Post Mortem | First Love, Then Murder

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I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today I'm sitting down with CBS News correspondent Natalie Morales to discuss the murder of Aaron Fryer.
Now, in the early morning hours of October 2nd, 2017, Aaron's ex-wife Maggie called 911 to report that both Aaron and their 15-year-old daughter, Ellen, nicknamed Ellie, were missing. Police arrived at Erin's home, and what they found there was shocking.
Blood-soaked sofa, blood spatter, shattered glass. Within hours, though, police found Ellie, and they found her alive and seemingly unharmed.
She was walking on the street with her boyfriend, Gavin McFarlane, and his friend, Russell Jones. But Aaron Fryer was still missing.
Natalie, thanks for joining us to talk about this case. Hello again, Anne-Marie.
Good to be with you. And a reminder to the listeners, like I tell you every week, if you haven't actually listened to this episode yet, you can find it in your podcast feed.

It's right above this one.

So go back and listen to the hour and then come on back and we can start talking about it.

So, I mean, this really is one of those cases where a lot happened in a very short period of time.

Police, they find Ellie, Galvin and Russell walking on the street not too long after they discover this bloody scene. They take them all into the Medford Police Department in Oregon.
They separate them, and they're hoping that they can give them some information about where Aaron is. Detective Bill Ford sits down with Russell, and as he describes him, he's a chatty Cathy, as they say.
He takes him out for it. Do you say smoke and joke? That's what they call it? Yeah, you know, I guess Russell, he's a smoker, and Russell asked for a cigarette.
And he's like, perfect opportunity. Let's take him outside, and we'll go smoke and joke.
And that's how they got Russell to talk and really start to spill the beans. Right.
And sort of in no time, he offers to tell him where Aaron is, where his body is. You went out there.
How difficult would it have been to find that area without Russell's help? It was a good 20 miles or about 30 minutes drive from the Medford Police Department headquarters. So it was a difficult area to get to because it was sort of a hilly, remote wooded area.
But it wasn't really, you know, something that they thought out. Investigators said they drove around for quite some time trying to figure out what to do.
They had the, you know, Aaron's body in the back of the car wrapped up in tarp. But finally, they figured it out.
Detective Ford, he says, Russell led him right there. And then he said, okay, stop.
He's like, okay, he's right down there over the ravine. And sure enough, the police looked down, they see a tarp wrapped up.
And once they knew they had a body, once they knew they had located Aaron Fryer, they were able to take that picture of that crime scene and they showed Gavin, look, we know, you know, where Aaron is now. We have a crime scene set up.
We're getting a lot of information. Russell is telling us his story.
What's your story? So the investigation moved pretty quickly. And after that, they were all pointing the finger at each other and blaming one another.
And when you see Gavin in that interrogation room, I mean, he looks remorseful. But then we find out that, like, there's this whole plan that they talk.
I mean, they didn't just talk about it. They wrote down plans and alternate plans, all these notes.
Yeah, apparently they had, according to the police, different plans that they had written out. In fact, Russell seemed to be sort of the secretary of the group writing down and taking the notes of the plans.
Ellie did, though, you know, in her handwriting, there's a note where she draws out the exact, it's a very small house where Aaron Friar lived, and Aaron was on the couch when he was killed with the baseball bat. So Ellie had drawn the inside of the house, including where the motion detectors were, so that they knew where to go once, you know, Gavin and Russell were going to execute this plan.
And there had been other plans, too, though. There was a plan, apparently, to chloroform Ellie's sisters, but also chloroform Aaron, and then they were going to take him in the car, in his car, and make it look like he crashed and had a car accident.
And, in fact, when they were going through with their planning, apparently, there was a whole plan in motion the night before Aaron Fryer was actually killed, where Gavin and Russell attempted to break into the house. And unbeknownst to them, Aaron's girlfriend was sleeping at the house on the time.
And when they tried to break in, the girlfriend disrupted what was their plan to then kill Aaron. And investigators said there was even a plan at one point.
They had talked about killing Russell's dad, and they wanted the Social Security benefits. And that morning after they killed Aaron Fryer, one of the things that police were able to glean from Russell and Gavin and Ellie was that they had gone to a Social Security office, and the idea was Russell was going to have Gavin become his rep payee so that he could then start getting the benefits signed over to him.
And once they get to the Social Security office, they realize this ain't going to work. And the Social Security office was closed.
It was early in the morning, so they couldn't even do anything with that. So as you could see, they were kind of bumbling when it came down to what they were going to do after they got away with murder.
And you said police spoke to Russell's dad? Police spoke to Russell's dad, and he said he wasn't concerned. He didn't think that Russell was actually ever going to try to kill him.

So, you know, he didn't feel like it was too much of a threat to him. Okay.
But I still think it's quite concerning that that would even be a topic of conversation. I do find it interesting that they clearly talked about it often enough.
But then they go with this messy choice, you know, to hit this man in his sleep

over and over again. There's blood everywhere, which means there's evidence everywhere.

Do we have any idea how long they had been planning this?

It appears they had planned probably for about three weeks or so beforehand, given, you know,

the nature of the notes and the text exchanges back and forth between Ellie and Gavin. But we know that a few days before, based on Ellie's texts, that she had told Gavin that her father had sexually molested her.
Now, you know, whether or not there is truth to that, we'll never know because Aaron isn't here to give his side of the story. You know, abuse claims are always very nuanced.
But the police detectives, you know, they did look into that. They couldn't corroborate Ellie's stories of abuse.
Her sisters were interviewed. They said their dad was a good guy.
They didn't, you know, see any evidence or had never experienced any abuse they said themselves.

So, you know, it's hard to corroborate that. But the question was, was Ellie telling him that

to give him the motive to go through with their plan?

So this was, you know, the portion of the hour that I found myself really wrestling with,

because this business of corroborating her allegations of abuse, it's so difficult because we know that abuse victims don't always talk. They're scared to talk.
We also know that they could be groomed. And so, you know, it's not like the victim of like a mugging on the street.

It's a different kind of crime victim.

And so I found myself, you know, torn listening to this. We want to believe the abuse victim as well.
And, you know, police, when they interrogated Ellie, she did say she was being abused. However, when they went about going through with their investigation, Ellie had told apparently three friends that she was being abused, but she never mentioned being sexually abused.
So it's a very hard claim to corroborate. That said, you know, she's a 15-year-old girl.
We don't know what her father was or wasn't doing, but, you know, her sisters did say that Ellie's abuse claim, they thought, came from the fact that Aaron Fryer had made it—it was forbidden that Gavin and Ellie could be together. And so, So Ellie was taking that as, you know, punishment and saying she was being abused.
That's what her sister said. And so while we're talking about this, there's also the business of whether or not Gavin was also motivated by thinking that maybe he was going to be a father.
Right. And in his interrogation with Detective Ford, he says, you know, and I was protecting my unborn child.
You know, he really believed because Ellie told him that she thought she was pregnant. Now, there was surveillance footage of them going into a store right after they had murdered Aaron Fryer, and she did buy a pregnancy

kit at that time. So, you know, we don't know what she really thought at the time, if she really

thought she was pregnant or not, though. You know, again, police thinking that she was using

everything she could, according to police, to try to manipulate the situation. They view her

as the mastermind of the plot.

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Welcome back. Natalie, we have to talk a little bit more about Russell.
I mean, not only did he basically give up all the goods at the beginning of his own interrogation, but then police leave him in the room by himself. He knows he's being recorded.
He starts saying all this odd stuff. I want to play some more edited portions that did not make it into the hour.
I know the cops twisted little pathetic rule game.

And actually,

sometimes I like to think that I

invented the rule book.

Now, I'm not

exactly bragging, but

cops like to twist

evidence.

I use reverse psychology,

which makes

Thank you. conflict to twist evidence.
I use reverse psychology. Which makes me be able to make you think it's not Gavin, but in fact your own kid.
By reverse psychology. Making you look like the lunatic.
So we can play it the easy way or the hard way. So I'm curious about what investigators, you know, made of this.
Did they think he was, this was him or he's putting on a character? He's using reverse psychology. Like what, what do you make of? You know, you can only imagine, you know, that the detectives told me that they were all outside in sort of a conference room area.
And the minute he, you know, Russell starts talking to the camera and putting on what they called like a show, they all stopped and were watching. And it was like a monologue to the camera.
And so it was very bizarre behavior. That video actually got released on YouTube and had gone viral after the fact.
But that said, Russell had given them so much information at that point. And you could see he is a talker and he likes to tell people what he knows.
And so he was really helpful to the police early on in their investigation and allowed them then to use what he was telling them to go back to Gavin and to go back to Ellie to get their sides of the story as well on, you know, what happened that morning and in the aftermath after they had killed Aaron Fryer. I couldn't figure out if this was an act he was putting on or if he really is this kind of character.
It almost seemed like it was like the Joker out of the Batman movie or something, just the way he was talking. Absolutely, absolutely.
But while he's kind of, you know, doing this one-man show in the interrogation room by himself, Ellie is also being questioned. She's being interviewed by Detective Stephanie Jackson.
But this interrogation goes on for quite a long time. It's 10 hours long.
Ellie's mother, Maggie, says that no one told her that her child was in custody. I was surprised that this was permitted.
I always was under the impression that an adult that was in some way representing the minor needs to be there, whether it's a parent or even somebody from the court. I don't know.
But I guess this was OK. Yes, in the state of Oregon, it is legal to interview a minor like that.

Police, the fact that they didn't let her mom know that she was okay, Maggie Fryer was very upset about that. I mean, she said, you know, at the point when she made the 911 call to first alert police to the situation, she reported Ellie and Aaron as missing.
And so as the day went on, she told us that nobody ever called to tell her that we at least have Ellie in custody. And Elisa Kaplan, who is Ellie's defense attorney now, believes it was excessive that they allowed this interrogation to go on for 10 hours.
You see Ellie a couple of times saying she's tired, she's yawning, she wants to lay down. They, in fact, bring her a blanket and they put it on the floor.
Kaplan points out that this is a 15-year-old who at one point even says, I don't want to talk, but then the police managed to get her to keep talking. So Kaplan says, you know, there are some issues with the way she was interrogated that this is just a child.
And, you know, she should have been given a little more time and perhaps had a representative or an attorney present when she was questioned. Yeah, I mean, I kind of have to admit that I feel the same way.
And maybe it's because I'm a mom and my kid's 14. But then I also thought like the officer that is questioning her.
She's a woman. And I was actually kind of watching her approach.
And I thought, geez, this is this is a really good approach. She's trained to talk to children.
I should point that out. Stephanie Jackson has all,

you know, the right credentials to be doing that kind of questioning. The other thing we should

point out, Stephanie Jackson recognized early on that Ellie was lying through a lot of the

interrogation. Ellie, from the start, when they asked her, what's your name? Is your name Ellie

Fryer? She was like, no. She said she was older than she actually was.
She said she was 18. So she did lie a couple of times.
So that didn't help her situation. Because that does come up in the hour, like several times, like people repeating over and over again.
But she lied so much. And I started to wonder if I was missing things that were there

things that she lied about that she really didn't even need to lie about. Well, you know, in the beginning, she pretended she had no idea what had happened and said she was just walking around with her friends and pretended she was concerned about her father.
So she denied a lot in the beginning, and she was lying from the start, according to the police.

So Aliza Kaplan says, though, you can... So she denied a lot in the beginning and she was lying from the start, according to the police.

So Aliza Kaplan says, though, you can explain those lies away because here is a 15-year-old girl looking across at the desk at a police officer, which could be very intimidating.

And this is a girl, Kaplan says, who was scared she had been caught.

Well, ultimately, all three are charged with Aaron's murder, and they took plea deals. Gavin McFarlane pleaded guilty to murder and murder conspiracy charges.
He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Russell Jones entered a no-contest plea to conspiracy to commit murder.
He was sentenced to 15 years. And Ellie Fryer pleaded guilty to an adult charge of conspiring to murder her father.
She received a 25-year sentence. In a way, I was sort of surprised that they all took plea deals.
I mean, usually when you're facing charges with such serious consequences, you know, people fight. I think they knew, though, at this point, they really didn't have a fighting chance because it was obvious that they had all, at some point, accepted responsibility and told police their roles in what happened and took the plea deal.
Well, you mentioned in the hour that Ellie has completed two master's degrees while she's been serving her sentence in a juvenile detention center. She's going to be eligible for parole in 2032.
What is her relationship like with the rest of her family at this point? Well, with her mother, Maggie Fryer, Maggie says they have a good relationship, that they talk regularly. And Maggie is an advocate for Ellie.
She believes Ellie was a victim in all of this and really believed that Ellie was abused. Her sister, Sierra, she didn't want to tell us too much.
Now, whether or not she believes Ellie's abuse claims, she said she preferred not to talk about that as well. But she said, my dad was a good dad.
And she loved him very much and thought he was a great father to her. And she and Ellie are communicating.
They talk to each other. They've been together.
There are pictures of them together. So she told us it's sort of a complicated relationship, but she still, it seems, loves her sister and chooses to have a relationship with her.
I guess, you know, family is family sometimes. And, you know, she talked about how she loved being the middle sister.
So I can understand that you can dislike what someone's done, but still love them. this is one of those stories that I think for many people,

there was. You can dislike what someone's done, but still love them.
This is one of those stories that I think for many people, there will still be a lot of questions. You know, whether or not these, you know, Ellie was too young to be interrogated, whether or not they believe her.
I think so. It's a thought-provoking hour.
And, you know, we, of course, present all the evidence that we could present on both sides. And, you know, it's just heartbreaking.
It seems like Ellie, given her situation in life, her parents were split up. You know, that destroyed her.
We know that because her sister said it, the whole family dynamic changed. That said, she was very involved in planning, if not, according to police, possibly the mastermind of this whole operation to begin with.
But Gavin and Russell were, you know, 19 and 22. They were young men who perhaps took advantage of a 15-year-old, as Elisa Kaplan points out, and maybe they were manipulating Ellie.
So it'll leave you thinking. Indeed.
Well, Natalie, I got to thank you again for joining us for Postmortem. My pleasure to be with you again.
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