Prime Suspect

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Speaker 5 Glenn Race loved video games. He was 11 years old.
It was April 22nd, 1991. He was in his house, his eyes on the screen, his hands on the game.

Speaker 5 He was utterly unaware that from this very moment, nothing in his life would ever be the same. Something was happening just outside the door.

Speaker 7 I remember looking out the peephole into the garage and seeing my parents talking.

Speaker 5 Now he looks back all these years later and struggles to remember. Did he hear something?

Speaker 8 Did he sense the trouble?

Speaker 7 Memory, just out of reach.

Speaker 5 It was too late anyway. And maybe it was better the boy not know what awful choices he and his sisters would one day be forced to make.

Speaker 5 Glenn Race and his sisters, Joanne and Caitlin, lived in a perfectly ordinary suburb, though other children might well have envied them for their neighbor, California's famous Magic Mountain.

Speaker 5 The parents he had seen through the peephole were John and Anne Race. They had been married 19 years.
He was an ex-sheriff's deputy. She, a former teacher, now a stay-at-home soccer mom.

Speaker 5 Anyone would have thought they were happy.

Speaker 5 Didn't they all have a wonderful time at Glenn's cousin's wedding just the week before he looked through the peephole? Didn't his parents dance happily together?

Speaker 5 Who could have known about the secret Anne was keeping from her unsuspecting husband?

Speaker 9 She told me that she was thinking about leaving John.

Speaker 5 Long before it happened, Anne revealed her feelings to a select few in her church women's group. Something was wrong with her marriage.

Speaker 9 She said, well,

Speaker 9 I don't feel like I love him anymore.

Speaker 9 I'm tired of his tightness. He's tight with money.

Speaker 5 This is Anne's close friend, Deanne Wood. a woman who knew Anne's organized, deliberate ways very well.

Speaker 9 Very organized, very meticulous, planned everything. She knew what she was going to do when and where she put things and I'm off looking for where did I put this, where did I put that? And she would

Speaker 9 have to where it was. Exactly.

Speaker 5 Deanne knew that in the days after the family wedding, Anne had completed a careful, secret plan to leave John Race. She'd researched their finances so she knew what she was entitled to.

Speaker 5 She'd signed a six-month lease on a condo a mile from the family home. She'd prepared for a quick and seamless departure while John was at work.

Speaker 9 She just said she was afraid of how John would react when he saw the note and saw that she was gone and some of their things were gone and the kids were gone.

Speaker 5 And now it was the afternoon of April 18th, 1991.

Speaker 5 Anne picked up the children from school. They went to the condo.

Speaker 7 I just remember it was a lot smaller place, of course.

Speaker 5 Did you have your own room?

Speaker 7 I don't remember. I don't think so.

Speaker 5 John Rice came home to a dear John letter and and an empty house and divorce papers.

Speaker 5 That night, Deanne helped the worried Anne hide her car so that John wouldn't see it parked in front of the new condo and discover where she and the kids had moved.

Speaker 5 On the 19th, Anne told Deanne she may have worried for nothing.

Speaker 9 She said he wasn't as mad as I thought. He was angry, but he only yelled a couple times.

Speaker 9 And I said, oh, okay, but I said, well, just don't let your guard down if you are still worried.

Speaker 5 Anne spent the day at the beach with her children. And later, she reluctantly agreed to meet twice with John and their pastor for counseling over the weekend.

Speaker 5 John begged Anne to return and rethink her decision to move out and file for divorce. But Anne was adamant about leaving.
Still, she didn't want to keep John from the children.

Speaker 5 And so, April 22nd, 3 p.m.,

Speaker 5 an after-school visit for John, Glenn at his video game, his mother talking to his father outside. Did you see what they looked like, whether they were angry at each other or how they were talking?

Speaker 7 I don't remember. I have pretty limited memories of that day.

Speaker 7 Looked out at the people in the front door to the garage, saw my mom in the car and my dad standing outside of the car and they were talking. And that's pretty much what I remember.

Speaker 5 That was it? Yeah.

Speaker 5 No great violent fight, nobody storming off in a huff, nobody coming in and screaming or yelling? No, no.

Speaker 5 He doesn't remember watching her pull out of the garage or drive down the street. Didn't seem very important to him at the time, though of course it was earth-shattering.

Speaker 5 Later that evening, Glenn learned from his father that his mother had decided to take suddenly a vacation. From him, from the kids, from everything.

Speaker 5 How could he know?

Speaker 12 that the view through the people

Speaker 5 would be the last time he ever laid eyes on his mother.

Speaker 7 She just left to think about things, is

Speaker 7 what I recall him saying, and that she would come back.

Speaker 5 Do you remember feeling reassured by that or

Speaker 5 upset?

Speaker 7 I believed him and

Speaker 7 went along with that, assuming she would come back at some later point from this vacation.

Speaker 5 Of course, it had been a strange week already. Perhaps this was simply more incomprehensible adult behavior, except for one thing, which even a boy of 11 knew was a very, very bad thing.

Speaker 5 Did your mom come to say goodbye?

Speaker 7 Not that I remember.

Speaker 5 You remember it seeming strange or

Speaker 5 not right?

Speaker 7 Yes,

Speaker 7 I remember it seemed strange, very much so.

Speaker 5 And so began the long, strange vacation of Anne Race

Speaker 5 and a son's painful journey to the true story of April 22nd, 1991.

Speaker 7 We all want to know the truth of what happened, especially something this important in my life.

Speaker 7 And I would like more than anything to know the truth of the situation.

Speaker 5 Since he was 11 years old, Glenn Race, along with his two sisters, had been living a truth their father told them.

Speaker 5 That on April 22nd, 1991, their mother simply left, went on vacation, never came back.

Speaker 7 I went along with that because that's my dad told me that.

Speaker 5 But why, he remembers wondering, why didn't she say goodbye? Why didn't she leave any clothes for him and his sisters to wear to school the next day?

Speaker 7 I wondered about it after the fact, but I didn't.

Speaker 7 pick up on it until.

Speaker 5 Until yeah.

Speaker 5 Still, he felt safe there with his dad, content with his dad's assurances. It was Glenn's older sister, Joanne, who got to worrying.

Speaker 5 After a week, without a word from her mother, Joanne began contacting her mother's friends and relatives. Anne's niece, Kathy Gettman, had been aware of Anne's secret plan to leave John.

Speaker 15 That was really weird. There was no way she was going to leave the kids with with him.

Speaker 17 His mommy.

Speaker 5 Amy and sister, Kathy's mom, agreed this wasn't like Anne at all. So she ensured that a missing person's report was filed.
It was 10 days now, after all.

Speaker 5 By this time, becoming very concerned, I would think.

Speaker 18 Yes, more concerned after I saw him.

Speaker 5 Saw John, that is, and found him, well, not helpful. He seemed to ration the information he had about Anne in small drips.

Speaker 18 It wasn't natural. He tells me some one day, some one day, and some another day.

Speaker 5 So the little wheels are turning into nine.

Speaker 5 And what are you thinking at that?

Speaker 18 I'm thinking something's wrong.

Speaker 5 And he had something to do with it?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 5 But I don't want to think that awful thing.

Speaker 5 Most of the world assumed the marriage was fine. But Anne's sister and niece knew better.

Speaker 18 I knew she wasn't happy.

Speaker 5 Anne complained about John's obsessive penny pinching, about his controlling behavior.

Speaker 15 He was the one bringing in the money, so I think he felt he had the control.

Speaker 20 This is how it will be spent.

Speaker 15 This is when it will be spent.

Speaker 5 Anne told her friend Deanne that she'd been hinting at divorce for at least three years, but John wouldn't have it.

Speaker 9 He said, it doesn't matter if we're dysfunctional. It's better to look good and to be married than, you know, than to have a divorce.

Speaker 8 Is that what she told you? Yeah.

Speaker 9 Image was everything to him. Image and money.
Those two things were everything to him.

Speaker 5 Which is why Anne was determined to keep John from discovering her plan to leave him. She was afraid he'd try something to stop her.

Speaker 5 And so when Deanne heard that Anne had gone missing, the reaction seemed to come right out of her gut. And I said, oh my God, John killed her.

Speaker 5 Had he? By May 13, 21 days since Glenn and his sisters had last seen their mother, it was clear to both Amy and the local police that a missing person's investigation wasn't enough anymore.

Speaker 5 It had to be something much more serious, which is how these two got involved.

Speaker 12 We came in late. Missing persons came in late.

Speaker 5 Frank Salerno and Louis the Hat Danoff were veteran homicide detectives with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. They'd seen and solved some of the toughest cases in L.A.
history.

Speaker 5 The Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler. Just how tough could this case in the suburbs be?

Speaker 13 Valencia is kind of like, you know, a place that doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 12 It's sort of crime-free, you know, affluent, this thing and that.

Speaker 5 The detectives met with Anne's husband, John Race, who told them what he'd already told his kids and Anne's family. What was his story initially?

Speaker 8 The story was that

Speaker 8 they were going through a divorce, that she agreed to go away and think about it, that he was giving her

Speaker 8 a total of $25,000,

Speaker 8 and that she left. As simple as that.

Speaker 5 Well, not quite that simple. John Race told detectives he met Anne twice after April 22nd to give her money.

Speaker 5 He also said she called him to say she was leaving her car at an airport shuttle parking lot called the Flyaway, that she was going to leave from Los Angeles International Airport.

Speaker 5 The only thing she didn't say, John told them, is where she was going.

Speaker 8 Right away, we're thinking, wait a minute. His story does not hold any water.

Speaker 5 As they poked around for clues, Detective Danoff and Salerno felt the familiar tug of suspicion grow. And each time they talked to John Race, that feeling intensified.

Speaker 13 We could not get by him, and it was his story, and then it was all of his little mannerisms and stuff.

Speaker 5 And that's what we've been trying to do, trying to get beyond you.

Speaker 22 Get somewhere else.

Speaker 5 Go on to some, you know.

Speaker 6 That's all we're trying to do. We're trying to locate your wife.

Speaker 22 Carry beyond you?

Speaker 22 No.

Speaker 7 Okay, what else do I have to do?

Speaker 22 I don't know if I should be worried about Anne or mad at her when she comes back.

Speaker 13 He's saying the right words.

Speaker 5 I love her. I want her back.

Speaker 13 I'm a good husband. I'm a good father.
But his body is basically saying, where are you guys going next?

Speaker 13 What are you going to do? Why do you need to do that?

Speaker 5 And a person doesn't do that unless he's trying to hide something.

Speaker 13 I got a deputy sheriff.

Speaker 12 That's basically playing a game with us, with me.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 trying to beat you in your head.

Speaker 13 He's playing his game, and it's definitely a chess game.

Speaker 22 John, all we're after is the truth. The truth is, the truth, I didn't do anything improper, and I want Ann back.
I'll do anything to get Ann back.

Speaker 22 And you gave me two choices, John.

Speaker 17 I gave you one.

Speaker 22 I know in my mind I didn't do anything improper.

Speaker 22 Okay, then, John,

Speaker 5 you are, in fact, a hidden.

Speaker 5 These were two supremely experienced detectives. They were sure they had their man.

Speaker 8 There's no doubt he killed her. What happened? Did he follow her? Was he able to get into her car? Was able to say, Can we talk five more minutes? Can you get into my car?

Speaker 5 Who knows?

Speaker 5 But without evidence, the investigators' match of wits and facts with John Brace remained to draw. Did John kill Anne?

Speaker 5 And if not, where was she?

Speaker 20 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 20 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 20 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 20 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 7 He said that she

Speaker 7 left us and

Speaker 7 went to start a new life or something to that effect.

Speaker 5 At the age of 11, Glenn Race became a motherless boy, abandoned, or so his dad told him. What was a boy to think?

Speaker 5 He would have been appalled to know what detectives now believe, that by the time the sun set on April 22nd, 1991, it was almost certain that Anne Race was dead.

Speaker 5 And Glenn Race's father was their only suspect.

Speaker 8 We couldn't get by the guy that's closest to the victim, and that is the husband.

Speaker 5 John Race, an ex-deputy sheriff, had never wavered from his story that the only mystery about his wife's disappearance was where she was vacationing, which to Salerno and Danoff made no sense at all.

Speaker 8 Went against everything we learned about her. She didn't travel alone.
She always let people know where she was. Everything he told us went against her life patterns.

Speaker 5 She was a woman of precise organization and preparation. Unbelievably organized.

Speaker 5 The detectives discovered that Anne had left a roadmap of her life. an amazing paper trail of detailed calendars, notes, lists for her everyday activities and future plans.

Speaker 5 And they also found a letter, which arrived after she disappeared, from a guy named Bob. A desperate plea from a worried man who wasn't her husband.

Speaker 5 Bob, the detectives learned, was an old high school friend of Anne's. They'd been writing to each other for more than a year, sometimes almost every day.

Speaker 5 Then, suddenly, in late April 1991, her letters suddenly stopped.

Speaker 5 The detectives tried to check out the clues an unworried John offered about his wife's movements, and they became increasingly suspicious.

Speaker 5 Clue number one, John told them he met Anne twice after her departure to give her money, both times at local eateries. And

Speaker 5 not a soul could remember seeing either one of them in either restaurant. Clue number two, John said he moved Anne's car into the shade at the flyaway parking lot.

Speaker 5 Really? At the time, there wasn't a single shade tree in the entire lot. Clue number three, Anne supposedly parked the car there on Thursday morning, almost three days after she left John.

Speaker 5 But here's the thing. They call it the flyaway because a shuttle from there takes you directly to your flight at L.A.

Speaker 5 Airport, and yet John claimed Anne did not call him from the payphone at the airport until the next day.

Speaker 5 If she parked at the flyaway on Thursday, why didn't she call from the airport until Friday?

Speaker 5 And clue clue number four, if she left John on Monday, but didn't leave town until Friday, where did she sleep? Certainly not at the condo. When the cops got there, they found a life interrupted.

Speaker 5 A bag of groceries purchased Monday, April 22nd, remained untouched. The crust for the pizza the kids said she'd promised them that night was sitting on the counter.

Speaker 5 Her clothes, makeup, passport were all there, untouched.

Speaker 8 So there was all these little things, and that's what makes a circumstantial case.

Speaker 5 By itself, that doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 8 But when you start adding up 15, 20, 30, 50 of those inconsistencies, that's what makes the case.

Speaker 8 And it makes it, you know, unbelievable what he's saying and believable that her life ceased on the 22nd of April.

Speaker 5 So there was enough circumstantial evidence to implicate John Race in the disappearance of his wife. In fact, the detectives assumed it was murder.
But you know what they say about assumptions.

Speaker 5 Besides, one of them had been burned before in a major circumstantial no-body case. A jury acquitted.
And when the body was found, well, it was too late. Double jeopardy applied.
A killer walked.

Speaker 5 So this time around, the detectives decided to keep their heads down and go on looking for Anne Race.

Speaker 5 Must have driven you crazy wondering where that body was.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah. We did a lot of searches and really didn't have any idea as to which way to go or where to really start looking.

Speaker 5 And Sister Amy, meanwhile, fumed, convinced John was getting away with murder.

Speaker 18 He'd always say, I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong.
I would say, where is she?

Speaker 18 He says, I don't know.

Speaker 5 And all the while in their hillside suburb, in the months and then years after Anne vanished, an elephant grew in the family room, about which silence.

Speaker 5 Glenn's older sister, Joanne, harbored dark thoughts about what her father might have done. His younger sister, Caitlin, embraced her father's story as unassailable truth.
And Glenn?

Speaker 5 Well, Glenn had to live as did they all. And life with father was not bad at all.

Speaker 7 He was very devoted father.

Speaker 5 A good father.

Speaker 7 Very good father. He showed how he loved us very much.
And I think my sisters and I would all agree that he's tried very hard to support us and raise us well.

Speaker 5 Were you proud of him? Yes.

Speaker 13 Did you love him?

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 5 Once, said Glenn, he asked his father, did you do it? Did you kill her?

Speaker 13 He said, no, no, I didn't do it.

Speaker 7 And he got really sad as if disappointed that I would even ask.

Speaker 5 So Glenn didn't ask again. As for the detectives, time was an enemy.
First, Salerno retired in 1993.

Speaker 5 And for seven years, Danoff kept piling up material, but there never seemed to be enough to make his case.

Speaker 5 And then in 2001, he retired too, reports unwritten, though it never ever stopped bothering him.

Speaker 13 I stayed with it up to 2005, and then I was out of the loop.

Speaker 5 And then, under continued almost daily pressure from aunt's sister Amy Ryan and her husband Jerry, the Sheriff's Department officially reassigned the case.

Speaker 5 to Detective Dee Scott, 15 years with homicide. This was her first cold case.

Speaker 26 And I I was kind of familiar with the case only because when you work homicide, you kind of hear some of the cases that are going on.

Speaker 5 She inherited a five-drawer file cabinet of impressive notes dating back 14 years.

Speaker 26 A standard case would be one folder. In this particular case, I had a file cabinet that had five drawers worth of material that had to be reviewed.

Speaker 5 It took Detective Scott nearly eight months to decipher it all. But by April 2006, 15 years after Anne's disappearance, all that old material seemed finally to come together.

Speaker 26 It was very obvious to me that John Race was the primary suspect.

Speaker 5 There was enough evidence. Detective Scott's massive report went to a grand jury.
The verdict? An indictment against John Race.

Speaker 5 Now, would the truth finally be known?

Speaker 5 Glenn Race approached the trial of his father John in the grip of unruly emotions. You already lost one parent.
Now, the possibility was you were going to lose another one. Yeah.

Speaker 5 The only other one you had,

Speaker 5 a man you loved.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 5 He'd grown up by now, was on his own, a married man.

Speaker 5 But still, the very idea that his father may have killed his mother all those years ago and then lied with every breath since was almost too much for Glenn Race to bear.

Speaker 7 Well, that's why I wanted to go to the trial and see. Are they spewing lies or are they making things up, falsely accusing him?

Speaker 5 But who was he to believe? His two sisters, with whom he was very close, had come sorrowfully to opposing opinions. The elder, Joanne, believed their father was guilty.

Speaker 5 The younger, Caitlin, was convinced of his innocence. So was his father the enemy? Or was the DA?

Speaker 17 In a circumstantial case like this, if a jury looks at what's possible, you're going to lose.

Speaker 2 If they look at what's reasonable, you're going to win.

Speaker 5 The prosecution team, John Lewin and Beth Silverman, went in confident.

Speaker 27 The fact that so much time had passed made our case so much more powerful.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 No question. Time is on our side.
In a case like this, people don't go on 16-year vacations.

Speaker 5 But juries can be unpredictable. And after all, there was no body, nor even physical proof that a murder had occurred.

Speaker 5 And without that proof, argued John's defense attorney Phil Israel, there was no case.

Speaker 11 It's very easy to make a person look like he's not telling the truth, especially when you're talking about statements that were made 16 years ago.

Speaker 5 The defense believed, even though the case was very old, and even though John had cooperated and told the police everything he knew, there was a rush to judgment.

Speaker 11 During that 16 years, John was always a suspect. And yet, John stayed in the area.

Speaker 4 He raised a family.

Speaker 11 He did not leave.

Speaker 5 No, he did not leave. He was a model dad.

Speaker 5 But was he also a homicidal husband?

Speaker 27 The evidence will demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Anne Race is dead. She was murdered by that man

Speaker 27 more than 16 years ago.

Speaker 5 The prosecution called on 42 witnesses over 20 days.

Speaker 5 Witnesses who knew Anne Race and had nurtured their suspicions about her husband for all those years.

Speaker 14 She felt that she was being controlled by her husband, that she was

Speaker 14 being forced to do things she did not want to do.

Speaker 9 She said in the last six months that

Speaker 9 he made her have sex every night.

Speaker 15 She said that that her husband, that she was afraid her husband was going to kill her.

Speaker 5 Her pastor remembered he warned the couple not to meet alone.

Speaker 7 Because sometimes things happen when in the heat of the moment.

Speaker 5 But Anne wasn't alone when she dropped by with the children the afternoon of April 22nd, 1991.

Speaker 5 That's the day Glenn looked out the peephole and saw his parents talking, the same moment one of the neighbors claimed to have witnessed from across the street.

Speaker 11 When she left, she said she had to go because she had to go get the kids something to eat.

Speaker 28 Now on a scale of one to a hundred how sure are you that Ann told you that she had to leave to go get the kids something to eat?

Speaker 5 100.

Speaker 5 That same neighbor said he was sure he saw John following Ann a few minutes later.

Speaker 28 Did you ever see Ann race drive back?

Speaker 11 No I never did.

Speaker 5 Ann was on her way to McDonald's when she was last seen alive by that neighbor. And John followed her, said the prosecution, and killed her.

Speaker 5 And then, in the ensuing days, hid her body so well, it has never been found.

Speaker 5 To which the defense simply responded, where's the proof?

Speaker 11 They're saying that he did all these things, that he followed her, murdered her,

Speaker 11 disposed of the body, did all of these things,

Speaker 11 and nobody saw anything. I mean,

Speaker 11 it's ludicrous.

Speaker 5 Had John ever been violent? They asked.

Speaker 11 He had not been abusive. I had not witnessed any abuse.

Speaker 11 If she had said to you, John had said he was going to follow her and kill her, you would remember that.

Speaker 5 Isn't that correct?

Speaker 15 I don't remember that.

Speaker 5 The defense challenged those famous detectives when they came to the stand.

Speaker 11 In all of these searches that you conducted, did you find any physical evidence at all

Speaker 11 that tied John Brace

Speaker 11 to any sort of crime here?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 Had detectives been too quick to suspect homicide, suspect John?

Speaker 6 Did you form the opinion that John Rays followed her to McDonald's?

Speaker 13 On that particular day?

Speaker 12 Possibly. Possibly, yes.

Speaker 11 You would agree, would you not,

Speaker 11 that the fact that the call actually came from the airport

Speaker 11 was potentially, at least, corroborative information that Anne had gone on a trip.

Speaker 8 Potentially.

Speaker 5 All old evidence, long argued, much of it damning, but all of it circumstantial.

Speaker 5 All questions that could sway a child's opinion one way or the other over the years, but that, as the race siblings were about to learn in painful detail, was simply not the whole story.

Speaker 5 Their mother had a secret, and it was about to be revealed in embarrassing detail. Did anyone really know Anne?

Speaker 11 You were aware that she had a boyfriend, a lover?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 11 So you really didn't know whether or not there was a sexual relationship. She never shared that with you.

Speaker 16 No, I didn't ask.

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Speaker 7 I think that it's a horrible thing to have an adulterous affair. However, I do not think it's worthy to be murdered over, you know, if that was the case.

Speaker 5 It was the secret at the heart of Anne Race's disappearance. All those years, her friends had assumed it was really more friendship than a full-blown affair.

Speaker 27 People call Robert Mason.

Speaker 5 But now Anne's children could see the of their mother's affection in court.

Speaker 5 She'd been cheating on their father with a man named Bob Russell, whom the prosecution called as a way of showing that Anne had plans. She would not simply have gone away.

Speaker 5 Bob read the last letter she wrote to him, the day she disappeared.

Speaker 14 At this point, I feel I can say to you, I'm exclusively yours. I will never have sex with John again.

Speaker 5 Bob never heard from Anne again.

Speaker 5 Of course, the children didn't either. But now in court, all three of them would have to choose between loyalty to their father and the memory of their mother.

Speaker 27 We went round and round on the issue of subjecting the kids to anything more in terms of the harm that they had already endured.

Speaker 5 It couldn't be avoided. They would take the stand.
But could they agree?

Speaker 27 Even after all these years, do you still love your mother?

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 27 And even after everything, do you still love your father?

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 27 And do you feel devoted to your father?

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 5 Joanne was the prosecution's star witness, or so they hoped. She was the eldest.
She had the clearest recollection.

Speaker 5 Her discomfort was obvious.

Speaker 5 But she told her secrets. How she knew, for example, her mother would leave her father a year before it happened.

Speaker 5 How careful and quiet the planning had been.

Speaker 15 She did not want me to tell my dad

Speaker 15 because he might do something.

Speaker 5 And then on that fateful Monday afternoon, she said her mother went to buy food at McDonald's. And she waited and waited for her mother's return.

Speaker 5 And instead, it was her father who came back with stone-cold French fries for the children.

Speaker 27 Did your mother ever come back to you?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 27 Did you ever ask your father at that point in time?

Speaker 27 you know, where's mom?

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 27 And what was the response?

Speaker 20 She went away to think.

Speaker 5 But Joanne was, remember, 14 years old. She knew her mother, and she was no dummy.

Speaker 27 My question is, did you believe your father?

Speaker 5 Did your mama go on a trip?

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 5 In the years since, she said, her father accused Anne of abandoning Joanne and her siblings.

Speaker 5 The others may have believed him, but not Joanne.

Speaker 27 Can you imagine your mother, knowing her as you did,

Speaker 27 taking any sum of money to abandon her family?

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 5 And yet, saying these things here in this silent courtroom, said Joanne, was very hard.

Speaker 27 Do you remember what your father had said about your mother?

Speaker 26 He had called her a bitch and a a whore.

Speaker 5 And then it was Glenn's turn.

Speaker 28 People call Glenn a race, Your Honor.

Speaker 5 With whom would he stand? The father he loved

Speaker 5 or the sister he also loved?

Speaker 31 Are you going to be thinking with your answers how they may or may not affect your dad in terms of this case?

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 5 Glenn, it appeared, had picked aside his father's.

Speaker 31 Do you believe that you and your sisters were the center of her life?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 10 Do you think your mom is alive?

Speaker 7 I think it's possible.

Speaker 7 I can't say anything 100%

Speaker 7 because

Speaker 7 I do not know for certainty one way

Speaker 7 if she is dead.

Speaker 31 Is it fair to say that

Speaker 31 for the last 16 years

Speaker 31 you've become much closer to your father?

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 2 This was the saddest part in the whole case to me.

Speaker 31 Glenn decided that

Speaker 2 he was willing to

Speaker 2 trash his mother if it was going to help his father.

Speaker 5 Well, it turned out there was more to it than that. In the days before the trial, Glenn read the letters Ann had written all those years ago to that man,

Speaker 5 to her boyfriend Bob.

Speaker 7 I've been

Speaker 7 shown things

Speaker 7 that made me think that it might not just be

Speaker 25 put other

Speaker 7 ideas out there that I didn't know about before.

Speaker 5 The letters, there were 109 of them, were intense and sexually explicit. And John Race's lawyers decided Glenn should see them before the trial.

Speaker 7 Made me think, wow, maybe she didn't have us kids first if she's saying all this stuff.

Speaker 5 Glenn is a born-again Christian. he was struggling now.

Speaker 7 It's like, wow, she was putting her love affair with this guy before us.

Speaker 6 As you sit here today, knowing everything that you know

Speaker 6 and knowing your father, do you believe your father killed your mother?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 No further question. And then came the youngest, Caitlin Race.

Speaker 5 She had very few memories of her mother.

Speaker 15 I remember being with her when she did errands.

Speaker 26 I remember holding on to her leg.

Speaker 5 And that's it.

Speaker 5 It was obvious that Caitlin supported her father's version of events,

Speaker 5 yet was forced to reveal under cross-examination that her father had in some way paid for it.

Speaker 5 He gave me

Speaker 18 a check last month.

Speaker 20 He compensated me because I quit my job so I could be here.

Speaker 31 What you're basically saying is your dad's paying you to come to court.

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 5 But like her brother Glenn, Caitlin Rayes had another reason for having doubts about her father's guilt.

Speaker 15 I've read letters that my mom's written to Bob Russell.

Speaker 5 And now

Speaker 5 it was, she said,

Speaker 5 complicated.

Speaker 28 As you sit here today, is it your testimony that you believe that based on the relationship that you had with your mother, that she voluntarily abandoned you?

Speaker 15 To this day, I don't know.

Speaker 5 And with the testimony completed, the defense rested, having presented not one word from John Race, who remained through the entire trial silent.

Speaker 5 Tell him.

Speaker 27 Tell him that this 16-year charade is over. It ends here.
Anne Race was murdered by the defendant, her husband, on April 22nd of 1991.

Speaker 11 So now we have a case. in which there is no body, no crime scene, no murder weapon, nobody saw anything.
Does that make sense to you?

Speaker 4 Why is that?

Speaker 11 The most reasonable explanation is that it didn't happen.

Speaker 5 Would the jury agree? The defendant's fate now rested with twelve strangers. Well, quietly and alone, a loving son was thinking about judgment too.

Speaker 5 By the time his father's long trial wound to its close and a jury took the case away to consider, Glenn Race had begun to feel the ground shift beneath his feet.

Speaker 5 Those 12 strangers would have their way, of course, but Glenn was a jury of one.

Speaker 7 My dad and the prosecution put everything on the table so that I could finally see both sides of the story.

Speaker 5 See who was right.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so I had all of the pieces to work with, finally.

Speaker 5 And now he would deliberate and wait, just like everybody, for the jurors, four of whom sat down with Dateline.

Speaker 18 How could this possibly be that someone could possibly be guilty of killing someone and there is no body?

Speaker 5 It was, as they all realized too well, a very strange case, which began with an open question. Was Anne Race alive or dead?

Speaker 16 There was no equivocation. I think that every single juror believed that she died.

Speaker 8 That was the easy part.

Speaker 5 The question answered, they went slogging through the long and entirely circumstantial case. And it wasn't easy.

Speaker 18 Too many witnesses, too much evidence.

Speaker 5 But they took the final vote. And

Speaker 15 the actual vote was unanimous. We, the jury, in the brotherhood of action, find the defendant, John Race, guilty of the trial of murder.

Speaker 5 The evidence was enough to convince the jurors it was murder in the first degree.

Speaker 5 But Glenn?

Speaker 5 Glenn's jury of one was still out.

Speaker 7 For those 16 years, I felt he was innocent. It was hard to hear, you know, and hard to see him walking out of that courtroom.

Speaker 5 Weeks later, at his father's sentencing, Glenn was still undecided. His father listened to Ann's family finally have their say in court.

Speaker 18 For 16 years, John was free. Well, his free days were over.

Speaker 18 I wish we could add those 16 years to his sentence.

Speaker 5 Glenn continued to waver as an angry prosecutor goaded his father into breaking his silence.

Speaker 31 Be a man and stand up and admit what I've done.

Speaker 13 Your Honor, I did not kill my wife.

Speaker 11 When I parked the car, when...

Speaker 5 It was his own attorney who cut him off at mid-sentence. What he was about to say, we'll never know.

Speaker 5 You are a murderer.

Speaker 5 How tragic.

Speaker 1 Then in a census state prison for the term prescribed by law, which in this case is 25 years to life.

Speaker 5 Anne's children struggled with the truth, each in his or her own way. Caitlin in her father's corner, Joanne the sad finality of bitter victory.

Speaker 5 and Glenn needing something to break the deadlock in his heart.

Speaker 7 Pardon me really would love for there to be

Speaker 7 golden bullet out there that shows that he didn't do it somehow.

Speaker 5 Perhaps there was. Glenn, an engineer and self-styled numbers man, created one, a chart, weighing the odds.
Could his father really be innocent? That, Glenn decided, was a long shot.

Speaker 7 What are the chances? You know, it's not like it's 100 to 1 anymore. It's more like a million to one.
And, you know, it's not reasonable.

Speaker 5 If you were on that jury, what would you have done?

Speaker 7 I would have said guilty.

Speaker 5 And so Glenn went to see his father in jail to tell him with certainty the one thing he could not before.

Speaker 7 And I feel he is guilty.

Speaker 5 Did you look at him when you said that? Yes.

Speaker 5 How did he react?

Speaker 7 He was upset and sad, kind of like how I asked him point blank years earlier if he killed my mom. The same kind of just upset.

Speaker 5 And so he left. The last question rattling around unanswered in his head.
Where was Anne?

Speaker 7 My dad

Speaker 7 knows where she is and it's up to him to share,

Speaker 7 you know, where her body is. Tell us that to

Speaker 7 put this whole murder finally to rest.

Speaker 5 Not his to know yet. Maybe not ever.

Speaker 7 Weird thing, actually, I had a dream about her and that she came back. But I remember asking her, like, why did you go? And she just said, oh, I was scared to come back home.

Speaker 7 It was just a dream, but it's funny. I think something in me definitely misses her a lot.

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