaker 03 Did you ever hear anything your parents talk about where they think David came from? They thought she kidnapped him.
35:11 Speaker 03 Kidnapped? Yeah, she says, when Janice left town, they became suspicious. Was Trey even hers? Like, did she steal him? Did she buy him? Like, what is the story there? It's a wild rumor and eerily similar to one that had circulated in Louisiana. Came out from somewheres that they thought he was stolen. Yeah, even Marlene, my sister-in-law, said she remembers that. Where did that come from? This is not a thing people usually say when a new baby appears on the scene. But groups of people who didn't even know each other seemed to believe it.
35:56 Speaker 03 And there were other stories, even within the same town. Like Peggy Perkins, the teenager who knew Janice from the diner and also lived in Poplarville. Remember, Peggy's mom was close with Janice for a while. One of the times Janice left David's dad, he called Peggy's house.
36:17 Speaker 05 He told my mama that he bought that baby from a charity high school in New Orleans, from a lady for $1,000.
36:25 Speaker 03 This is the source of the black market adoption rumor that the investigator had told David. And there's something else David's dad had said about his reasons for doing it.
36:36 Speaker 05 Jan told him that she miscarried the baby. And she was having such a hard time mentally about it, he went and bought the baby.
36:45 Speaker 03 Did she fake a pregnancy and then grief as a way to get a baby? If so, that's hard to relate to. Hearing this made me wonder if some element of the grief were real, even if the pregnancy weren't.
37:02 Speaker 03 I've had both a miscarriage and later a hysterectomy. There was, at least for me, something similar in the grief that came with each. What you're letting go of is a huge part of your life and who you might want to be. Was Janice so desperate to keep being a mother that she'd do anything to make it happen? And did any of the people who suspected she had broken the law call the police? Child Protective Services? It seems not.
37:42 Speaker 03 Karen told me something that stuck with me about Poplarville, that little town Janice kept returning to. She says, "You can hide stuff there. It's part of the culture of not inserting yourself." "In public, they keep their mouths shut. Behind closed doors, they tell it all." So behind closed doors, Karen may have been hearing these theories, but that's where they stayed. As you can imagine, learning all of this has David thinking the worst about his birth family. What if they don't even know what happened to him?
38:18 Speaker 04 Back then, you pay a nurse off, you get a kid, and nobody knew about it. Doctor or nurse, I'd tell the parents, "Sorry, your son or daughter passed away," or something like that. See, I get too much into TV.
38:33 Speaker 03 A seemingly outlandish theory that now doesn't sound so much like fiction. As we've reported this, several people have asked me about David's birth mother. Could she be the real Willie Joe? Had Janice possibly stolen not just Willie Joe's identity, but her child?
38:57 Speaker 03 But this does not appear to be the case. According to Janice's marriage records, she took on Willie Joe's identity two full years before David was born. And according to records, Willie Joe is a different race, not just from Janice, but also from David.
39:17 Speaker 04 I just want to know if it was actually a legit adoption or not. Did my parents really give me up? Didn't my mom kidnap her? Or did my mom really buy me? Or is this all true?
39:32 Speaker 03 The timing is lucky. David learns about his mom's lies in February of 2022. That same year, the state of Louisiana passes a law that allows all adoptees to request their original birth certificates with their birth parents' names, even if the adoption is closed. David logs on, fills out the form, and mails it. An envelope arrives from the state.
40:03 Speaker 04 That's what I'm looking at because they sent me a...
40:06 Speaker 03 There it is. Oh, whoa. And what he finds in that envelope sends him to Janice herself.
40:22 Speaker 03 Tell us where we are, David, and what we're doing today.
40:25 Speaker 04 We're in Dallas. I'm going to go visit my mom.
40:29 Speaker 03 How are you feeling leading up to this?
40:31 Speaker 04 I'm nervous.
40:33 Speaker 03 Hello, Stephanie. Hello.
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41:32 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 Aliyah 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.
42:15 Speaker 03 Legal review by Davis Wright Tremaine.
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Previous The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 4. Bombshell Next The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 6. The Real Janis Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated