A Deadly Path - Part 2 (Justis Marie Garrett)

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Speaker 6 Previously on Anatomy of Murder, a preliminary investigation revealed that these were the human remains of a female.

Speaker 6 The identity and the race of the female could not be determined at this time, nor was it apparent to any of our investigators what caused her death.

Speaker 4 She confronts him. Essentially, my daughter's been missing for weeks and you're lying.
And that was the last time Danielle spoke to Bobby.

Speaker 4 And when you put it all together, and you see all the messages over those several weeks, and when you find out what he knew and what danielle must have been feeling knowing her daughter's missing it adds an entire layer of depravity that i've never seen in any other case

Speaker 1 i'm scott weinberger investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

Speaker 5 I'm Anasega Nicolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

Speaker 1 And this is Anatomy of Murder.

Speaker 1 We just want to give you a reminder, this is the second part of a two-part story. So if you haven't listened to part one, go back and listen to that first.

Speaker 5 In April of 2018, the body of 16-year-old Justice Marie Garrett was found in the woods of DeLand, Florida.

Speaker 5 She had been reported missing when she she didn't show up for school after catching a ride with her mother's boyfriend, Robert Kern.

Speaker 1 When police interviewed Kern, he claimed that Justice wanted to skip school.

Speaker 1 Kern agreed not to tell her mother, Danielle, and instead of driving her to school, he said he dropped her off somewhere else where she would be meeting friends.

Speaker 5 But police were suspicious of Kern and with good reason. He hadn't told anyone for weeks that he had not dropped off Justice at her school, even as he helped her family and friends in the search.

Speaker 5 There was also his phone data, which police had subpoenaed. It showed that on the morning Justice went missing, Kern had driven directly to the area where her body was ultimately found.

Speaker 1 Was it just coincidence or something more? When police dug deeper into Kern's phone data, they noticed another visit to the same area. This one took place three days after Justice went missing.

Speaker 1 Here is Assistant State Attorney Megan Upchurch of Florida's 7th Judicial Circuit.

Speaker 4 So at that point, we knew he had gone to a location where the body was found before anyone knew there was a body there.

Speaker 4 The only person that would know what was there is the person who put the body there.

Speaker 5 You know, Scott, it definitely is odd, the idea, if you want to look at this, whether from an innocent standpoint or something more sinister. Why go back to that same area?

Speaker 5 And for me, I automatically go to that you would be looking to see if you had covered tracks.

Speaker 1 I do believe there's enough forensic research on Asega that talks about offenders returning to the scene of the crime for, let's just say, the thrill of it.

Speaker 1 And there's also cases, of course, where the offender returns back where, let's say, a body is dumped hastily and they want to start questioning whether they may have left any evidence that could point back to them, especially sort of DNA forensics.

Speaker 1 And that gives them an opportunity potentially to discard the evidence before the body may be located. So I think it could go both ways.

Speaker 5 And with respect to this case and Kern's phone, his phone had stayed in that location for over an hour.

Speaker 5 Now, Kern worked as a handyman a job that required regular travel, but the fact that he was in this area where Justice's body was found, not once, but twice, right around the time of her disappearance, was raising alarm bells with police.

Speaker 1 Now, a month before, they had confronted Kern with the location data they had obtained from Justice's phone, showing she had never went in the direction of her school.

Speaker 1 That conversation led to Kern admitting that he hadn't taken her to school.

Speaker 1 Now he was claiming that he had helped Justice skip school and taken her to meet up with her friends instead of dropping her off at her high school on that day.

Speaker 5 Investigators decided it was time to confront him using information they had gained from his phone. In June of 2018, police approached Kern at his home and he agreed to speak with them.

Speaker 1 They asked him about the woods where Justice was found and if he had ever been there before.

Speaker 4 They learned through that conversation that he did have familiarity with those woods. He admitted to having been there before and knowing the area.

Speaker 4 He had been from that area and had lived there as well.

Speaker 1 Kern also said he had several clients in that general area. While he couldn't recall specifics, he told police that work had taken him there the morning Justice went missing.

Speaker 4 Each time he was confronted with another piece of information that showed that his statement didn't make sense, he came up with something new to try to explain it. Oh, I had a job out there.

Speaker 4 Oh, I had to go do an estimate over here. And he used the transient nature of his work to try to explain why his phone would have been showing there.

Speaker 5 Police wanted specifics. When the questioning got more pointed, Kern challenged the phone data the police were citing.

Speaker 1 You know what? It's understandable that many people don't realize that a phone is constantly pinging towers in whatever area they may be in, even when the phone is idle.

Speaker 1 The geolocating data of a phone can be very specific depending on the number of cell towers and proximity of a phone to those towers. And Anasega, I have said this so many times.

Speaker 1 You know, over the years, this type of evidence has become law enforcement's secret weapon because of the fact that most people always have their phones on them, right?

Speaker 1 And those phones were always searching for a signal. And that's the way that, as you know, smartphones are set, constantly searching for the best connection to the closest tower.

Speaker 5 And you know, while Kern tried to challenge what he was being presented with by police, they stood by the data and said, You can say whatever you want, but we have proof from the records we've obtained from your phone.

Speaker 4 He stayed there for over an hour. We had over 300 points over that period of time that had him pinging in that area.

Speaker 1 When Kern didn't like the answers he was getting, he said he didn't trust the data and ended the interview right there.

Speaker 5 The information provided by his phone was compelling and painted a picture that was suspect to say the least. But it was only a theoretical picture of what happened to Justice.

Speaker 1 In order to have a prosecutable case, investigators really still had a long way to go.

Speaker 4 It's really just the beginning because there was no apparent way to determine how she died.

Speaker 1 If you recall in part one, Justice's body was taken to a special lab that examines skeletal remains because there was a significant amount of tissue missing from the upper half of her body.

Speaker 4 Well, what was strange about the differential decomposition of the body was how much tissue was still present in the bottom portion of the body and how it was almost completely missing from the top portion of the body.

Speaker 5 The state of her body made it almost impossible to tell if there were any recent injuries, like a stab wound or a gunshot wound, which would have pointed to a cause of death.

Speaker 4 So it was a little unclear because the body wasn't complete. Animal activity had taken some pieces and parts of it.
Like for instance, there was no hyoid bone.

Speaker 4 So we weren't able to use that to determine cause of death and the like. In fact, we didn't have a cause of death in this case.

Speaker 5 And you know, Scott, we have talked about this multiple times before.

Speaker 5 While it's definitely a challenge when prosecutors can't point to an actual cause of death, here, the way that justice was found, and there were many indicators that clearly they can rule this a homicide, even if they don't know specific means.

Speaker 5 But it definitely is another hurdle that in this case, they're already up against so many.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I see it really as a technicality in a sense, because you clearly see the injuries in this case and where her body was left, and you clearly know this is a homicide.

Speaker 1 And so at this point in the investigation, there were more unknowns than knowns.

Speaker 4 When you have a body in the state of decomposition as severe as this one, you are lacking information about what happened and how this person died.

Speaker 5 There was no direct evidence tying Kern to Justice's murder, but the circumstantial evidence was hard to ignore. He had lied about dropping her off at school.

Speaker 5 He continued to lie for weeks after Justice went missing. His phone data showed that his phone and Justice's had traveled together directly to the area where her body was eventually found.

Speaker 5 The phone data also showed that he returned to that same area just a few days later, when her body was still there and had not yet been discovered.

Speaker 1 With no other major leads, investigators continued to press forward in this case.

Speaker 4 I think what had to be done was you had to almost confirm that no one else in her life could have been a part of this so that you could point the finger at Bobby and say he did this.

Speaker 1 There was other evidence that continued to point investigators in the direction of Kern. One area they focused on was Kern's car, which had been seized following his second interview with police.

Speaker 1 In that car, they had found a cell phone.

Speaker 4 But we found during the search warrant of his vehicle an old phone that he had used just prior to the phone that he factory reset. It had a cracked screen.
We could not get it functional.

Speaker 5 There was also a pair of sweatpants that were stained.

Speaker 4 And when you held the pants up, there were markings on the bottom of the pants that appeared to be discoloration.

Speaker 4 that could have come from bleach and it was splattered in such a way that one could argue he was wearing those pants, standing over the body, and pouring the bleach, and then some of it was splattering onto his pants.

Speaker 1 The sweatpants alone would have not meant much, but the pants had been bleached. And Kern's cell data showed that he had visited the site where she was found before her body was discovered.

Speaker 1 What appeared to be a potential bleach stain on Justice and also now Kern's pants was something that could not be ignored. Investigators began to develop a theory.

Speaker 4 And we believe that's when he was conducting forensic countermeasures with bleach

Speaker 4 to try to get rid of any biological or DNA evidence that he may have left behind.

Speaker 4 It made sense that, and this was a theory again, if at that point in the process, he went back a few days later, pulled the pants down, poured bleach on those areas of the waist down,

Speaker 4 it would have helped to explain the differential decomposition.

Speaker 5 They continued to build on this theory over the course of nearly eight months.

Speaker 4 It was almost like law enforcement did such a thorough, massive investigation that we had a ton of information, but it was unclear what was important and how it all fit together.

Speaker 5 Police believed that Kern was responsible for Justice's death, but their beliefs needed to be backed up by evidence.

Speaker 5 While they continued to work on the case, investigators wanted to speak to Kern one more time and see if his story would once again change.

Speaker 1 There was one problem. In the months that had passed, Kern had left Florida and moved to New York.
In February of 2019, police got a break.

Speaker 1 Kern was arrested in New York, but for an entirely different crime.

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Speaker 5 An arrest warrant had been put out for Robert Kern by investigators in Volusha County, Florida for his alleged involvement in a gambling fraud ring.

Speaker 4 So, the FDLE agent and an investigator from our office traveled up there to speak to him.

Speaker 4 They had been doing a corollary investigation into something separate regarding fraud, something with gambling, and were able to make a case involving that charge since the murder investigation was so long-term and had some difficulties with it.

Speaker 1 After he was arrested, officers sat down to talk to Kern about the fraud, at least at first, but then the conversation turned to justice.

Speaker 4 And he's being held for extradition, and they're able to do a really extensive interview with him to try to get, you know, more information and see if he sticks to his story or what he says when he's confronted with additional evidence.

Speaker 5 About 40 minutes into the interview, they began began to pivot the conversation towards Justice's murder. Here's a portion of that conversation.

Speaker 5 We've been racking our brains about this whole thing for a year, and we're coming up on almost a year. I know we've talked about this a lot, you know, at the length and everything.

Speaker 5 And you provide a lot of facts that has helped us kind of sort through everything.

Speaker 1 They began to have Kern once again walk them through the timeline that led to that point, starting with the morning justice went missing.

Speaker 3 The morning that you're supposed to be taking justice to school, but she doesn't want to go to school. Did you say that you and her went to the convenience store first? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 And then you dropped her off at the Haven in the area of Haven bus stop?

Speaker 3 Why didn't you just leave her at the convenience store and have her friend pick her up there? I was originally supposed to take her back

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 Bay and Miss Air. She was folks, you wanted me to get dropped up here? I think I went to get cigarettes or whatever.
So I just went there first.

Speaker 5 Kern said after he dropped off justice, he did some contractor work, though he couldn't recall the exact details. Later, he went to the bus stop to pick her up after school.

Speaker 5 When Justice didn't get off the bus or show up at the bus stop, he and Danielle had hit the streets trying to find her.

Speaker 8 We talked about you and Danielle were putting the flyers all over and beat rank. How long and how often did you do that for?

Speaker 8 I think each a week or so.

Speaker 1 But that whole time, Kern had known that Justice never went to school that day because he hadn't taken her there. Investigators wanted to know why he had kept that information to himself.

Speaker 8 My question is, why didn't you tell Danielle Justice's plan was to not go to school that day?

Speaker 8 After everything was said and done,

Speaker 8 I

Speaker 8 damn great.

Speaker 8 Well, I don't understand understand what you mean by that.

Speaker 8 After, you know, everything was, like,

Speaker 8 happened, you know, where she didn't come back and come back and come back. I was like, you know, I thought she would.

Speaker 8 Everybody thought that she was sane.

Speaker 8 There was very a lot of, like, there was a lot of kids, a lot. There's a lot of areas where she could go.

Speaker 5 Investigators began to present Kern with some of the evidence they'd collected, including a text from Justice to her mom. This is a screenshot of a technical message between Danielle and Justice.

Speaker 5 Read to about 39 out.

Speaker 5 Says, Danielle wants you to come over tomorrow on this school. Text her.
I already told her I'm not. I have to go to school.
I've been missing a lot.

Speaker 5 Okay, what date did you see there? April 11th. Okay.

Speaker 5 I know nothing about that.

Speaker 5 Well, I think that that's probably accurate because we probably wouldn't have all this conversation about her when you get school if you did know about that.

Speaker 1 Officers then presented Kern with the phone data showing his cell phone tracking alongside Justice's cell phone the morning she had disappeared.

Speaker 1 What if I told you that wasn't the only phone that did this that traveled that path that day? What if I told you that her phone was not alone when it made that route?

Speaker 1 You guys already told me that. Yeah, you told me that that night.

Speaker 8 I said, I don't know nothing about technology and the way that things work, all I know is what I did and what happened, you know,

Speaker 8 as far as I'm concerned. You know, like I told you that night, I didn't hurt that girl.
And I don't care what any of these people say.

Speaker 8 I didn't hurt them.

Speaker 5 Similarly to previous interviews, Kern deflected and made up excuses for the information he was presented with and didn't like.

Speaker 4 He confirms some of it. He tries to explain away some of it.
He tries to point the finger at other people in Justice's life. He really does everything he can to try to get the spotlight off of him.

Speaker 1 So as you would expect, investigators slowly ramped up the intensity of their conversation.

Speaker 8 And I'll say it one more time. It looks like you hurt her on purpose.
In the worst way, it caused her to, you know, caused her death.

Speaker 8 Or that

Speaker 8 it was an accident or just in the moment, something happened.

Speaker 8 I have no idea.

Speaker 5 They laid out the condition of Justice's body, including the bleached pants found around her ankles. You said something before.

Speaker 8 He said people would look at you and think you were a monster, okay,

Speaker 8 on April 13th. And you said it didn't happen like that.

Speaker 8 How did it happen then?

Speaker 8 How did it happen? Were you a monster? Or did something just get out of hand where you took this and wrapped it around her throat? How did it happen then? I didn't hurt.

Speaker 8 If you're not a monster, how did it happen?

Speaker 1 It didn't happen with me.

Speaker 8 I didn't do any of this. You said out of your own mouth.
It didn't happen like that. I misspoke them because I didn't do any of that.
It didn't happen like me doing any of this.

Speaker 8 I have nothing to do with that. I would never hurt that child.
She was a beautiful, intelligent, nice girl. I have nothing to do with this.
I didn't do this.

Speaker 8 I don't know how this happened, how all this communication and technology. I I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 You know, Anasega, this is textbook in a sense. He's offering Kern two options, and neither of them have him not being the killer.

Speaker 1 The one option is that you're cold-hearted and you're a cold-blooded killer. The other one is you're not a monster, and this may have began potentially as an accident that turned to murder.

Speaker 1 The second portion is giving him an option to see that the evidence is building, and maybe he should save himself.

Speaker 5 You know, it's always interesting to see how different investigators conduct their interviews. And there's never one size fits all in any of this.

Speaker 5 And this is, though, something that we see, Scott, as you know, like all the time. Like, first, just ask open-ended questions and then just ask over and over again.

Speaker 5 Because if you are not telling the truth, you often can't keep the various pieces straight.

Speaker 5 And from there, when they're not getting further in their questioning or what they're hoping to get, well, then they start to lay it out like piece after piece because now being pointed and showing him what they have, as you know, like sometimes people give and they tell you more from there and sometimes they don't but it's just interesting watching what we have seen happen very often in those interview rooms and seeing how it is working and in some ways not working when it comes to Kern at least not yet Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 1 Being repetitive in your questions is key because you will find those openings. Now, after three and a half hours of speaking with detectives, Kern ended the interview.

Speaker 1 But by that point, investigators had already gotten the information they believe they needed.

Speaker 4 I know his interview in New York, you know, he told many more lies, but it did at least tie him into a story.

Speaker 4 And he was saying more and more things that were able to be disproved by physical evidence.

Speaker 1 Kern was extradited from New York to Florida, where he would await trial for fraud. And during that time, investigators would keep working the evidence tying Kern to Justice's murder.

Speaker 5 One thing they focused on was the broken phone that had been seized during a search of Kern's car. It took them over a year, but they were finally able to get it working.

Speaker 5 The content of the phone revealed a detailed picture of Kern's life, including before Justice had disappeared. And it was disturbing.

Speaker 4 Once we got into the phone, and it was Homeland Security that assisted us in doing that. Once we got the data from that phone, it was his old phone that he'd stopped using a couple months prior.

Speaker 4 We got so much information that really taught us what exactly was going on psychologically in this situation with Bobby Kern.

Speaker 1 Kern's Internet Search History showed a series of searches that took place between December of 2017 and late February of 2018.

Speaker 1 They included searches for GHB, which is short for a gamma-hydroxybutyrate. It's commonly known as the date rape drug.

Speaker 1 That's because it's odorless, tasteless, and has a history of being used as a method to secretly drug and assault unsuspecting victims.

Speaker 5 The drug suppresses the central nervous system, which can lead to a temporary loss of consciousness.

Speaker 4 The educational searches that he was doing for himself were things such as GHB alternatives, are they wonder drugs of the century? Question mark.

Speaker 4 Knockout drugs, their prevalence, modes of action, and and means of detection. How much is GHB per ounce?

Speaker 4 What are the best drugs to make someone unconscious?

Speaker 1 Kern hadn't just searched for it once, he visited several websites, articles, and discussion forums, all centered around this topic.

Speaker 1 And there were other searches in his phone history that were even more alarming.

Speaker 4 He searched pornography that

Speaker 4 showed themes like daddy and daughter, themes like women being raped in the woods, and things that really matched up fearily close to what we had in front of us as far as physical evidence.

Speaker 5 The searches were horribly consistent with the facts of the case and the theory that investigators had been working to build. And there was still more that would be uncovered.

Speaker 1 Investigators had discovered an Instagram account on the phone that appeared to belong to a teenage boy.

Speaker 4 And this particular profile of this person, which we learned the photo used was one of the most widely used stock photos of a

Speaker 4 white male in a gym that is, you know, late teens, early 20s. We did a reverse image search and was able to determine that that was a very widely used stock image.

Speaker 4 And that was where we started to wonder, what is this?

Speaker 1 You know, in a matter of seconds, you can go online and find a picture and screenshot it and add it up as your profile. And that's how quick somebody can impersonate someone else.

Speaker 1 It's fairly common when someone, in most cases, a predator, is trying to come off as an equal to a teenage boy or a teenage girl.

Speaker 5 And while the image didn't match Kern, the description and the profile had notable similarities.

Speaker 4 The information on that profile were things that we had come to learn about Bobby, like that Bobby had done martial arts.

Speaker 4 Also, the person was from New York, which is where Bobby Kern was originally from. So there were little things that matched up to who Bobby was in real life.

Speaker 1 There was more. In the message history, the profile had interacted with several teenage girls, including Justice, just a few months before her death.

Speaker 4 And when we got into the actual contents of that account on the phone itself, we learned that he had been talking to Justice from that account himself from that phone

Speaker 4 and saying completely inappropriate things to her.

Speaker 5 One message sent to Justice read, you're a cutie. How old are you? Another said, talk to me, beautiful.
The messages continued for weeks and possibly longer.

Speaker 5 And all the while, Justice had no idea she was actually communicating with an adult, one that she knew, her mother's boyfriend, boyfriend, Robert Kern.

Speaker 4 If you remember, he factory reset his newer phone. So there was likely more information there.
We just weren't able to recover it. So on March 7th, 2018,

Speaker 4 which is the last confirmed date we know he was chatting with her based on what we had in front of us, that's only 37 days before the murder.

Speaker 1 And Justice wasn't the only person that the Instagram account was shown to interact with.

Speaker 4 The other way that we determined it was Bobby was that he was even talking with his own teenage daughter from that account and other young girls.

Speaker 5 This grown man was posing as a teenage boy and seeking out young girls, including those that he knew. The messages were inappropriate, dangerous, and criminal.

Speaker 5 Even thinking about it makes my stomach turn. And they showed that this man had an obsession with young girls and with justice.

Speaker 1 It was a characterization investigators had heard before when asking Justice's friends about Kern.

Speaker 4 There were some statements given to law enforcement from her friends in Volucia who stated that he was creepy, that they found him creepy, the friends.

Speaker 5 The discovery of the social media account added to the mountain of circumstantial evidence being built against Kern.

Speaker 5 And in May of 2019, 13 months after Justice was killed, he was arrested for her murder.

Speaker 1 He was charged with second-degree murder, but that was changed to first degree murder before his trial.

Speaker 1 The case against Kern was long and complicated, comprised of phone data, GPS maps, and other circumstantial evidence. Megan was certain of Kern's guilt, but would a jury agree?

Speaker 4 You know, from a legal standpoint, you wonder,

Speaker 4 is the jury going to go with me on this? I know he did this, but I'm the expert on the case. So can I relay it to them in a way that makes sense? And are they going to go with me?

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Speaker 5 The trial against Robert Kern for the murder of Justice Garrett began in August of 2022, over four years after she'd been killed.

Speaker 5 Megan had prepared for trial for months, and interestingly, she also drew on skills she had picked up from something else entirely, her time as a collegiate soccer player.

Speaker 4 I approach cases similarly to how I approached at that time my passion and the sports, as far as there's nothing else that goes above the preparation involved.

Speaker 4 And then, of course, over time, as I became more experienced, I learned the ins and outs. But I found that as long as I intended to be the most prepared in the courtroom, that I was going to be okay.

Speaker 1 It was all Megan could do for a case with this level of complexity.

Speaker 4 I think for this case, the case file was so big and so many people have been talked to and so many agencies were involved and it was such a large geographic area and timeline that I remember just studying as much as I could so I could be prepared if something came up that I needed to access.

Speaker 4 While the trial would be filled with intricate pieces of evidence, at its center would be the story story of justice's young life cut tragically short you want to do justice for the victim you want to give it your best for the family you want the community to be safe but when you think of the gravity of a 16 year old girl who won't ever get to go to college who won't ever get to see her little sister grow up it hits you in a different way

Speaker 5 The timeline that the prosecution presented at trial began months before her murder, when Kern began messaging justice anonymously on social media.

Speaker 1 The email used to create that social media account had been linked to Kern, but then it had been deleted. And the timing of that, that was significant.

Speaker 5 It had happened shortly after the press conference announcing that a body had been found in the woods of DeLand.

Speaker 4 And then the body was found on the 18th. And then the press conference was done on the 19th.
And that also became an important date because we learned that Bobby Kern deleted a Gmail

Speaker 4 account on that day right after the press conference that would have tied him to certain evidence within his phone.

Speaker 1 Kern challenged that the social media account was not his, claiming the account belonged to his nephew.

Speaker 4 We were never able to confirm that he had a nephew by that name. At one point, he said it was a teenage boy in an apartment complex where he lived that he had let use his phone.

Speaker 4 And we were never able to identify a boy by the name he gave either for that.

Speaker 5 None of his claims proved to be true.

Speaker 1 Then there was the morning of April 13th when Kern was supposed to drive justice to school. 20 minutes after leaving the house, he texted Danielle and said that he had dropped off justice.

Speaker 1 But evidence made it clear that that was not true.

Speaker 4 And when you align that with the data point on the map of where Justice's phone is on its way to Volusha County, you know at that point something was already off because he's indicating to Justice's mother that she's at school, but he's on his way to the woods.

Speaker 5 And from there, the tragically brutal picture continued to be painted in court.

Speaker 4 We believe he was driving her to the woods. And at that point, she was either unconscious, incapacitated.

Speaker 4 We don't know specifically, nor did we have to prove specifically when exactly she became incapacitated, but we do think that it began once he was on his way east.

Speaker 4 That at some point she would have realized this isn't where I'm going or supposed to be going.

Speaker 4 We do have indications that he provided her with something to drink or got her something to drink, either at the house or at a gas station.

Speaker 4 That was part of the theory, and he could have dosed her with something like Xanax, in which case she either would have been out of it or more compliant with what he was trying to do.

Speaker 1 At some point, Kern sexually assaulted Justice, even though by the time her body was found, it had been badly decomposed. There were signs of a recent injury.

Speaker 4 We know from the Pound Lab that there was some indication of a fracture on the nose. So we do think there was physical harm brought to her by Bobby Kern.

Speaker 5 During that same period of time, Kern had not responded to Danielle's calls or texts, which became the timeframe that investigators believed that the assault and murder had occurred.

Speaker 4 And the timeline became so important in this case that when he was telling her things

Speaker 4 and when he was not responding to her became evidence in the case.

Speaker 1 Then around 9.52 that morning, Kern received an incoming phone call. That call allowed investigators to see that his phone and Justice's phone were in the same place

Speaker 1 going through downtown DeLand.

Speaker 5 There was additional proof that Justice and Kern's phones worked together. Tracking side by side, two separate surveillance cameras showed Kern's SUV along the highway into land.

Speaker 5 Justice's phone also appeared in both of those locations.

Speaker 1 Megan said that at that point, Kern was likely figuring out what to do with Justice's backpack and her phone. He then powered off Justice's phone and got rid of it near Justice's high school.

Speaker 5 Later that day, when Danielle found out that her daughter was missing, she wanted to go straight to police, but it was Kern that had encouraged her not to.

Speaker 4 In addition to Bobby discouraging Danielle from going to the police, he was trying to say that justice is probably fine. She's just with her friends.
She's being a teenage girl.

Speaker 4 But Bobby was also telling Danielle, the police won't do anything for 24 hours anyways.

Speaker 4 So you might as well wait.

Speaker 1 Kern was buying time.

Speaker 4 And he hoped that with the passage of time, the body would become unidentifiable and unusable for any kind of forensic investigation.

Speaker 5 Three days later, Kern returned and the evidence points to him attempting to cover his tracks by doing the unthinkable, pouring bleach on the lower half of Justice's body.

Speaker 4 It was certainly possible that either he went back on the 16th and the pants were up until that point and then he pulled them down and bleached and that contributed to the differential decomposition of the two parts of the body.

Speaker 4 Or the bleach itself,

Speaker 4 the medical examiner was able to say, could very well have discouraged some of the animal activity on that part of the body.

Speaker 1 While he was in the area of the woods, Kern also texted with Danielle, Justice's mom.

Speaker 4 The part that made this so difficult to stomach was that during these timeframes, once we put the timeline together and we knew that he was there with that body on the 16th, he was exchanging text message communication with Danielle about justice being missing.

Speaker 4 And when you put it all together and you see all the messages over those several weeks, and when you find out what he knew and what Danielle must have been feeling knowing her daughter's missing, it adds an entire layer of depravity that I've never seen in any other case.

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Speaker 5 There was one more piece of evidence that the prosecution presented, and not the type of evidence you'd likely think of as proving such clarity in a case. It was Leaves.

Speaker 1 Her body had been found in the evening, so it was dark when crime scene technicians were processing the scene. They returned the following day to finish their work in daylight, and that was key.

Speaker 4 And they got some really great scene photographs of the area where the body was.

Speaker 4 And what they probably didn't know is they were also collecting a visual view of all the vegetation in that immediate area. And as a layperson, you're looking at it and it all looks green.

Speaker 1 But police brought in a botanist who would distinguish between the different plants and trees and break down the ecosystem in that part of the woods. He also examined the leaf found in Kern's car.

Speaker 5 And there was even more information to be revealed.

Speaker 4 There was a leaf in particular that we found in Bobby's car that was fully intact.

Speaker 4 And based on the fact that it was fully intact in its dehydrated state, the botanist was able to give an opinion that it would have been placed there close in time to when the vehicle was processed.

Speaker 4 Otherwise, it would have been completely crumpled up. If there had been movement, if he had been using that space regularly, it wouldn't have survived in that complete state.

Speaker 4 He was able to determine not DNA matches between the leaves, but that they were consistent as far as the genus of where they come from.

Speaker 1 You know, Anasiga, it began with recognizing it in a photograph and then being able to put the puzzle together, confirming, you know, like real forensic science here with a botanist to put those key elements together was really great work.

Speaker 5 And I just love always when it's something novel or the not the type of things that we're used to seeing.

Speaker 5 I mean, here we are talking about vegetation, leaves that really provided insight that is linking him to a case that is just being built on circumstantial piece after circumstantial piece.

Speaker 5 And step by step, Megan and her co-counsel presented this case to the jury.

Speaker 1 She also was deeply moved by the details of Justice's story, but she knew it was important to keep her emotions at bay until the end of the trial.

Speaker 1 And obviously in every case that's done by a talented prosecutor, that is so important.

Speaker 4 I've got to get to the end of the trial, and then I process it afterwards. I process the emotions of it afterwards.

Speaker 4 And that's really the only way I can go in there and do my job as a lawyer with with some of the most heinous things I've ever seen in this case in particular and still be able to make it through the whole week that this took.

Speaker 5 This was especially true as it came time for closing arguments.

Speaker 4 We knew because of how many pieces had to fit together that a large part of it was going to come down to closing. Because there wasn't any one part of this case that said, aha, this is it.

Speaker 4 It was really everything together that formed the basis and the theory of the case. And so going into that morning of

Speaker 4 closing,

Speaker 4 that was my thought was, okay, I've got to put the story together for the jury. That's my job.

Speaker 1 Those closing arguments in the case were presented by Chief of Homicide Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis. Here is a portion of his closing statement.

Speaker 6 What are the best drugs to make someone unconscious?

Speaker 6 Guys chloroform and a sleeping girl. Not my searches, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 5 The searches of this man sitting right here. The searches showing what his mindset was, showing what his thought process was, showing what he wanted to do to justice.

Speaker 7 He raped her. He kidnapped her.

Speaker 5 He took her into the woods.

Speaker 5 Every piece of evidence points to that.

Speaker 5 The prosecution rested their case and the jury went to deliberate. After just 30 minutes, they returned with the verdict.

Speaker 5 Robert Kern was found guilty for the first-degree murder of Justice Garrett and for evidence tampering.

Speaker 4 In Florida, it's a mandatory life sentence. So the sentence would have already been determined by the verdict.
It was just then the judge needed to pronounce sentence. So we went ahead and did that.

Speaker 4 immediately since we'd already had a week-long trial and there really was no need to delay it.

Speaker 1 While over the years, Justice's mother Danielle had been grieving over her death, over the years she had also been waiting for answers.

Speaker 4 And I think after this, she was able to really take a step back and make sure that after she grieved, that she was going to continue to be a present mother for her other children.

Speaker 4 I mean, she didn't have the choice to fall apart. She had other kids relying on her.
And so I think...

Speaker 4 The family grieving sort of brought all of them together in a certain way.

Speaker 5 While the family was satisfied with the verdict, they would never truly be happy with the outcome.

Speaker 5 The justice of the legal system could never replace the bright light that justice had been to her family.

Speaker 5 This is summed up in her obituary, which began with the line: although your wings were ready, our hearts were not.

Speaker 1 One of the core reasons we shine a light on these cases is to ensure that victims of homicide are never forgotten. Justice Marie Garrett is no exception.

Speaker 1 Her name and her spirit should serve as a moving reminder of life's fragility and the true mission to seek justice, not just within the confines of a courtroom, but within our communities where we work tirelessly to support and uplift one another each day.

Speaker 1 We owe it to justice and to all those whose lives have been tragically cut short.

Speaker 1 Her story and her untimely death urge us to strive for better, to challenge ourselves, to ask the difficult questions, even when the answers are elusive. Every life is precious.

Speaker 1 Every story deserves to be heard. I also want to take this moment to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of you in our AOM community.
Your engagement makes it clear how much these stories mean to you.

Speaker 1 We deeply appreciate the trust you place in us to tell them with respect, honoring the victims as they deserve.

Speaker 1 Our aim is to not only shed the light on these tragedies, but offer the families a space where they know people genuinely care and are interested in understanding their perspective and their pain.

Speaker 1 Your support fuels our commitment to this important work.

Speaker 5 This case is pure horror and especially tragic for many reasons. Such a young life lost.
lost so brutally. Taken by someone she should have been able to trust.

Speaker 5 It's hard not to dwell on the terror and pain. I hear an inner scream in my mind every time I think about all that this case represents, but that isn't the place we should end.

Speaker 5 Let what happened to Justice be a reminder that we need to band together and watch out over one another. Hold those you love closely.

Speaker 5 We need to protect one another, especially the young, in every way that we can. And let's not leave off by thinking of the way Justice died, but rather who she was when she lived.
She was a caregiver.

Speaker 5 She had helped care for her grandmother, who had regular seizures from the time Justice was just seven years old.

Speaker 5 She helped her mom care for a younger sister. She worked hard in school and kept up her grades.
She loved her friends. She loved her family.
And this young life should have had much, much,

Speaker 5 much more time.

Speaker 5 Next week, we will be off. Anatomy of Murder is an audio chuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.

Speaker 1 Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

Speaker 5 This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Phil Jean-Grande.

Speaker 2 So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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