Jay Durnil (2 of Hearts, Nebraska)

Hi everyone, Ashley Flowers here.

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Shop now at allmodern.com. Our card this week is Jay Durnall, the two of hearts from Nebraska.
In the spring of 1976, Jay was having an afternoon that most 11-year-old boys would dream of, hanging out with his dog, shooting his BB gun down at the river. But an encounter with someone would cut Jay's perfect day and life short.
For nearly 50 years, not only has Jay's killer gone unidentified, but Jay's story has gone virtually untold. The details of his case have been lost to time, or at least that is until our reporting team traveled to Omaha, Nebraska earlier this year and asked detectives to dust off his case file, literally, so we could review it.
And what they found will have you screaming. Out of frustration, yeah, a little, but mostly out of excitement.

Because we might have found the thing that solved this half-century-old case.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Thank you.
It was the evening of Thursday, April 29th, 1976,

and Wanda Durnall was home planning a scavenger hunt

that was set to take place in her neighborhood that weekend

as part of her housewarming party,

which was going to be a major bash. We're talking 200 plus people on the invite list.
Wanda and her 11-year-old son Jay had just moved into a new house in the Riverside Lakes community, about 10 minutes west of Omaha. And they were excited to welcome all their friends to the neighborhood that Saturday.
Around 8 p.m., Wanda was working at the kitchen table when Jay stormed in and ran upstairs to his room. Wanda isn't around anymore, but some of her words are.
In a memoir she wrote, there is a chapter about Jay. And here's a voice actor reading an excerpt.
He came back down, two steps at a time, then ran out the door. Before he disappeared, I said, Hey, Jay, wait a minute.
Where are you going? It's almost dark. Jay said his new friend had a pellet gun.
They were going to shoot cans down at the river. We lived in a gated community, so I assumed the new friend was another kid.
I said, Okay, but be back here 20 minutes before dark, okay? He said, Okay. Turned to jump on his bike, then rushed back to me.

He gave a kiss, a big hug, and said,

catch you on the flip-flop.

Wanda watched as Jay took off on his bike

with his dog Tex trotting along with him.

When 8.30 rolled around

and it was getting dark with no sign of Jay,

Wanda started to worry.

She walked outside, peered down the road that led to the river to see if she could spot her son biking toward her, but there was no sign of him. So Wanda hopped in her car and started toward the river, passing by where Jay had a treehouse.
I stepped out of the car, walked to the edge of the road and yelled. I had a yell that Jay knew was especially for him.
I used it when we were out in the country. That yell would rattle windows.
Yet, no answer. Wanda got back in her car and patrolled the neighborhood.
Even just looking for Jay's bike. But even that was nowhere to be seen.
Out of places to look, Wanda returned home thinking maybe they'd missed each other and he made it home while she was out driving. But Jay, their dog Tex, and Jay's bike were still all missing from the house.
Just then, the phone rang. I thought it must be Jay calling.
It wasn't. The call was from a friend who lived a couple of doors down from us.
When Frank asked what I was up to, I said, looking for Jay. Frank told Wanda he'd seen Jay go by earlier on his bike, headed toward the river with texts right by his side.
He figured Jay was just being a kid, losing track of time in one of his favorite places. But he wasn't going to leave Wanda to figure it out on her own.
Frank offered to pick her up and go out for another search around

the neighborhood. But Frank soon came to learn that maybe every bit of Wanda's panic was warranted because no one else in the neighborhood that they spoke to recalled seeing Jay.
And there was the briefest moment of relief when they got back to the house and realized Tex was there, paws all wet like he'd been down by the river.

But when they realized Jay wasn't with him,

they knew... they got back to the house and realized Tex was there, paws all wet like he'd been down by the

river. But when they realized Jay wasn't with him, they knew this was actually a terrible sign, and Wanda decided it was time to call police.
According to her book, Douglas County Sheriff's deputies arrived at 10.30 that night to take down a description of Jay, and they said that they would be back in the morning with search dogs. A small brief on page 8 of the Omaha World Herald appeared the next morning with the headline, Missing Boy Being Sought by River.
In it, deputies stated they had no reason to suspect foul play, and they said volunteer firefighters would be out that day searching the banks of the Elkhorn River. Here's Douglas County Captain Eric Sellers, who sat down with our reporting team to discuss Jay's case.
I believe that they did a visual search of the river river bank, and then a more thorough search was done looking for the bike. I did read one report where they were throwing in lines with a hook on it to see if they can find the bike.

After finding nothing in the river that first morning, searchers started spreading out,

looking in fields and woods that surrounded the Riverside Lakes neighborhood.

Eventually, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office even put up a helicopter and started an aerial search.

By Friday afternoon, Wanda was beside herself. Even Tex knew something was wrong.
The dog just sat outside Jay's bedroom door, crying like he was having all the same intrusive thoughts Wanda was about where her son could be and who might have him. That was the first and only time I cried.
I realized I was feeling sorry for myself. The most important thing was Jay and his whereabouts.
I needed to make phone calls, first to my banker, then my accountant. I wanted to raise as much money as I could in case of a demand for ransom.
A ransom demand never came. But according to reporting in the Omaha World-Herald, Wanda did end up offering a reward of $5,000 cash for Jay's safe return.
The next call Wanda made was to her ex-husband Jerry, who lived in Leawood, Kansas. One of the theories police had early on was that maybe Jay ran off to his dad's house in Kansas.
But Wanda wrote in her memoir that she showed detectives Jay's bedroom, and all his money and belongings were accounted for. I said, Detective Jim, you went through Jay's room.
He keeps bills under money and grain in his encyclopedia. He also keeps loose change under his mattress.
If he's going to run away, he would at least cop one of my credit cards and leave when I drop him off at school. Still, she called Jerry anyway.
I called Jerry, Jay's dad, to see if by some strange reason Jay had taken a plane to Jerry's place. Jerry made a heated remark that I'm sure he regretted.
I hung up the phone. I was directing my energies at finding Jay.
I was not going to defend myself to anyone at this point. Jerry might not have been much help in that moment, but others in Wanda's life surrounded her.
People like her life coach, Sue, and other friends gathered at her house to help. One of her friends even called all the people who'd RSVP'd to that housewarming party to let them know that the party was off, but searches for Jay were underway.
And then yet another friend sat in a chair by the phone all day and all night so Wanda could get some sleep. Now, despite the extensive searches for Jay, Wanda wrote that the Douglas County Sheriff's Office wouldn't take an official missing persons report for 72 hours.
So on Saturday, around the 48-hour mark,

she hired a private investigator.

I told detectives I would make a deal

with the devil himself to have my boy back,

alive and well.

I was going to pursue every avenue I could.

By this point, Wanda was convinced

her son had been kidnapped.

She told a Herald reporter that weekend

that Jay would go to the river almost every night to shoot cans and hang out at his treehouse. She said Jay was a strong swimmer and that the Elkhorn River was slow moving, swatting away the idea that Jay might have fallen in and drowned.
She pleaded with people to be on the lookout for Jay's 20-inch blue bike with new knobby tires and one broken pedal. Wanda also said she had seen a middle-aged man with long hair driving a blue car near Riverside Lakes on Thursday night.
And she asked anyone familiar with a person of that description to call the sheriff's office. Maybe that man was a witness to something.
Or maybe he was who Jay had gone to meet. It hadn't occurred to her before that Jay's new friend might not be someone his own age.
But if someone had been grooming him, that would make the most sense. Especially because when she thought about Tex, who was a 120-pound dog, Wanda told the World Herald, quote, if anyone had tried to take him by force, Tex would have torn them apart.
Whoever the man was, he didn't come forward that weekend. And on Monday, searches started once again in the Elkhorn River.
And that's where they found their first clue.

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On Monday afternoon,

search teams found Jay's bike in the Elkhorn River near a bridge not too far from where Jay liked to hang out. Oddly enough, a hammer that Jay was known to carry with him was lodged in the bicycle spokes.
Though no one could explain when or how it got in there. It's even unclear how long the bike was thought to have been in there.
No media or police reports from back then give any details about the condition of the bike when it was found. But what is clear is that by finding the bike, it emboldened investigators' theories that Jay fell in the river and drowned.
They were sure that Jay's body would eventually turn up downstream. But Wanda wasn't going to sit by and wait.
Working with her private investigator, she got a suspect sketch drawn and made flyers to pass out. Though it's unclear what the description was based on exactly.
Maybe the man Wanda said she saw in the blue car. But this is where things get even more muddy.
In the case file, there are five different suspect sketches and three different wanted posters, and none of them are dated or sourced. All the drawings look somewhat similar, but the written descriptions of each are all over the place.
One of the wanted posters featured a sketch of two men, both with long dark hair and mustaches. Under their photos, it said, on or about April 29th, 1976, these men were believed to have been seen in the vicinity of Riverside Lakes addition.
They are believed to have been driving a blue Chevrolet Camaro 1969 to 1971 model. The next wanted poster has a different sketch.
This time a man with chin-length dark hair pushed back with a big nose and big lips. Under the photo it said, it's believed that this man was in the vicinity of Riverside Lakes Edition, south of Waterloo, Nebraska, on or about April 29, 1976.
On that date, Jay Durnall disappeared. This man is believed to be somewhat slow.
He's believed to be a laborer, farm, ranch, or construction type of labor. His skin appeared to be weathered as though he worked outdoors.
Then the final suspect description goes like this. This man may appear to be dirty.
His teeth may appear to be in poor condition. Possibly one tooth broken or missing.
Noticeable when he smiles. His nose may be broken.
There may be a noticeable bump on the bridge of his nose. Especially apparent from his profile.
There is reason to believe he carries a large buck knife. This man may be the loner type.
Detectives today don't know where these descriptions came from. Wanda wrote about working with a psychic and her P.I.
on some theories and sketches, so it's possible one or more of these came from those efforts. On May 6th, a full week after Jay disappeared, the sheriff's office decided to give Wanda a polygraph.
Unfortunately, no one knows what the results were. In her memoir, Wanda wrote about taking multiple lie detector tests, but she didn't detail whether she passed or failed.
She did detail some of the questions they asked her, which were mostly personal lifestyle questions. A week later, Wanda upped the reward from $5,000 to $25,000, according to reporting in the Lincoln Journal-Star.
But it wasn't the increased reward money or any investigative work that would lead them to their next clue. It was a purely chance encounter on a completely different body of water than they'd been searching.
On May 19th, an Army Corps of Engineers boat was floating down the Missouri River on the eastern edge of Omaha. That's when a deckhand noticed a body in the water.
According to reporting by the Omaha World Herald, the men on board were able to catch the body with a long pole and tie it to the edge of their boat in order to keep it secure while they called authorities. For context, the Missouri River runs on the opposite side of Omaha as the Elkhorn River.
We're talking like a 20 to 30 minute drive between the two bodies of water. And where the body was found was in the county east of Douglas.
So it was the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office that arrived to pull the body from the water. But they weren't clueless as to what was happening in Douglas County, which is why they called them to respond to the scene as well.
They would later confirm that this was, without a doubt, Jay. And when they pulled him from the water, they could see that he was fully clothed with his hands tied behind his back by wire, and there was obvious trauma to the back of his head.
The only other note about the condition of his body was that it looked like he'd been in the water for what they called several days. But several days can mean a lot of different things when you realize that there had been more than 20 days between Jay's abduction or disappearance and his body being found.
And investigators today aren't keeping information from the public. I mean, it is truly something that wasn't documented well and now has been lost to time.
And I think it's an important detail that could tell us a lot about the offender and motive. Did this person abduct, kill, and dispose of Jay all in the same day? Or did they keep Jay for some time in between? I did an episode pretty recently about another Omaha boy named Ricky Chaddick, where his abductor kept him for a period of time before killing him.
And I'm not implying that these cases are connected, but so much of the FBI profile of Ricky's killer was based around the fact that he kept him captive for some time before killing him.

Now, the one thing that's not up for debate in Jay's case is whether or not his body was moved.

It would have been impossible for Jay's body to float from the Elkhorn River to where it was found in the Missouri River, because the location was upstream from the confluence of those rivers. Here's Captain Sellers again.
The Missouri River water temperature was 61 degrees, and the speed of the river was 5 to 6 miles per hour flow on May 19, 1976, the time the body was found. This leads me to think that they were trying to determine if the path he could have taken could have gotten there, but it couldn't have happened.
At his autopsy, the coroner noted that there were no signs of sexual assault. But the next day in the World Herald, the sheriff's office asked the public to report any suspicious activity involving adults sexually abusing young boys.
Basically, because there was no other motive that made sense. And on this point, Wanda and the sheriff's office finally agreed.
On May 20th, Wanda was quoted in the newspaper saying that whoever killed Jay was likely responsible for the deaths of three other little boys in the region. The story noted that Wanda didn't have any evidence of this, that it was just a

hunch. She mentioned a five-year-old boy whose body had been found on the banks of the Missouri

River in April 1976, the same month that Jay went missing. That boy's death had been ruled

an accidental drowning. Wanda also mentioned the unsolved murders of two boys, 12 and 13,

who were abducted about an hour away from Omaha the fall prior. Wanda was quoted saying, it seems this person likes the pure joy of killing kids.
I think for the safety of all other little kids who go out and play for 30 minutes, this man should be caught. Douglas County detectives did meet with law enforcement in

Lincoln, Nebraska, to discuss two of those cases mentioned. In September 1975, 12-year-old Jacob

Serber and 13-year-old John Simpson were abducted from the Nebraska State Fair and stabbed to death.

But by May 21st, local newspapers were reporting that there was no evidence linking Jay's case to

Jacob and John's murders. That case would go on to be solved three years after Jay's murder.
By the time Jacob and John saw justice, police had tried everything they could think of to progress Jay's case. They did more searches looking for evidence of a kill site, more canvassing of neighborhoods looking for witnesses.
They tried testing the hammer found lodged in his bike to see if it was the murder weapon.

They'd even tried talking to Jay's classmates to see if he had told anyone at school about that new friend.

But nothing resulted in a break in the case.

So in August 1979, when police charged 57-year-old William Gottney with murder,

kidnapping, and sodomy in the deaths of Jacob and John, Douglas County detectives were quick to speak with him. They learned Gottney traveled with cattle shows and carnivals, and by the time he was linked to the other murders, he was already out of state.
They had to pick him up from the Illinois State Fair and extradite him back to Nebraska. According to reporting in the World Herald, Gottney admitted he was in Omaha on April 29, 1976.
But he was shown a photo of Jay and said he didn't recognize him. Records show Gottney was a patient at a Kansas VA hospital during that time frame.
But his doctor admitted that he had gone missing for a few days back then. And maybe that's when he had hopped on a train back to Omaha.
All Gautney said he remembered about his Omaha visit was hitchhiking into a town with a few bars, buying some liquor, and getting drunk. The following year, in 1980, a court ruled that Gautney was incompetent to stand trial in the Lincoln double homicide.
And despite no other additional information coming to light, he remained the one and only suspect in Jay's case, which got shelved sometime around then and closed by exception, which Captain Sellers told us basically means nothing. He said if new leads come in on cold cases,

they'll work them.

He thinks that's just how they categorized that

back in the 70s once all their tips dried up.

So that was it.

Closed by exception from 1980

all the way till 2024.

But if you think that's the end of Jay's story,

you'd be wrong.

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That's rosettastone.com slash deck to start learning. In the spring of this year, I sent a team of audio truck reporters to Omaha to cover our first ever Nebraska cases for this show.
We've already released those episodes, Rebecca Williams, Sarah Neal, and Ricky Chaddick.

And when we asked to cover Jay's case, it was a hard maybe on our wish list,

because it's usually hard to get a detective to sit down for an interview about a cold case that isn't being investigated

and that they know very little about, especially one that's almost 50 years old.

But at the end of their week in Omaha, Captain Sellers agreed to get Jay's files out of the evidence vault. I've been here 26 years.
I've never read this one. Just because it's so old? Is that why it's not on your guys' radar? We, at one time, we had somebody that could do cold cases, and then you, somebody retires and you run short, and then you no longer have that person.
Captain Sellers brought back three or four binders to the conference room and he took one and gave the others to our reporters, Emily and Madison, so they could start reading through them. And after a while of thumbing through the piles of old reports, Madison stumbled across a long lost, and I sh** you not, confession.
This guy claimed Durnell was making fun of him and messing with the fishing poles and that he struck Jay Durnell. Read this.
Raven indicated during the process of tying Durnell up, he began with the right hand and then tied the left hand in the process

of doing that, stuck himself in the bottom of the left ring finger with the wire. Are we sure this is a piece that wasn't a rest of it? Yeah, that's accurate.
That's accurate. Well, there's...
Literally, I don't know. I've never heard.
Let's continue. Now, you've caught my interest here.
It was around one hand and then wrapped around the other and down around the finger. And around the finger.
Yeah. It's pretty specific.
The guy's name was John Raven, and he was 17 when the report was made in April 1978. That's two years after Jay's murder, meaning that John would have been 15 when Jay died.
At the time, he was somewhat known to police for some juvenile charges of arson, burglary, and larceny.

A detective also noted in a report that John Raven was known to hurt animals,

but there's no information in the report confirming that.

The report was written by an officer who said that they were contacted by John Raven

because he wanted to confess to killing the kid by the Elkhorn River.

And listen, this is not our first rodeo, not even the first confession we've seen documented in a cold case. Plenty of times there will be something like this that seems amazing, and then if you keep reading in the case file, you find out that none of the facts match, and it's been ruled out, and that's why no one 50 years later has heard of it or is talking about it.
Well, that's not this. As they kept reading, the more legit this confession seemed.
How would he have known the details? Do you think we would have released that? Should we compare that to that report that you had? Was it in this one? About how the finger was tied with his statement? They compared all the statements and thanks to our research team had all the newspaper reporting ever done about Jay at their fingertips. And there were never any details about the wire binding or the location of Jay's head injury released to the media.
And John Raven mentioned specifics about both of those things. It doesn't hurt either that one of his old mug shots looks like a perfect mixture of all five suspect sketches.
Though, important to note that at the time, he would have been 15. So John Raven's whole story goes like this.
On April 29th, 1976, he went to the Elkhorn River to fish. He set up some poles and then started throwing rocks into the river.
This was his method to chase the carp up to his fishing rods. As he's doing this, he said this kid approached him.
A detective then showed John Raven a photo of Jay. And he said, yep, that's the kid.
John said the boy had a BB gun with him, which had a wooden stock and a pump on it. And after the boy shot at a bird, Jay asked him what he was throwing rocks into the river for.
And John said that when he explained his method, Jay started making fun of him and messing with his poles. John Raven asked him to stop.
And when Jay didn't, he said he grabbed a hammer and swung it at Jay, hitting him in the back left side of the head. John said Jay fell face down and landed partially in the water with his lower half on the sandy riverbank, his head bleeding.
John said he found some black wire stuff, as he called it, by the river, and that's what he used to tie Jay's hands. And he did this because he was afraid Jay might wake up and try and fight back.
At that point, John said he grabbed all of his stuff and went home to his house in Elkhorn. But after a while, he started worrying about the kid, so he ran back to the river.
He found Jay still laying there, in the same spot he left him. He tried to check for a pulse, and when he didn't really feel anything, he splashed water in his face to try and revive him.
But the boy, Jay, was dead. Raven said he tossed Jay's bike into the river and started once again walking back toward Elkhorn.
And that's when he saw someone getting out of their car to go inside a bar. Raven said the small red car still had the keys in it, so he took it, went and got Jay's body, and drove it to the Missouri River to dispose of it, the BB gun, and the hammer.
He said he then drove back to Elkhorn and left the stolen red car parked under a bridge. He used rags from his tackle box to wipe up blood in the back seat, and then he went home and burned those rags.
Now, in that whole story, the hammer detail is the only thing John Raven got wrong. Because remember, the hammer was found lodged in the bike tire in the Elkhorn River, not the Missouri River.
But John told detectives that he would take them and show them exactly where he hit Jay and where he tossed his body in the water. I don't think they took him up on that field trip, though.
Instead, they booked him into jail under maximum security and called the county attorney. But the next day, John Raven took back the whole thing, saying it was all a lie.

That's the 1978 audio from the follow-up interview with him. But it's not great quality, so I'll sum it up.
When asked why he lied, John Raven said he'd seen something about it in the newspaper and that he wanted to go to jail because he was tired. There isn't much in the case files or tapes to explain what he meant by that because John Raven was still a teenager, he was living at home with his parents, so it's not like he was out on the streets.
I mean, was something going on at home where jail would feel like a break? I wish we knew. There weren't any reports in the case file that mentioned any investigation into the stolen red car either.
Possibly because his confession was coming two years after Jay's death. But for good measure, even though he was recanting, deputies made him take a polygraph test, which he passed.
So that was the end of that. Our best guess is that they let him go just based on the polygraph.
But here's what was bugging the reporting team. Nobody can explain how John Raven knew the exact spot on Jay's head where he'd been hit.
And no one can explain how he so perfectly described the intricate tying pattern that he made with the wire around Jay's wrists. We even had detectives pull the old tapes of Raven's interviews just to make sure nobody was feeding him information and using leading questions, which, let's be honest, wasn't uncommon in the 70s.

But when we listen to it, that's not what happened here.

Everything he told detectives seems to have come from him and whatever he knew, however he knew it.

John Raven was released after he passed the polygraph

and he is never mentioned in Jay's file again.

Captain Sellers says he thinks investigators

likely took the past polygraph as fact in the 70s

and felt no need to further investigate John Raven's story.

But looking at everything today,

Sellers told us he had a hard time getting past

how specific his confession was. He wishes he could formally reopen the case and interview John Raven, who went on to have a petty criminal career, but he can't because John died in 2009.
So maybe it is the thing we've seen before, something that was ruled out and became irrelevant to the investigation. Just know that I'm willing to accept that as a possibility before I tell you this next thing, because some will think it's a little woo-woo.
And it's definitely not evidence, but it did give me full-body chills nonetheless. Our reporter Madison interviewed Jay's cousin Susie for this episode, because she's one of the only remaining family members still around.
And before sharing any of this information with her, Susie told us a story about a time she met with a psychic. And I have a tape of the reading, which, God, I wish I could find.
It's on a cassette tape. And through the reading, one of the things that she did was told me that the person that took Jay was doing bad things, but Jay was doing bad things to him first.
Susie gasped when we told her what we'd discovered about this long-forgotten confession. She had never heard of it, and she thinks Jay's parents likely never knew about it either.
We had Captain Sellers call around to some retired Douglas County investigators to see if any of them remembered the John Raven confession, or if they knew why it got dismissed. One of them vaguely remembered it, but he didn't know anything else.
Susie said after Jay's death, his dad Jerry was

never the same. And Jay's homicide was a taboo subject in their family growing up for the longest time.
Susie was scared every time they would have to drive over the Missouri River because all she knew was that her cousin Jay was gone and that something bad happened to him there. She was only before when her cousin was murdered,

but she still remembers some things vividly,

like how his bedroom was completely decked out in a Wild West theme, and how he wanted to be the best veterinarian when he grew up. Jay would have been an amazing veterinarian.
He would have been an amazing kid, you know, growing up, teenage years, like, oh my gosh, young adulthood. He would have had beautiful children, like, that would have loved animals too.
I mean, he would have probably had a farm that he, you know, raised animals on. Wanda closed out her chapter about Jay in her memoir with these thoughts.
I think of Jay often My god, I loved that kid I would have given up everything I owned

My very life, to see him mature, contribute, and prosper. I miss him.
I shall always regret losing my son, my very best friend, my partner. No matter the age of your children, my wish for you is that you have such a constructive and rewarding relationship with your children as I had with Jay.
Moreover, I wish you long, prosperous lives. No matter their age, the children are your students as well as your teachers.
They are our partners in life. They are our future.
If you have any information about the 1976 murder of 11-year-old Jay Durnall near Waterloo, Nebraska, call the Douglas County Sheriff's Office and ask for Captain Eric Sellers. They're also interested in speaking with anyone who knew or came in contact with John Raven anytime in 1976 or after.
The phone number for their office is 402-444-6000. The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.
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