Cold Blooded: A Gamble

This is Deborah Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska.

Remember, you can get new episodes early if you follow Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Listen to Vanished, What Happened to Vanessa, a new series from ABC Audio and 2020.

Coming September 16th.

Hey, I'm Brad Milke.

I'm a reporter at ABC News.

I host our daily news podcast, Start Here.

And today, we got something special for you here.

I am with the host of Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska, Chris Connolly.

The voice of the series is with me now.

And like many of you, I've been an avid listener of this series.

So I want to ask Chris some of my burning questions about what makes this story's many twists and turns.

Chris, thank you so much for being here to dig a bit deeper with us.

I'm honored for the opportunity, Brad.

Thanks for asking.

I mean, it's just an amazing series.

So here's what I'm always curious about, by the way, with these sort of true crime stories.

How do you get brought into this story, Chris?

And what did you think as you were first kind of digging into it?

Well, sometimes people assume that it's been my idea to do this story.

And I always say pitching a true crime story to the folks at 2020 or to the folks at ABC Audio is like calling up Toyota and saying, I have an idea for a car.

They're way ahead of us.

And so I think because I'm on the West Coast,

it was thought as being appropriate that I go up to Alaska and talk to the people up there.

I think what I thought about Alaska is what a lot of people think about Alaska.

It's a fascinating place, and a lot of really interesting stories emanate from there.

Can we talk a little bit more about Ketchikan, Alaska?

Because I think it really does become kind of a character in this story.

Like, it's so crucial to understanding how this all played out the way it did.

So you've been up there in Ketchikan specifically, right?

I mean, just what's it like to look around?

Well, we were there in the summer months, right?

I mean, we were there for a week when the cruise ships were stopping by.

Ketchiken is the first city if you're taking an Alaskan cruise from Vancouver or Seattle.

And if you do, it's in between, I think, April and October, and the sun's out.

There are lots of places to walk around and do some shopping if you want.

Plus, you see the beautiful wildlife, the birds, the seals, the incredible landscapes.

And so it's a remarkable thing.

Like, I went...

to cover this story like I was going to be in the Iditterod, you know, with the clothes I wore.

And I was doing most of my work in a down vest and a button-down shirt.

I was reading at 10.30 at night and 5 in the morning outside, okay?

But the people we met in Ketchikan,

one of the things I think they wanted to impress upon us was don't be misled by what this weather, this time of year, is like.

This is a tale of two cities, Ketchikan.

This is what it's like April to October.

Lots of new people coming to town for a little while.

Lots of activity around the cruise ships.

Lots of business being transacted.

When things get cold and dark, Ketchiken is a different place.

It can be hard on people who aren't used to what the weather can do to your spirit and do to your, you know, just your overall attitude.

And they wanted to make sure that even as we were admiring the landscapes and the nature and the conviviality, it was not always like that.

And so, in that respect, Ketchikan plays a double role in this particular story.

Do you think this could have unfolded somewhere else?

Or I guess, do you think the uniqueness of this place affected the actual events, the actual investigation into Dr.

Garcia's death?

I think it might have been in a sense.

There was that contrast between the conviviality that

Dr.

Eric Garcia was able to experience with the people up there and the isolation of that beautiful home that he had.

He had the most remarkable views.

He could look out all over this landscape and see just amazing things.

But it was a big house, and he lived there alone.

And a lot of people commented to us on what that must have been like.

In particular, Dr.

Garcia's brother Saul talked about what he felt like as the isolation and loneliness in that house.

So in that sense, and in the sense of, as some of the police...

told us in this case, it's not so unusual for them to do a welfare check on a man in his late 50s in his house in late March and find someone deceased.

That's not so out of the ordinary.

That's the kind of thing that it seems like has happened in the past.

And maybe that's unique to a place like Ketchikin.

What I appreciate about you as a reporter, by the way, Chris, is you had this huge breadth of interests and coverage.

Like you've covered the entertainment industry for years.

You've covered so many criminal cases.

Were there parallels to other stories that you've covered?

I guess in what ways did this seem universal?

In what ways was this specific?

I mean, from the very beginning, it's a mystery.

What happened to Dr.

Garcia?

In a way, I've done true crime for a number of years.

MTV, we did Mia Zapata's passing.

She was a musician in the Seattle scene.

Her murder later solved by DNA.

Certainly was covering Tupac Shakur's murder.

We went to Las Vegas when he was still in the hospital trying to figure that out.

I think what made this unique in my experience

was the crime scene itself.

It was so unusual.

It was so so mysterious.

There were so many things there that didn't seem to make sense.

It was a puzzle that investigators had to solve.

And I'm one of the people who, I'm listening to episode one, being like, you guys got to take this 911 caller more seriously.

Like this person is someone saying, I know this guy.

He probably killed himself or like I'm starting to get nervous.

That ends up being the voice of a man convicted of his murder.

But so I guess I'm like trying to wonder, like, what do you make of the initial decisions from police and how that kind of those early decisions all affected what happened next?

Well, that's the thing that's fascinating about this case, too, is that so many things happen at the beginning.

So many things take place that you hear about in our first episode that will take on a totally different cast as you learn what's actually taken place.

People's motivations, people's feelings, what they seem to be on first glance turn out to be something totally different.

In a general sense, the thing that struck me about how the investigation proceeded was at every step, law enforcement and investigators did not take any leaps.

They wanted to go very deliberately and not assume anything.

Okay?

Okay, here is Dr.

Garcia deceased on his couch.

Could it be natural causes?

Could it be something he did to himself?

Could it be some other thing?

Also, now, a lot of his valuables are no longer in the house.

Could he have given them away?

Could they have, you know, left for some other reason?

Any attempt to link all these things together at the outset, you know, police officers and investigators resisted.

Go one step at a time, see where the evidence leads you.

And then if it turns out that there is a connection between the things we're seeing, those connections will reveal themselves in time.

When you were describing all the sort of things here, if I'm Saul Garcia, Eric Garcia's brother, I want to know everything that's happening.

And he ended up playing a big role in this investigation.

He's the one who found the missing smoke detectors.

That was kind of a break in the case because it showed someone had removed them, tossed them down a ravine.

And you said you interviewed Saul personally.

Like, I mean, what was that like?

Saul Garcia is not ruled by his emotions.

He walks down from his brother's house onto this kind of ravine, and all of a sudden there's a phone call, you know, or his phone pings somehow.

And he grabs his phone and he's looking down at his phone the way one would as he's walking across this bridge.

And because he's looking down, he sees these white things in the ravine, you know, beneath him.

And yes, they turn out to be the smoke detectors.

One of the details we weren't able to put into the podcast, though, is that that discovery, later confirmed by law enforcement, happened on Jordan Joplin's birthday.

And so Saul Garcia, in no way way ruled by emotion, says he said to himself, happy birthday, Joplin.

He sounds similar in terms of the rationality, in terms of like, I got to be kind of cold-blooded,

forgive the phrase.

Oh, no, we appreciate the branding.

But that also sounds like his brother, his late brother, as well.

And I guess I'm wondering, though, for somebody like that to make the decision, like, I got to go up there.

What did that say about him?

Well, I think they were very concerned about the investigation.

You know, I mean, there's an incredibly poignant scene where he tells, this is Saul Garcia tells a younger brother,

you have to come up to Ketchiken with me.

But he doesn't tell the younger brother what's happened exactly to their brother Eric until they're literally changing planes at SeaTac.

There's a lot of emotion in this story sort of all the way around.

And a lot of it is involving Dr.

Garcia and his family.

Dr.

Garcia's desire to become a doctor in the first place had so much to do with his grandmother and his grandmother's heart issues.

He was constantly concerned about looking after his grandmother and he took an interest in medicine right from the beginning.

Saul Garcia told me an amazing story about Dr.

Garcia being at camp, the same camp with his younger brother.

Maybe Dr.

Garcia, you know, then just Eric Garcia, was in high school and his younger brother was like in sixth grade, and his younger brother broke his pelvis.

And Eric Garcia in high school stabilized his younger brother.

Wow.

I mean, he just had, you know, he wanted to help people.

And his connection with his grandmother, you know, went on throughout his life.

You know, he was constantly, like in high school and college, constantly calling her doctors, telling them to do tests, telling them to do certain things.

What an amazing human being and what an amazing family.

And it just makes his loss, his murder, that much more painful.

Well, and can then, can we talk about the man convicted of killing him?

So Jordan Joplin, by the way, my favorite piece of tape in this series by far is you asking another human being, in all seriousness, about a murder suspect.

How did he look with his shirt off?

Yes, that's right.

I do do that.

Yes.

What do you think it was about Jordan Joplin?

It speaks to a more serious point, though, of what was it about Jordan Joplin that gave him this kind of hold, this like magnetism to maybe Dr.

Eric Garcia and to other people around him.

I think one of the things that made Jordan Joplin stand out was just his physical charisma.

He was a great-looking guy.

He had an amazing body.

And

so that had its own kind of charisma.

He'd worked in adult entertainment.

You know, he had worked as a stripper.

You know, he was, you know, proud of that body and knew how to use that body to help support himself.

But there was definitely this kind of innate charisma that he had and this energy that when it came into your life for the first time, it seemed great.

It seemed upbeat and positive and exciting to be around.

And we heard a number of people speak to them.

We're actually going to take a break right here.

When we come back, we will talk more with Chris about how this trial ended up having so many twists and turns of its own.

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All right, we are back with the host of Cold Blooded Chris Connolly.

I'm Brad Milke.

And Chris, in this series, we hear a lot from Ketchikam police officers who spent years investigating Dr.

Garcia's death.

For all of them, it seems like this case just really stuck with them in a unique way.

There's actually something that Eric Madsen, who was sergeant back then, but now is actually the Ketchikam police chief, he said something that did not make it into the series that I found really interesting.

He talks about surveillance footage they obtained from Jordan's trip to Walmart.

That's when Jordan bought all these plastic bins that he used to steal and move Dr.

Garcia's valuables.

Madsen, it turned out, printed out a still from that surveillance footage and kept it in his office the entire time he worked on the case.

And the image was just of Mr.

Joplin smiling, and it was during the time that would have been close to, I believe, when the doctor was at home,

drugged under the morphine.

So in that instance,

it was just motivation to

get everything correct, get it correct for not only Dr.

Garcia and his family, but to get things correct for Mr.

Joplin and for

everyone.

So that's why I did have a photo hanging in my office.

And so Chris, I mean, you spent time with a lot of these investigators.

Does that give us a sense of what kind of effect this case had on them?

Dr.

Eric Garcia was initially appreciated for what he could do,

but it wasn't long before he was appreciated for who he was.

And so that's what I hear in some of the things that we hear Eric Mattson talk about.

The other thing I love about that clip you just played is,

you know, is his desire to make sure it was all buttoned up.

And I have to say, Eric Mattson and the rest of the investigating team, people like Sahl Garcia, could not have been more grateful for the work they did.

You know, the family and the investigators as they moved forward.

There was great affection and appreciation between the two groups.

And I think for just that reason, you know, the incredible contrast between the smiling Jordan Joplin and that nine-second tape of Dr.

Garcia gasping for breath on his deathbed, it is horrifying to contemplate.

And

it's fitting that that contrast takes such a key role in one of the investigators' mindsets.

And so then as we go through the series, you've got kind of the crime scene itself.

You've got, you know, sort of interviews with people along the way.

Then, of course, by the end of the series, we're in court.

Prosecutors are sort of digging through these mountains of evidence that

we don't really have time to go over every single thing that they even brought up to tie this all together.

So, I guess what I wanted to ask you is, what details did not make it into the series that you still find interesting?

What's on the cutting room floor?

We talk again and again about that scene where the house gets open for the first time, where the group of friends is outside Dr.

Garcia's house.

Nobody knows where he is.

And Jordan Joplin has shown up with keys to the house.

And so Don Hink is there concerned about where Dr.

Garcia is.

And Jordan Joplin is asked by police to hand them the keys that he has, the extra set of keys that he says he has, to the house.

As Don Hink watches this, she sees the keys pass from Jordan Joplin's hand to the police's hand, and she recognizes the key ring.

It's a gift that she gave Dr.

Garcia that she bought on her honeymoon.

There is no way that's an extra set of keys.

He would never have given that away.

Oh, like those are his keys, not the spare set.

Exactly.

And at that moment,

her heart goes through the floor.

In that moment, she knows something terrible has happened.

Wow.

Hey, can we also talk about the part that shocked me the most about this whole trial was that Jordan Joplin testified testified that they put him on the stand and he has to admit that he's lied to people many different times.

And prosecution this whole time is like poking holes in his testimony.

What did you make of that, the whole scene with him?

Because I found that tape so compelling.

After he wrote the Star Wars movies, Lawrence Kasten wrote a movie called Body Heat.

And there's a moment in Body Heat where Ted Danson is trying to commit arson and Mickey Rourke's character is trying to advise him about about it.

And I'll clean this up for the purposes of our podcast.

Mickey Rourke says to him, there are 50 ways to mess something like this up.

And if you can think of 25 of them, you're a genius.

This is why we got Chris Connolly on this, right?

That's the perfect connection.

Yes.

Jordan Joplin was no genius.

Jordan Joplin was not a strategist.

Jordan Joplin was not a master criminal.

He was improvisatory.

He was a chameleon.

He would change from moment to moment to deceive in that moment and then worry about the next moment after that.

So at no point, it seems, did he have a complete and detailed story in his mind to present to authorities or even to present to his own lawyer in court?

He went up there, he backtracked, he changed his answers.

You know, he was, I think you could say he was seen by the jury as an unreliable witness, you know, even as he was on trial for his life.

And that that kind of typifies what many people say about him.

He was charismatic, but he was a deceiver.

It's interesting you say that because I found myself wondering, this is a story about really calculated murder, disguised as a suicide and just the vast Alaskan night.

But it's also in some ways a story about love and loneliness.

Do those around Jordan Joplin think this was all opportunistic, that he had a plan the moment he went up there, like he knew what he was going to do?

Or does he sort of go moment to moment i don't know did you get the sense from people who knew him you know the the the sense that i got uh that came stronger was slightly different and it was a sense that i got from people who knew dr garcia and it was what they felt jordan joplin's you know mindset was even saul garcia said why kill the golden goose I think that's the question everybody kind of has.

And it's amazing that Saul Garcia phrased it that way, I thought.

Why kill the man who is funding your lifestyle, who paid $10,000 for your down payment, who's given you all this money and goods?

Why take this guy out?

You know, why kill, why kill this man?

And the thing that both his relatives and his friends said was Dr.

Eric Garcia compartmentalized his life.

And Jordan Joplin got that.

When he was with Jordan Joplin, He never heard Jordan Joplin about his friends like Bob Jackson or Don Hink or Will Hink.

He never heard about his relationship with his brother Saul Garcia.

And so in their mind, this is the mind of the people who knew Dr.

Garcia, Jordan Joplin must have thought,

oh, I can do this and nobody will care.

Nobody will care.

Nobody will investigate.

Everybody will just go up there and it will look like he took his own life or his natural causes and I'll get off the hook because nobody cares about Dr.

Garcia.

That was wrong.

He might have felt isolated at times.

He might have felt lonely at times.

But there was a big team, Dr.

Garcia, behind him.

There was a team that was supporting Dr.

Garcia from the very beginning.

And

they were heard from, and they played a huge part in the fact that Jordan Joplin went to jail.

Well, and in fact, not just went to jail, but for how long he went to jail too, because Saul Garcia, Eric's brother, also gave a victim impact statement at Jordan's sentencing.

We actually have a clip of that.

Some of the things he gambled on

were

that there would be no investigation, that Eric was lonely and had no friends.

He gambled that he could get possession of Eric's home

by

mentioning he had a power of attorney.

I'm here today to seek justice for Eric and collect

on all your failed gambles

to ensure

your wish, your unconscious wish of becoming imprisoned for life becomes a reality.

I guess I'm wondering, just from hearing Saul's voice, how do you think he ended up reckoning with this case, with what Jordan had done and with the death of his brother?

I'm fascinated and have been by his use of the idea of gambling as the thing that he kind of accused Jordan Joplin of.

To accuse Jordan Joplin of gambling, you know, was a very powerful way to say, you didn't know who my brother was.

You know, I think if anything came out of this trial and out of everything that we learned, we know,

we have some sense at least what kind of person Dr.

Eric Garcia was.

Revered, beloved, admired by this community that, you know, that took in this outsider from a different part of the world and grew to appreciate him and feel the deepest affection for him.

At one point, I asked Bob Jackson, when you want to come up with an image of Dr.

Garcia that makes you happy, what do you think of?

And he said, well, you know, Eric was, you know, a surgeon and he was, you know, you know, you know, he's proud of his hands and stuff.

But we had a dog and he loved our dog.

And I just remember him rolling on the floor with our dog, getting all this hair all over him and laughing and laughing and laughing just at playing with our dog.

And that's one of the images that I have, a joyful Dr.

Eric Garcia rolling on the floor with our dog.

That's really the sort of thing that sticks out to me at the end of the day about this whole story is the dichotomy of the Alaskan lifestyle that you just were describing earlier.

There's the summer and the winter, right?

There's the community, but also the loneliness.

That's what sticks out to me about all this.

What sticks with you as you go forward now?

You've been with this case for so long.

What still lingers with you?

What I go back to over and over again is my kind of admiration for this community and for Dr.

Garcia, that there was somebody who came from another part of the world as their chief surgeon, and they admired what he did.

and they appreciated his personality.

And while they admired him for what he did, they came to love him for who he was.

If there's a sadness at the heart of this story, it's the feeling of both his friends and his family that had he been able to share what was going on in his life with Jordan Joplin, they might have provided counsel to him that could have kept him from landing in bad situations.

Saul Garcia even told me at one point, I got mad at my brother.

You know, after his passing, I got mad at him.

Why hadn't he confided in us so that we could have guided him otherwise?

And so if there's any, you know, if if there's a takeaway from it, it's like you realize how many people care about you.

And if you are going through something, disclose it, you'll get more love and acceptance than you might imagine that you will.

It's incredible storytelling and it's incredible reporting.

And really thankful that we were able to spend some extra time with you.

Thank you so much, Chris.

Oh, I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Brett.

And if you liked Cold Blooded, which I assume you did because you're on a bonus episode now, there is a new podcast by ABC Audio you should really check out.

It's called Vanished: What Happened to Vanessa.

This is the story of Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen.

She went missing.

Her family is pressuring the military for answers.

The search for their beloved sister and daughter ignites a movement and sparks a reckoning throughout the military.

That's Vanished: What Happened to Vanessa.

It's out weekly on Tuesday, starting September 16th, and the trailer is out right now.

So go check it out.

I'm Brad Milke.

See you later.

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