Jefferson West (King of Diamonds, Mississippi)

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Speaker 5 our card this week is jefferson jeff west the king of diamonds from mississippi it was july 2nd 2018 when jeff seemingly vanished into thin air outside of his mom's home in bay st louis mississippi and when locals caught wind of the disappearance rumors started flying Did the 46-year-old change his identity and start a new life somewhere else?

Speaker 5 Could he have been targeted by a gang? Could this have been a suicide? It's a mystery that has stumped detectives and devastated Jeff's family, but they all agree someone out there knows something.

Speaker 5 I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 5 On July 3rd, 2018, Bessie West went to the Bay St. Louis Police in Mississippi to file a missing persons report for her son, Jeff.

Speaker 5 She told police that just the day before, the two of them had gotten into an argument and she thought Jeff had walked off into the woods surrounding her house.

Speaker 5 Now, typically, this wouldn't have been cause for alarm. Jeff liked to clear his mind in the woods.
They were sort of an escape for him. But Jeff hadn't really been himself lately.

Speaker 5 Jeff had long struggled with a substance use disorder, and after a recent relapse, his wife Stephanie began pulling away. So Jeff had to move back in with his mom.

Speaker 5 And it seemed like he was in a downward spiral.

Speaker 5 The two began arguing a lot about Jeff's drug use, and leading up to their final argument, Jeff had been posting about his personal struggles to Facebook.

Speaker 1 Love hurts, but it also feels great.

Speaker 5 You have good and bad times. Love keeps you together throughout.

Speaker 1 Just

Speaker 5 have fell out of love. Just missing my wife and kids, bro.

Speaker 3 She's not talking to me.

Speaker 5 Now I got to get through this rough road.

Speaker 5 Four days before Jeff allegedly walked off into the woods, he reposted a message from an account called Depression Quotes. It read, nobody will ever text me and say how much they miss me.

Speaker 5 I'm not worth missing. But Jeff was wrong.
Bessie did miss her son. When a day went by and Jeff didn't show back up at the house, she immediately went to the police.

Speaker 5 And around that time, she actually commented on Jeff's post, saying, quote,

Speaker 5 You worth more than you will ever know. Love you, son.
Please come home. God, please watch over my my son.

Speaker 1 End quote.

Speaker 5 Here's Detective Sergeant Dustin Weir with the Bay St. Louis Police Department, who is working the case today.

Speaker 1 At that time, we took the report, we issued a bolo, put him on NCI, see who's a missing person.

Speaker 1 And then after that, spoke with Jeff's mom, and she did give us some other names of people that he might have been involved with as far as his wife, who he was separated from, and some friends.

Speaker 1 It looks like there was a recent relapse, which could have led to some marital problems. There could have been some other problems in the home, which we see a lot.

Speaker 1 But we do know that from talking to family and friends that there was a lot of depression over just losing his wife and kids.

Speaker 5 Jeff's older brother, who goes by Little Joe, who we also spoke to, said that he could see the toll the separation was taking on Jeff in the weeks leading up to his disappearance.

Speaker 1 It's devastating to him, but he

Speaker 1 was just all upset about Stephanie. You know, that was his world.
That was his, that child was his, you know, that was his heart.

Speaker 1 But he got on that math, you know, and like everybody, it destroyed him, destroyed his relationship with his wife, everything. She didn't like him on it at all.
And he turned into a demon.

Speaker 5 Little Joe says he remembers the last time he saw Jeff very clearly. He remembered him standing outside in the backyard after his argument with Bessie.

Speaker 5 At the time, because Jeff disappeared so quickly, Little Joe assumed that he'd gotten into a car with someone. This is actually detectives' working theory as well.

Speaker 5 They told us that Bessie's original statement was sort of misconstrued when it was originally taken down.

Speaker 5 What she likely said was that Jeff could have gone into the woods, but he just disappeared so fast she didn't know what had happened. He didn't even take anything with him.

Speaker 1 I didn't see him get in no car. I just put two and two together.

Speaker 1 I said, that's the only way he could have disappeared is fast he disappeared because he wouldn't have went in the woods with clean clothes on like that. He got cleaned up.
He was waiting on somebody.

Speaker 5 And Detective Weir also spoke with Stephanie.

Speaker 1 We did talk to his wife quite a bit and she just relayed the same thing, you know, that he was depressed and had substance issue problems.

Speaker 1 And she did say that she was able to get into his Google account at one point. He was searching for free places to camp on the beach.

Speaker 1 She basically said that he had texted her, said that he was staying under a bridge, just sleeping under the bridge or hanging out under the bridge was kind of where he stayed, according to his wife.

Speaker 5 Stephanie was referring to the Bay St. Louis Bridge, which is about three miles from Bessie's house.
Detectives also heard from another friend that Jeff was supposedly under a bridge.

Speaker 5 But this friend added that he thought Jeff was there experiencing suicidal thoughts.

Speaker 1 There's a park underneath the bridge. which is where she thought that he might have gone.

Speaker 1 Now we went over there and we searched under the bridge, we searched near the bridge, down the beach, but we just couldn't locate him at that time.

Speaker 5 According to detectives, there was simply no physical evidence to suggest that Jeff was or ever had been under Bay Bridge after he disappeared.

Speaker 5 If this was a suicide or even an accident of some kind, they would have expected to find a body, but there was truly nothing.

Speaker 5 As for the woods by Bessie's house, it seems like they were sort of neglected amid all the searching of bridges and beaches.

Speaker 5 Our reporters actually visited those woods and confirmed that they are both vast and dense.

Speaker 5 And because most tips pointed towards Jeff being somewhere else, investigators seem to think that searching them wouldn't be a productive use of time.

Speaker 5 Now, Jeff did have a car, but he didn't leave in it. So if he had gone to the Bay Bridge on the second and somehow not left a trace, He either got a ride or walked over an hour by foot to get there.

Speaker 5 And he wouldn't have done it all without his phone, which detectives found lying outside of Bessie's house, as if it had just been dropped there.

Speaker 1 A lot of the times when we investigate these cases, if we can get a hold of a victim's phone, if they leave it at home, we'll take those phones and we'll do search warrants on them because you can learn a lot from that.

Speaker 1 A lot of the times they'll be Googling things and sending text messages or, you know, different things like that. In this case specifically, they did find his phone outside.
It had been rained on.

Speaker 1 We did take that phone and attempt to get forensic stunt on that phone. However, it was destroyed by the rain.
We weren't able to get anything out of it.

Speaker 5 Also, this phone was a pay-as-you-go phone, which didn't back up anywhere. So even if it hadn't been destroyed by the rain, investigators wouldn't have been able to pull much from it anyways.

Speaker 5 Still, the fact that Jeff left his phone behind, along with all of his other belongings, seemed to suggest that he wasn't planning on being gone very long.

Speaker 5 But then again, from Bessie's story, it didn't seem like Jeff had planned to be gone at all. It seemed much more like he had darted off in the heat of a moment.
So why wasn't he turning back up?

Speaker 5 It was lost on everyone.

Speaker 1 Especially in this day and age, you don't just go missing and law enforcement or somebody not be able to

Speaker 1 find you or find any trace of you. You can't leave without a trace anymore.
When you have a case like this, where yes,

Speaker 1 we by what's been told to us, he left on his own, he was upset, mad, whatever it be, there's not really suspected foul play until there comes a point where nobody's heard from this guy, we can't find him, there's no bank records, there's no phone calls, there's no social media, there's nothing to say that this guy's alive, which is when we have to look into it more.

Speaker 1 And that's when we, you know, we have to speculate that something happened to this guy.

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Speaker 1 That's when we, you know, we have to speculate that something happened to this guy.

Speaker 5 That point came even sooner for Little Joe. He remembers telling his mom that he didn't think Jeff was going to come back.

Speaker 5 After Jeff disappeared, Little Joe was out on the streets talking to everyone he could to try and figure out where his brother was.

Speaker 5 Now, Little Joe and Jeff had their ups and downs, as all siblings do, but they were still brothers.

Speaker 1 I mean, sometimes we'd argue, you know, fight, and that was brotherhood, you know, that's just how we did it as brothers.

Speaker 1 But if any trouble came out, or either one of us was there together, you know, was like stuck like glue.

Speaker 5 A handful of the people that Little Joe spoke with seemed to believe that Jeff's disappearance had something to do with a certain local gang.

Speaker 5 Now, this gang was identified by Sergeant Weir as the Simon City Royals, a group with a history of violent criminal activity and quite a few members in the area.

Speaker 1 We hear Simon City Royals a lot. They are known known for a lot of violence, specifically that gang.
And really, that's one of the only ones that we really hear about over here.

Speaker 5 According to Little Joe, a lot of talk about what happened to Jeff revolved around this gang. His thinking was that maybe Jeff tried to become a member.

Speaker 5 And during the initiation process, which essentially entails a severe beating by existing members, things went too far.

Speaker 1 There was rumors that there's a couple guys in the association that had done something to him.

Speaker 1 Said they cut him up in little big pieces and then mixed him with some chemical portion of the septic date. That's what I was told.

Speaker 5 Now, Jeff never explicitly told anyone in his family that he was involved with the Simon City Royals.

Speaker 5 But after hearing enough of these rumors in the neighborhood, they couldn't help but wonder if there was some truth to them. So they brought it up to the police.
Sergeant Weir told us that in Bay St.

Speaker 5 Louis at the time, it wasn't uncommon for someone who was using drugs to get mixed up with the Simon City Royals.

Speaker 1 But a lot of the times, drugs will do it. Drugs will get you in contact with these people and you'll either make a decision or just get brought into it.

Speaker 5 Detectives actually told us that they've heard of the Simon City Royals members going missing from neighboring counties before. So they followed up on this tip as best they could.

Speaker 5 but they had their work cut out for them. Getting gang members to talk openly with law enforcement is difficult, as is getting outsiders to cooperate due to their fear of retaliation.

Speaker 5 But on July 17th, Bessie told investigators about a call she got from a friend that would make things a bit easier.

Speaker 1 A friend had contacted her and gave her the name, a name of a gang member, and said that this guy's murdered people in the past. He's gotten away with it.

Speaker 1 And she was unaware of any direct threats, but she was worried because she knew that he had been hanging out with this gang member. Oh, yeah, he was one of the big dogs.

Speaker 5 Detectives said that this person, who we'll call Carter, was a quote, super high-ranking member of the Simon City Royals and known for stonewalling police.

Speaker 5 So they knew he wouldn't give them anything without proof, which of course they didn't have.

Speaker 5 Still, they tried to locate him and put out bulletins for him that said, wanted for questioning, but they never found him and he never showed up at the police department.

Speaker 5 Investigators also pulled phone records for a number that they suspected belonged to Carter, but there didn't appear to be any activity on it.

Speaker 1 We did look into this guy. He has an extensive criminal history.
I know they did several search warrants, several court orders, trying to get any information they can to connect this guy.

Speaker 1 Now, we know that he and Jeff were associated.

Speaker 1 We can speculate all day long. In this case, there just wasn't anything to prove that he had anything to do with Jeff's disappearance.
And we can only do so much with a rumor.

Speaker 5 So investigators decided to change course. But there wasn't another obvious direction to take things.

Speaker 5 According to Sergeant Weir, there was zero physical evidence in the case and barely any tips either, aside from the rumors that Jeff's family was passing along.

Speaker 1 In August 2019, so would have been... A year and a month.
We kind of ran out of places to go. And at that time, it was suspended and considered a cold case.

Speaker 5 The case stayed that way for about three years. But then in 2022, two things happened.

Speaker 5 First, Carter was part of a massive indictment of over 20 Mississippi gang members on RICO charges, which are levied when someone's accused of being part of a group committing multiple crimes like fraud or violence as a part of a bigger illegal operation.

Speaker 5 And some of the charges stemmed from incidents Carter was involved in in July of 2018, right around the time that Jeff went missing.

Speaker 5 These charges included the sales of both heroin and a stolen gun, though there was no mention of Jeff in the charging documents.

Speaker 5 Carter was charged again and pled guilty to similar charges in 2023, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Speaker 5 And the second thing that happens, Bay St. Louis police got a 911 call from some people hiking in the woods.
They said that they'd found a human skull in their path.

Speaker 5 When the operator asked for their location, they gave an address on Washington Street, which is the same street that Bessie lived on.

Speaker 5 The location of the skull was no more than half a mile from her house.

Speaker 1 So of course we responded out there and it's just the skull. There's no jawbone.
There's no other bones around it that we located.

Speaker 1 We know obviously that it could be connected to a missing person.

Speaker 1 We also know that in that area, there is a lot of homeless

Speaker 1 that frequent that area. And the issue with that area is in Bay St.
Louis, it floods often and bad.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of the times some of these bones can be disturbed by floodwater so they can be moved over

Speaker 1 extended lengths. So we just don't know.
Yeah, I mean, we always hope. You know, it's, you know, obviously not any outcome that we want, but we need answers and the family deserves answers either way.

Speaker 1 We hope when something like this happens that

Speaker 1 for the family's sake that we can give them some answers. And in this case, it didn't pan out.

Speaker 5 When investigators sent the skull to the state medical examiner's office, it was determined to be, and this is a direct quote from Sergeant Weir,

Speaker 5 just a very, very, very old, very old skull. I mean, the medical examiner actually seemed to think that it was archaeological.

Speaker 5 Now, what an archaeological skull was doing in the woods, detectives had no idea. Typically, experts deem something archaeological when it is believed to be over 100 years old.

Speaker 5 So, the one thing police did know was that that skull did not belong to Jeff West.

Speaker 5 And the only thing stranger than finding this skull in the woods was finding yet another skull on the very same street just two years later.

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Speaker 5 This second skull was reported to police in October of 2024 after a man's dog sniffed it out in the woods behind his house. And this one was even closer to Bessie's house than the last one.

Speaker 5 Investigators processed the scene and sent out a team of officers, volunteers, and cadaver dogs to search the wooded area around the property.

Speaker 5 But once again, there were no other skeletal remains found. As of this recording, the state medical examiner's office is still analyzing that skull.

Speaker 5 But Sergeant Weir said that it's not looking promising.

Speaker 1 I will not sit here and try to be an anthropologist and try to tell you how old I think it is.

Speaker 1 Speaking with the coroner, he believes that it's another very old skull. And when I said so, like before 2018, he said, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's just one of the things we just have to keep looking into and keep investigating. And once we hear back from the state medical examiner's office, we should know a little bit more.

Speaker 1 It could be months to a few years.

Speaker 5 If you're thinking, it's bizarre that two super old skulls popped up within a mile of each other in the span of two years, you're not alone.

Speaker 1 It's weird, and we don't have an answer to it. It's just kind of, we don't know why it's happening, where it's coming from.
But it's definitely weird that it's so close in such a short period of time.

Speaker 5 Unfortunately, until they get the determination back on the second skull, there is not much more investigators can do.

Speaker 1 I think it's one of these things where we just, we're trying to get more information and just kind of stuck. We have the skull, but we still have nothing else.

Speaker 1 The way that I feel is when I have a case like this and I have a family that I haven't been able to give answers to.

Speaker 1 That's the hardest part of this job is we have a lot of cases that we just can't solve. And it's not for lack of trying.
You know, most of the time, it's just lack of information, lack of leads.

Speaker 1 In this case, we just don't have a lot of information coming in. And I think the biggest issue on a personal level is that we can't tell the family what happened.

Speaker 5 Some detectives still think it's possible that Jeff died by suicide or an overdose, and they just haven't found his remains yet.

Speaker 5 They emphasize that the area he lived in was surrounded by swamps and thick woods, which haven't really been officially searched. And that could be part of the reason he hasn't been found.

Speaker 5 Jeff's wife Stephanie seems to think that this is the most likely scenario as well, though nobody really has a theory as to how.

Speaker 5 Little Joe, on the other hand, feels certain that his brother is still alive somewhere.

Speaker 1 I don't have a sense in my gut that he's dead. I haven't got no feeling, you know, or any dreams or anything like that

Speaker 1 that he's dead. I feel like he's still out there somewhere, you know,

Speaker 1 like watching me, keeping tabs on me.

Speaker 5 Little Joe is constantly checking social media and browsing the internet for any signs of his brother. So far, he says he hasn't seen anything.

Speaker 5 But he's always coming up with new theories about what could have happened that day in July. His current theory is that Jeff is alive somewhere, using Little Joe's ID to get around.

Speaker 5 This theory stems from the fact that several months before Jeff went missing, someone stole the West family's safe, which, among other things, held Little Joe's birth certificate and social security card.

Speaker 5 And this safe was the only thing missing in the entire house.

Speaker 1 It was right beside Ma's bed on a little end table.

Speaker 5 Little Joe actually confronted Jeff about this when it happened. And when Jeff denied it, they got into a small fight.
Now, detectives say that they have yet to hear this theory from Little Joe.

Speaker 5 He hasn't reported it to any law enforcement agencies. So as of this recording, they haven't done a credit check or anything to confirm or deny it.
But Little Joe still sees it as a possibility.

Speaker 5 Now, I want to note here for anyone wondering that detectives did interview family about Little Joe during the investigation and determined that While he and Jeff definitely disagreed sometimes, he didn't seem to have anything to do with his disappearance.

Speaker 5 He just wants answers.

Speaker 1 Oh, I think about it every day. A day goes by, I don't think about it.
I'm hoping that I can find out something one day.

Speaker 5 Sergeant Weir feels the same way. It's one of the reasons that he wanted to work with us.

Speaker 1 I know that. Somebody knows something.
Somebody's talked to him that we haven't talked to. And somebody has information that we haven't talked to.

Speaker 1 And so I'm hopeful that once this gets out, once we start talking about it more and this gets more pressed, that somebody will come forward after, you know, all this time and give us something to work with.

Speaker 1 You know, Crime Stoppers has these playing cards and, of course, he's featured on them. And hopefully somebody will see it and somebody will know something.

Speaker 1 That way we can try to figure out what happened and give the family some answers. I understand that in larger agencies and other investigations, you can get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tips.

Speaker 1 We're not that big. So if I get 50 rumors, give them to me.
You know, we'll gladly take them.

Speaker 5 If you know anything about the mysterious disappearance of Jefferson Jeff West from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi in July of 2018, we urge you to call Detective Sergeant Dustin Weir at 228-466-5474.

Speaker 5 Or if you prefer to remain anonymous, you can call Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers at 877-787-5898.

Speaker 5 The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

Speaker 5 So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

Speaker 5 Here on the deck, our work is all about finding the truth for those who deserve it most.

Speaker 5 But there are some stories where the truth is so obscure and the web of lies is so complicated that it's almost impossible to unravel.

Speaker 5 On Chameleon, host Josh Dean puts the pieces of these stories together to tell you about some of the most shocking cons, frauds, and imposters in history.

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