Baby Lisa's Disappearance - Megyn Kelly Investigates: Answering YOUR Questions and Key Updates

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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
In March, we brought you a five-part series on the disappearance of baby Lisa Irwin, an 11-month-old who vanished.

from her crib in Kansas City, Missouri. It's a case that I've been reporting on for years.
All right, let's get moving. All right.
You gotta go.

The series culminated with a bombshell interview with one of the key possible suspects in the case, John Jersey Tanko.

All we're trying to do is like sketch out the story and wondering if you can tell us what your involvement was in the disappearance of baby Lisa. I don't have any involvement.
That's what I'm saying.

The whole thing was fascinating. It left us with more questions than answers and we had so much feedback from all of you, both questions and comments, thoughts.
Loved doing the whole thing.

And I loved hearing from all of you once the show was birthed. You know, it was like just so great to hear people's reaction and the questions that you guys were asking were so smart.

And people, we had like so many amateur sleuths in the audience who had great observations. And we have not lost hope that this case can be solved.
Little baby Lisa was never found.

We don't know what happened to her. We don't know if she was killed.
We don't know if she was stolen, if she was sold, and if she could still be out there right now.

But that's, of course, her parents' hope and our hope, too.

And our main goal in launching the series was to see if we could spur a renewal of interest. by the Kansas City PD or someone else.
And we'll have an update on that at the end of the show.

But joining me, our team.

Phil Houston, former CIA agent, the guy who invented the CIA's deception detection method still used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the country and the world.

Bill Stanton, former NYPD,

and someone you don't know whose name is Brian O'Keefe. He is a producer on the series.

He worked very closely with my executive producer on the series, Mary Murphy, who is a wonderful, amazing producer. but who is camera shy.

And so Brian, very, very up to speed on everything he and Mary did together. And one of the unsung heroes of this whole production.
So, Brian, thanks for being here.

Phil and Bill, great to see you guys too. How's it going?

Good, Megan. Thank you for having us again.
Awesome.

Okay, so first of all, I haven't even really gotten a chance to ask you guys what you thought of the five-part series and whether it changed your thinking at all, seeing it all strung together.

I'll start with you on it, Phil.

It hasn't changed my thinking per se,

but it did spawn

some

thought process

in reviewing

what my rationale is for thinking who is responsible for the disappearance of baby Lisa.

Okay, we'll hear more on that throughout this hour. How about you, Bill Stanton?

Well, first, Megan, let me just tell your audience that is devout and intelligent and worships you, as do I. if not for you, we wouldn't have had this opportunity.

When I called you up on the phone all those years ago to the most recent call that started this, when you said, let's do it, you know, hopefully this brings something to the table in furthering the investigation.

As for my opinion, if it changed at all, I would say absolutely not. If nothing else, when you walked up, on that individual in his backyard, it only galvanized my opinion.

And I'm more sure, both personally and professionally, more than ever. That was such a crazy day.
And Brian, he knows all about it. He's the one who really set it up.

It's really kind of thanks to Brian that it was able to happen.

How about you, Brian? When you saw it all stitched together, you put so many hours into it. Did it change your thinking at all? Or talk to us about what your reaction was to the finished product?

Well, I'm still a little torn, you know,

but I've had some distance now. You know,

We published a couple months back, and I watched them all yesterday. And I

am really beginning to wonder what Megan has told us, Megan Wright.

And

it's made me

coupled with Mr. Tanko's reaction to you and the kinds of careful answers he gave really makes me wonder, wait a minute, come on, it's the phone call.
I mean, that phone call is everything.

Because you were not thinking that Jersey, you didn't really like Jersey for the crime.

You remember, you might recall

when you and Bill came back from the house down the street. We were listening to it.
And my first reaction, you saw my face. I remember you looking at me and I said, I don't know, guys.
I don't know.

I'm not so sure, you know.

And

so it's a fascinating mystery mm-hmm you know we're gonna get into a lot of the viewer questions but can you just tell us because that the interview of Jersey in his backyard

called Jersey because he's from Jersey but John Tanko

was stunning and we all we planned so much for it we didn't know if we'd get it there's like that my favorite part of the whole series is when we're doing our prep for that you know interview and the three of us are sitting there talking about like what if you get them what if you don't get them what can we do what our what's our game plan and the audience loved that too they they felt like they were in on it right there with us but brian you were there we we worked on this series for years

which you can tell from the changing hairstyles of mk throughout the whole thing um

but we couldn't find him we hired how many private investigators we moved heaven and earth to find this guy and we were unable to and for most of the series we thought it wasn't going to happen we were thrilled that megan wright agreed to sit with us we thought that was the best we were going to do And then maybe you could give the audience a little backstory on how we actually did wind up finding him.

Well, his mom

lived in New Jersey. She has since passed, by the way, several months ago.
She passed away. But we had talked to her, Mary and I, through her doorway.
She wouldn't come out and talk to us.

She was afraid of being photographed, I guess.

And she made it clear that he was somewhere in northern New Jersey. And she kind of gave a hint at a couple of towns.

But the real humdinger was a private investigator from Kansas City, Piquel Lund, helped find an obituary of a woman named Lisa Gallo.

This woman, at the bottom of the obituary, it mentions her survivors and her, you know, her mother or stepfather or what have you. And at the bottom, it says, and her domestic partner, John Tanko.

Now, there are not that many John Tenko's in New Jersey, frankly, in northern New Jersey, there's only one.

And

we figured out, Mary and I figured out how to, where was this, where did this woman live? So we went to the house that she last lived in before she died.

And

as we continued to do reporting, I

met up with a man who lived in that house and he told me, John did live here. We kicked him out months ago.
They kicked him out of that house for lighting fires in the backyard.

And I said, Well, where?

Yes. So the claim, well,

he said, Yeah, this is what the man said. The man said that he was lighting fires and it was becoming a problem.

And he was a little erratic behavior, a little erratic, is

what he said.

Then,

again, in this group of friends or people that lived in that house, somebody gave me a tip

that they didn't have the address,

but they knew that it was on a cul-de-sac. And at the end of the cul-de-sac, not far from a diner, there'll be a couple of horses.

And so I made, you know, of course I made several trips out there. And this one trip,

I walk down the street, that street, the cul-de-sac,

and a dog starts barking like nuts, crazy at me. And I don't know where this dog is, but you know, I don't like, you know, a barking dog is not going to be, can, can, can be a bad thing.

But it also attracted attention to me wandering down this street. Well, guess who pops his head out from behind the fence, that big fence that you guys were looking through when we shot?

There he was. And I'm thinking, oh my God, it's him.

So I said, he says to me, can I help you? And I said, well, because he lives with a woman named Lisa. I hadn't really planned on being confronted by him.
I really hadn't.

I was just scoping and seeing what cars were in the driveway, et cetera,

and the neighbors and what have you.

And I said, well, you know, there's a John and Lisa on this block. I'm trying to find John and Lisa.
And he literally looks me in the eye and immediately lies

and says, oh, John and Lisa, you got to go into the block and go all the way down. He's sending me away.

He doesn't want me to know where John and Lisa live. And it's him.
Now, listen,

I've never heard his voice, but it was him because I've seen enough of his mugshots. And he was wearing a little beanie.

And I'm like, oh my God. So then I went to the diner, which wasn't that far away and called our executive producer.
And I was shaking because I was like, It was him.

He's there on the video tapes, or even

we had no footage of him. That was one of our problems.
In the back of his head, we were thinking about how we were going to produce the episodes talking about him, but not with him.

There's no b-roll. All we had was mug shots of him over the years because he had done such a good job of staying off camera.
Keep going.

And being incarcerated for something else

right after

the kidnapping, a burglary, I believe, and or absconding, what have you,

he was locked away.

And when he got out, the media was gone. And, you know, and then he made his way back east a couple years later, I guess.

But

the only video of him is basically the back of his head

in a courtroom. In court.
Yeah. It was such a big deal.
Couldn't believe it. We really thought, all right, you know, we're just not going to get him.

And then thanks to Brian's efforts and the efforts of others we hired prior to that, we eventually got on the trail and found him.

And so that was half the battle and really led to the most interesting, I think, piece of the entire show, which was ultimately the confrontation between the two of us with Bill in the backyard.

Brian was there back in the van. And just a crazy day.
I mean, Bill and I met at that diner right around the the corner before we went over there.

And without getting too specific, we had a bit of a briefing from law enforcement, Bill, that had us both very worried about what we might be walking into.

And we started second-guessing like the protocols we had settled on and whether

basically you could keep me safe and whether we had done enough to make sure this could go off without a hitch.

Yeah, my well, first, you know, Doug, your loving husband, he had a phone call with me and said, listen, nothing happens to my wife. You understand? That was like a couple of nights before.

I'm like, 10-4 of that.

So when we were doing the pre-game, if you will, in the diner, and by chance, the sergeant walked in with his driver and I got pulled to the side. And as you,

you know, described, can you handle what may come your way? And then that made me tilt my head. And I'm like, yeah, I got it.
Don't worry. Don't worry.

Yeah, there was a little tension there.

We got a lot more concerned in a very short time about what we might be walking into.

And so when you see us there on the outside of the house, we are very much like, okay, this needs to be handled just right. One thing we had definitely concluded was I was not going in alone.

And I was going in with Bill, who knows how to handle himself in any threatening situation. What were you going to say, Brian?

I was just going to mention that neighbors had told us that, and the police backed it up, he had exhibited some erratic behavior at different points prior to this day.

And begging to your credit, I said, do you want me to go first? You're like, no, I'll go.

It's easy to be brave when you've got... Bill Stanton right behind you.
No, you don't just don't feel like anybody's going to mess with you.

Okay, so let's get into it because the listeners have a lot of questions after having watched the whole series and they were so great. Everybody watched.

It's like you didn't get anybody who watched one. You had all the same people watch all five of them.
They now have their own strong opinions on it.

I'm going to start with this one from Zahn, who writes as follows. Upon listening to your interview with John Tanko, I noticed a couple of things.
He repeatedly used present tense.

This could indicate that it is still ongoing or not over. And here's a little montage of what he's referring to from part five of our series on Baby Lisa.

If you can tell us what your involvement was in the disappearance of Baby Lisa. I don't have any involvement.
That's what I'm saying. None whatsoever.

I don't have any involvement whatsoever.

They refer to me as a link to this case. I don't have no involvement.
I'm not involved.

They feel I'm being put involved in something that I'm not involved in.

There were some instances where he used past tense, but I take the point. He does say, like, I am not involved.
He's talking about it like it's happening right now.

What do you guys think as my law enforcement experts, Phil?

Yeah, that immediately stands out. I mean, the incident occurred 13 years ago, and he's referring to the present time, and it reflects his worry that he is going to be caught.

That's his biggest fear now.

And much of the interview, the manner in which he responded is

about the here and now, as opposed to what happened way back when.

And

to include when he said something like, I don't want to face a death penalty case or something of that nature. And

he's, you know, truthful people don't sit around worrying about that they're going to be at a death penalty case unless they have a reason to worry about it. And he carries

that reason to worry every single day, is my opinion.

Did that jump out at you at all, Bill, the use of the present tense? Like, I can see the point.

You know, if you're asking me, did I have something to do with, I don't know, let's say some scandal at Fox 15 years ago, I don't think I'd be sitting there saying, I have nothing to do with it.

I am not involved.

I think I probably would be using the past tense.

Yeah, I mean, it was a great pickup by your viewer, but it's not that one syllable, that one statement for me.

If you look at this man's overall history, you know, Brian mentioned that he lied right to his face without blinking an eye, that he was setting fires, the neighbor told you.

What happened the night of the abduction? There was a fire. When you look at, in aggregate, all of his past crimes, meth addict, arsonist, he was a B ⁇ E, breaking an entering specialist.

That was his thing, breaking into homes. You know, the preponderance of evidence for me, all roads, in my opinion, lead to Jersey Joe.

okay so this is

which is confusing he also went by jersey joe or but his name is john but it goes by jersey anyway we're talking about the same man um yeah on the subject of the fires because he did he had a history of setting fires uh our Our viewer, Jennifer, had a question about the fire that happened the night baby Lisa went missing.

For the audience just joining us and not up to speed, baby Lisa was stolen out of her crib in the middle of the night after the mother was home, the two sons were home, they were asleep, they said.

The father was out working all night on an electrician job at Starbucks. That was verified by cameras.
So we never found out whether the baby was taken and killed, taken and sold. We have no idea.

But the main guy we focused on in our series was this guy, John Tanko, who was a handyman in the neighborhood and had been spotted around the Irwin's house doing work and

three cell phones were taken from the Irwin house on the night baby Lisa went missing. One of those phones was used to call Megan Wright.

So one of those phones was used to call somebody and the person was Megan Wright who was the girlfriend of John Tanko and there had been some reporting that she had said she wanted a baby.

She denied it when we talked to her.

She did admit she broke up with him thinking, like, whatever, he's not a family man. You know, this isn't the man for me.

But the reporting at the time was much more specific that she had said, I want a baby. And there was speculation he might have stolen one from her.
So he likes to set fires.

And that night, shortly after baby Lisa went missing, we talked in the series about how a dumpster nearby the Irwin home and near the so-called flop house where Megan Wright had been living,

which Jersey knew and he had. been there many times, was set on fire.
There was a dumpster fire that was found.

But in the series, we point out that they investigated and they didn't, the cops did, and didn't find anything.

They did look for, you know, signs, God forbid, of a baby or any sort of incriminating remnants. But this is what Jennifer writes.
The series was fascinating.

I'm curious if the fire that took place after the kidnapping was ever investigated. Is it possible Jersey was totally strung out that night, took the baby, and then burned her in the dumpster?

Brian, is my information correct? Right. We looked into that.
It's not like the cops didn't know about that fire. They did.

Right. And I think Deborah told us also that that was a dead end.

There was burnt clothing in there, but it was not the baby's clothes and other garbage.

And by the way, that dumpster was near the

flop house that she had lived in when she was dating him. On the night of the kidnapping, she was a mile away at a different flophouse.
Right, right, right, right. Another one.
This is from Jane.

I just watched number five with Tanko. It's obvious to me, she writes, that he is guilty due to the nature of his answers and history of this case.

Moreover, he states that he believes Lisa is living with a rich family, enjoying her life. Why would anyone not involved say that? I pray she is alive.

I'm wondering why this statement was not addressed. Here he is in SOT 2.

Why would somebody take a baby?

You know what? The FBI asked me the same question. And I'm like,

only thing I come up with is to sell it to maybe somebody that can't have kids.

You know, I mean,

it sounds crazy, but if we

had all of this, that's the best case scenario that could have been happening that that kid is

now 13 and

school, you know, has a rich family, you know, something like that. I mean, that's the best case scenario.
Yeah. What does that say to you guys that he went there?

Megan, when I said at the outset of the show today that some of my views I had been,

you know, I've had to reflect on them a little bit more. This was one of those.
I had

told myself at one point in the case that I was guilty of wishful thinking when I would, when I thought that she had been sold.

When I heard him on the video, the first time I heard that answer, it shocked me into thinking that what he was trying to do potentially is put a clue on the table, that

what really happened to her might have been that she had been sold. And

if you connect that with the belief that he is the guilty party here, then he would be the person that would have sold her, so to speak.

He's using, his answer is very, very deceptive. He immediately goes to the FBI that he's talked to them.
He's trying to

develop some credibilities using convincing statements. As we know, deceptive people,

when they can't share the truth because of the consequences, they almost immediately go into some form of convincing statements or efforts to influence us to believe them.

And that's simply what he's doing there

with his statements and his discussion about the FBI

and his offer to, you know, maybe put something on the table

that would lead us in the right direction. Now, what I heard today about him sending Brian down the street, he may well be using that as a way to put us in a completely different direction.

But I have to confess,

as I mulled over this after

episode five, I wondered more if maybe there is a chance that that little girl is still alive. That's, I mean, I think all the time about how, you know, remember what happened with Elizabeth Smart?

That any day, it's happened so many times, we're just not necessarily that exact scenario where someone's missing and they come back, but where a story, you think it's over, you think you have it figured out, and then you get the news alert on your phone and your jaw drops.

Oh my gosh, like huge development. And I really believe in my heart of hearts, one of these days, we're going to get the news alert about baby Lisa.

I admit, I don't know whether it's going to be they found remains of a baby and the testing is done and it's her, or if we get the more hopeful possibility, which is this young woman went to ancestry DNA.

took a test and found out she has a mother and father match who are other than the ones who raised her. And this girl does investigation and figures out she's actually Lisa Irwin.

I mean, that's my hope. And I really believe one way or the other, we are going to find out.
It's just a question of time. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to do this series.

Like, let's know exactly what we know and what we don't know before that day comes because I just feel like it will.

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Joanna. Joanna or Johanna.
My thoughts thoughts are about Jersey. Let's say he was paid a large sum of money for baby Lisa.
Was there any indication of that? How did he afford to move to Jersey?

Did he buy that house in Jersey? Do we know the answer to that, Brian? It's not his house. It's a woman named Lisa.

I'm not going to use her last name, but it was owned by, I'm assuming, one of her parents. The father, right? For her.
I think the father before she owned, now she owns it. So he has no money.

He doesn't have a job and he does not own that house. So I really don't know what his income would be.

So you're saying that the domestic partner you found in the Obit was named Lisa and the woman with whom he was sharing this house was named Lisa.

Correct.

Yep. And it's that whole setup,

Megan, you know, the town, the horse, the horse paddock in the back,

the clucking. The roosters.

Yeah,

I was waiting for Anthony Hopkins to come running out of the back door.

It was surreal at best. But, you know, Tanko is not a master criminal.
He's a repetitive criminal. He's not a mastermind.
Pardon my language. He's a bullshit artist.

You know, if he told me the sky was blue, I'd look up before I agreed with him. So he is so adept at doing it.
You know, to the average layperson, they may, oh, he's trying to be cooperative.

But thank God we have Phil on our team that can cut through all that BS and we get right down to it, that just about almost on every question you asked him was a lie.

In the scenario that we're considering of he's, he stole baby Lisa and then he sold baby Lisa.

Does anyone here believe he would have received a lot of money? Like, I think we all kind of thought maybe it was a crime of opportunity. If he did it, it was a crime of opportunity.

There's just no way way this guy who was a meth head in and out of the prison system had a connection to somebody very wealthy who was going to like i feel like

no he didn't buy that house and he probably didn't buy any house and if he stole and sold the baby he probably got a pittance for her because he was likely just looking for

a drug hit potentially or you know just something to get him through the day this is the life of an addict recovering or using but certainly using without a doubt i mean it was a I wholeheartedly believe, you know, people ask the question, why would he take the baby?

Well,

how do any of us know what runs in the mind of a meth addict? You know, he, if I remember correctly, he said he found the cell phones.

And in my opinion, that was to cover the tracks for the attempted call. If we remember, the phone bill wasn't paid.
So the phone call did not go through, but the phone company logged it as an attempt.

So in his mind, being from the streets and having street smarts, you know, there's a difference. He knew he had to cover that up.

So he told his attorney or his would-be attorney that, yeah, he fat, yeah, yeah, I found the phones. I made the call.

So if anything, what I think, I think he left the baby or to your point, Meg, maybe have traded the baby for drugs. And what happened from there, who knows?

And in the entire series, that to me was the most incriminating thing we heard from anyone.

The interview with Cindy Short, who had represented the Irwins, the mom and the dad, for a short time before being dismissed because there was sort of a turf war between her and Joe Takapina, and he won.

And then on her own went and found Jersey in the jail, sat down with him, talked with him for some 10 hours.

And in that interview, he told her he found the three stolen cell phones that had been taken from the Irwin's house that night and then allegedly discarded them. And then when we got in Ontario.

But he actually said he said he found three phones. He didn't know what's which he found stacked, you know, three phones.
So who finds three phones together in the middle of the night? Right.

Yeah, sure. So we actually got a question about that.
This is from Rick.

He writes, when Cindy talked to John Tanko, Cindy Short, the lawyer, talked to John Tanko in prison, and he said he had the phones and was with a woman. What about that woman?

I watched the rest of the the episode and you never came back to if Cindy asked who the woman was. Isn't that a huge item to leave out?

Let's say this woman wanted a baby, this mystery woman, and John and Megan Wright got the baby for her.

And after doing that, Megan Wright knows how bad of a thing she did, resulting in her getting sober.

Do we know anything, Brian, about the woman? I mean, this was from Cindy Short, but I don't think Cindy knew anything more about her or got anything more about her. Correct.
That's right.

Cindy said she did not get a name. It was like another street person, kind of, you know, and

she had no idea who the woman was. And he didn't have her name or offer her name.

Here is, just so people

are with us, here's Sat Seven Tenko talking about what he said to Cindy Short when she visited him in the jail cell. He did tell me, though, that he had found three cell phones.

And he told told me where he had found them. He also claimed to have told the police that he had found three cell phones.
And he's telling me where, which is not very far from the house.

So he's placing himself, not just the proximity of the phones, but in possession of the phones. He's claiming that he's with another woman.

And we have videotape of the underpass where he claims he found the phones thanks to Brian,

because this is how it works. Like Cindy says this to me in an interview.
I talked to Mary and Brian. We say we need to figure out exactly where they went.

Brian went on the ground and got you guys that footage. All this stuff is just sort of a behind the scenes on how we produce TV for people.

And, you know, it takes a real-life person to actually go and figure it out and talk to Cindy again, exactly where. Let me get a shot.
Is it representative? And let's be careful.

So all that stuff went into it.

Then when we confronted him, Bill, of course, I asked him about that. And he claimed it was all lies he told Cindy Short.
Did you have those phones?

Because

we

we understand that you told a lawyer Cindy Short that you found those phones.

I'm shooting here for whatever she wanted me here. I didn't tell her I found those phones.
I said I found phones that night, but I didn't find them. No, nothing?

Oh. Why? It's because she's asked me a million questions and I didn't want to

make her happy, whatever. It's kind of interesting, Phil Houston, that he didn't lie.

That he didn't just say, I mean, I think he did lie, but that he, that he didn't, if he's going to lie, why didn't he just say, I never told Cindy Short that?

The lie that he's is concealment of the fact that they're the real phones. He, he, he,

it sounds to me the way it was characterized is that it was a random finding of some phones. And he said, I didn't, I didn't say it was those phones.

And what I think he is covering. But then he also says, and I didn't tell her that.
Like, he's like, I was, you know, he says, I told her that, but it was a lie. So let me just be clear.

You know, I did say something to her about three phones, not the three phones, but phones. But it was all lies that I just told her to tell her what she wanted to hear.

Why wouldn't he just say, that never happened? Cindy Short's a liar.

Yeah,

because he has to cover up his tracks.

The original reason that he told her about finding the phones was so that if those phones were ever recovered or or found, because he got rid of them somehow, and they had his fingerprints on them.

And is there anyone else who saw him with those phones? For example, there was a reference to another woman, and then you have the call to Megan Wright.

If they connected in that evening, then that means that someone else knows that he was in possession of those phones. So he has to cover up and

come up with a reason as to why he has his best

yes exactly and also megan he knows he made that call he knows it so it's like you know the the planes when they got a missile locked in they throw up flares to distract he is putting up so much distraction and the best liars in my experience they stay as close to the truth as possible and take a baby step to the left or right.

I mean, when I go undercover, that's what I do. Keep it simple, stupid, so you could remember your lies.
And that's what he, in my opinion, that's what he's doing here.

Oh, yeah, I told her I found the phones. Now, he could retract that if he was ever pressed.
But in my opinion, he believes he's so far past getting convicted.

That's why he felt he can engage and control the narrative. Because we don't believe his denial.
We believe that he did tell Cindy Short that.

And when he did that, he probably did that because he didn't know what she knew. He didn't know whether law enforcement had the phones.

He didn't know exactly what the evidence would be because this was right after the disappearance about him and those phones.

And so if he had stolen them along with the baby, he had to say enough to Cindy to find out what she knew,

what does she have on the phones, but not to incriminate himself for having stolen them. That's our belief.

It's all. So chilling.

And Phil always teaches in his deception detection class and in his book, by the lie that one of the signs, it has to be as part of a cluster, meaning within the first five seconds after you ask the question.

Because like, for example, looking away, that could be a sign of deception, but not if it's by itself.

But if it's with another sign of deception, and Phil outlines them all within the five-second cluster, or within the five-second answer, it can be a cluster, which is a deception thing.

And so one of the things Phil talks about is hands above the midline.

Because, Phil, why? Why do your hands go above the midline sometimes when you lie?

Typically, it's a spike in anxiety, the fight or flight or freeze response.

Someone asks you a question and it puts you on the spot. Your anxiety immediately spikes, and that spike in anxiety causes a rerouting of your circulation.
And that circulation,

as it rushes,

you know,

away to the muscles and the things that are going to help you get away or get out of this, face this threat,

they irritate the capillaries. And as a result, you find yourself playing with your ears or your nose

because blood is being drawn away from those things that could be, that normally require a lot of blood.

He's up on a ladder. He's already got a barrier between the two of us, but then he starts waving his arms around in this particular answer.
Let's watch it again, just with all that in mind.

Did you have those phones?

Because

we understand that you told a lawyer, Cindy Short, that you found those phones.

She was here for whatever she wanted me here. I didn't tell her I found those phones.
Waving the hands. I said, I found phones that night, but I didn't find them.
More waving? No, nothing.

Oh. Why? It's because she's asked me a million questions and I didn't want to.
Waving. Just make her happy, whatever.

I mean, every second of it with the hand here and then the big, big, big, and then back here and then big, big, big.

So would you peg that as anxiety, Phil? Yeah, absolutely. It was a great question.
He wasn't expecting it. And you followed up.

And he thought he had satisfied you, I think, in terms of your curiosity with his answer in the previous question.

And in fact, you just kept going. And

he's getting more and more nervous, more anxious all right sonia

have you thought at all about how quickly tanko answered the question about whether the ex-girlfriend megan wright wanted a baby the way he answered made me feel like he could have taken the baby for her but then when he called her and said he had a baby for them she may have freaked out he said that was a lie very quickly and and huffy almost like she lied to him.

She's referring to this right here. One of the theories is that she really wanted a family, she wanted a kid.
Yeah, it's totally not true. That's not true.
She never said that to you.

Totally not true. No.

Megan Wright was defensive on this same point.

And that

the effect of that, Phil, is to make us believe it more, not less. One of the things that jumps out immediately, he says it was totally not true.
Immediately a convincing

adjective, if you will, prior to

making his answer, giving his answer. And

he's giving you a denial, but it's a little bit like in the O.J. Simpson trial, when they asked him,

for a plea, he said, I'm 100%.

you know, if you believe that he was guilty.

They feel the need to be more compelling in their response. And that's what he was doing there.
And it was, and he doesn't, he doesn't realize it. And you're asking direct questions.

And that's what's giving him real difficulty. Because Brian, at the time, I mentioned this when we first got on in the show, the reporting was

everywhere that

she told him she wanted a baby. And when she was younger and pink-haired, she was on camera, like with Jim Spellman.

But the denial she gave me on that front, the denial he gave me on that front, was much stronger than I'd ever heard from them up until this point. Did Jersey ever offer to get a baby for you? No.

The denials she gave to me and he gave to me were the strongest I'd heard from either of them on the allegation that he might have been stealing a baby or that she might have told him she wanted a baby.

Go ahead, Phil.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. At a minimum, they talked about that subject.

I truly believe that they had, in perhaps the early days of their relationship before

Megan realized that this was not the guy for her, I think there was a strong possibility that they would have talked about having a child or wanting a child.

Kate writes in, and I confess I don't know this movie, but she writes in, I'm really enjoying your fascinating Baby Lisa series. I'm sure you've thought of this already.

But doesn't this whole situation remind you of the Cohen brothers movie, Raising Arizona, where the main character, Nicholas Cage, in a small town, is a criminal who hatches a plan with his wife to steal a baby from a family who had quintouplets, quote, no one will notice if we steal one, in order to start a family of their own.

Could Jersey, the suspect, have watched that movie and thought it would be a good idea to steal a baby to try to start a family with his girlfriend, Megan?

Here is a clip from the movie Raising Arizona with Nick Cage and Holly Hunter from 1987.

Which one you get? I don't know. Nathan Jr., I think.
Give me here.

Here's the instructions.

Oh,

he's beautiful. Yeah, he's awful damn good.
I think I got the best one. I bet they were all beautiful.
All babies are beautiful.

This one's awful damn good, though. Don't you cuss around him? He's fine, he is.

I think it's Nathan Jr.

We are doing the right thing, aren't we, Hi? I mean, they had more than they could handle. Well, now, honey, we've been over this and over this.
And there's what's right and there's what's right.

And never the twins shall meet. Don't you think his mama will be upset? I mean, overly? Well, of course she'll be upset, sugar, but she'll get over it.

She's got four little babies, almost as good as this one. It's like when I was riding the convenience store.

I love them so much.

Holly Hunter, she's amazing.

Now, that was 25 years before the events in question in this case, Bill, but Jersey is of a certain age, and we cannot rule out that he saw that movie which was really popular yeah i i could pretty much tell you my guess would be absolutely not and you know i they couldn't afford they couldn't afford their own phone they passed around a cell phone in the meth house i don't think they could have afforded netflix let alone a tv set so that humor of an amazon primer

i think

clever clever viewer though i love the movie references and one never knows and you know what it just shows you you know you're in a meth house lord knows what they were hopped up on you know and they probably rambled i want a kid yes i'll get you a kid and that may have been you know when the perpetrator went in that house through the front window i remember the police said oh they could not have gone in meanwhile when we went to the house i got right in pushed in that screen and he walked through that house, which was chilling, and probably heard the baby stirring.

And he grabbed everything that he could could carry. And unfortunately, baby Lisa, in my opinion, was one of them, along with the phones.

Okay, we had the neighbors right around the corner say they saw a man with a baby, both the husband and the wife,

right in the relevant timeframe. And

that's never been explained.

Just the baby. That's right.
They both saw it. They did not know that one was missing.
I mean, that's just that, that's such a damning fact. Okay, from Kathy.
Thank you for all of your hard work.

I listen to your show daily. Thank you, Kathy.
It's It's my number one trusted news source. Yes.

If you have a chance to discuss the Tanko interview with Phil Houston again and haven't already explored the below, I was hoping Phil would talk about this.

The question is, Tanko seemed aggressive when he was asked who Bill was, meaning when the subject of who Bill Stanton was, here's what she's referring to in SOP 5.

The way I see it is we're trying to provide them with closure. You can help us do that and with some comfort, you know, and just figuring figuring out what the story is.
This is Big Sean Glory,

no, he's not a lawyer. He's my friend.
This is Bill.

Yeah, no.

In another life, he's a lawyer.

They do these stories and

people just trash my name. They totally trash my name.
You know what I mean? I was involved with a lot of illegal activity back then.

What do you make of that, the focus on Bill, who he raised, I didn't raise there, Phil?

Again, Megan, you were focusing, you opened the interview with three questions or three focuses on involvement and you weren't going away.

And he

didn't know what to say. And it was a classic case of buying time.

And he used the aggression also just

in case Bill was with law enforcement. And he spent a lot of his life dealing with law enforcement.
And I wouldn't be surprised that if he felt that Bill looked, acted, and could be law enforcement.

But the major benefit to him was he needed to buy time. And then, as you know, he came back and made an attempt then to answer the question.

But the questioner that raised this question was absolutely correct on the aggression because

he talked very demeaningly about

in Bill's direction. It was was like a stall tactic.
That makes sense because

you hadn't really come up and he wasn't like searching for more information when we first walked on, Bill. It was kind of interesting.
And when we were walking off, remember he said something like,

Are you taping this? And you said,

Not with this phone. You just said something that was actually true, but not totally revealing it.
And then don't BS right back.

Yeah,

exactly. He spent half an hour BSing us.
We got actually a lot of of email about this one. Here it is in

SOT 6.

What happened to the guy? Frank, or what do you think should happen to the person if they hit this? I don't know what happened. So, I mean, you ain't think they kidnapped me?

Or,

God forget a homicide?

Motherfucker, Kelly, sticking emails on me. That jumped out at us, too.
I remember when Bill and I were walking off property, we were both like, holy shit, just at the thing about the death penalty.

That came up.

What about that one, Phil?

Yes, the death penalty, again, is part of a convincing statement.

And it's also part of this demon that he deals with all the time and worries about getting caught and worries that sooner or later all of this is going to become unraveled and his knowledge and our participation in it will come to light.

And he's scared to death because

he knows, having been in prison, how serious these things things can get very quickly once the truth has been uncovered.

And so he so fears the death penalty that he uses that as a convincing statement to enhance his answer in saying, I would never do something like that. I know how bad the death penalty is.

That was his. Yeah, it makes sense.
I should state for the record,

this is Phil's opinion, his expert opinion as a deception detection expert. Jersey denies all these claims, as you've heard.

That it's true, because if you asked me, did you have any discipline, what involvement did you have in the disappearance of baby Lisa, my answer would be none.

I came in after she was gone to report on it as a journalist, period. And even if people had gotten to the point of saying, maybe Megan Kelly did it, she was there on site in Kansas City.

I still don't think my response would be, this is a death penalty case. I'm not talking like

that it's interesting that that's where his mind went and the audience reacted strongly. I have a question concerning part four.

You mentioned the parents finding a charge on their debit card for a name-changing service. There is no questioning or explanation of how the charge was on their card.
Is this something I missed?

Great work on all of your presentations. Bob is referring to this piece of part four of our baby Lisa special.

One month after Lisa went missing, Deborah and Jeremy found a charge on a debit card, $69.04,

paid to a British company that called itself a name-changing service. Bob has a point.
That one, we probably, we should have closed that loop a little tighter there because that is a big one.

Like, wait, what? But we didn't, I don't think we found anything more on it, Brian, right? Jeremy did not know and nothing came of it. Right.

It's

debit card fraud, you know, which, you know, happens.

Whoever took the phones and the baby did not take his debit card or a statement that had the

number.

So, and also, if it were Jeremy and Deborah, why would they be paying for a

name-changing service? You know, so it's like, it really is a fuzzy, I mean, it's a dead end

no matter which way you go. Yeah, because if Jeremy or Deborah stole the baby, then one would presume they'd be with the baby.
They'd be raising the baby. They didn't do that.
That's not true.

They were together, living in the same home up until very recently. so not one wasn't scurrying about the world changing the baby's name so that she couldn't be identified as little lisa

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Okay, Megan Wright. OMG.

A lot of feedback on the Megan Wright interview. I think all four of us and Mary too were all really floored after that whole thing happened.

Phil and Bill, you watched it with me in the wings and then came up to offer instant analysis. Brian and Mary were watching too.

And it was a shocking exchange. I really didn't expect it to go as it did.
The audience may remember she got very emotional and there was a turn in the interview where she was like, she cried a lot.

She was very emotional or like she purported to cry a lot. And then there was this turn where I had to ask her about

she served some time for abuse of the baby she had much later after baby Lisa.

You just have to do that as a reporter.

I can't have her on and give an interview about whether she may have been involved in the disappearance of a baby and ignore the fact that later she was found guilty of medical neglect of her own child.

So, you know, it's one of those sensitive things where she's agreed to give me this interview, but we both know that this thing is going to have to come up. And boy, she wasn't happy.

Here's a little bit of that in SAT 17. He was underweight.
Is that what I was saying? He was underweight severely.

Can we not talk about this? This is the worst thing in my life. And you're just dwelling on it.
And I really don't appreciate it. I'm

trying to participate.

I'm trying to participate for the sake of maybe Lisa not to focus on the worst thing in my life, the most embarrassing thing. So, Phil, the audience did not believe the tears.
And

I think sided with you, who also

very rough on Megan right after that interview. You did not believe pretty much anything she said.
Phil was stoneface. He was hard.
Bill was hardcore. Yeah, I had seen other interviews with Megan.

And in my opinion, in every one of those interviews, she used

the tough life. In other words, I think that much of

what she's saying about how tough her life was,

there's a certain amount of truth to that. And she's using it very effectively to distract people away from

what the real issue is. In other words, it gets people to take their eye off the ball and focus on this stuff.
And she's very, very good at it. She started

her answer

with aggression. And what that typically means is that when someone really doesn't want to talk about this,

they will try to shut shut it down right off the bat. And she did that.
So I also believe that there is an underlying reason,

some of the reasons that she gave, embarrassment and the worst moment in her life and so forth.

But I also believe she's hiding and doesn't want to talk about her role in the mistreatment of her own child.

In other words, how bad that level of mistreatment actually was is what I think she was really trying to conceal there. That's what the deception was primarily about at that moment.

So many of the audience members had the same reaction that even my family had when we watched it together at first, which was, why would you keep that in?

When they first saw her come for me, you know, it was a very tense, awkward exchange between us. And people were like, why would you keep that in there? Oh, my God.
But there was a reason.

You know, we wanted the audience to see how in this moment she turned on me, she aggressively came for me me and sort of tried to emotionally stand me down.

And, you know, Phil, you can see in episode four, had very strong thoughts about that and about her use of emotion throughout the interview. Philip.
Like a child, Megan.

When you put her up against, she started like crying.

And, you know, if we're going to look at it, go down that road, like to obfuscate. You know, she had me tearing up and I bought it.
You know, I bought it.

But now that we step back and we look in reflection, like a child, they don't get what they want or it's not going their way, you know, start crying to bring out the humanity in us.

One thing I struggle with, and having watched it and listened to it again repeatedly, is

on October 4th, when she got back from Walmart and

Waffle House, she decided to become sober. Like, what? Because she got a call from the FBI.
She had not yet been connected in any way publicly to anything. I put the TV on and I saw a kidnapped.
Like,

she was connecting herself.

It's a very good point.

And

even if she did see that a baby had been stolen,

a baby she didn't know from a family she didn't know, why would that scare her sober? Like, why would that random news item scare her sober?

And sober ever since, okay?

according to court records she violated probation or something it was documented that she had failed a marijuana test at least once

you know in the years of

when she was imprisoned or afterward and you know listen that's that could be the demi levato california sober right but back in 2012 and 2013 marijuana wasn't like the you know

over-the-counter thing that it is now so true

Yeah, we got a lot of mail on people wanting to know about that, you know, how she got scared sober. This is from M.

She would go, she goes by M or he, writes as follows: I agree with a lie detector, Phil, on Megan Wright.

She clearly says that she was only in a relationship with this guy for five months, but then she says she has post-traumatic stress disorder and cries throughout the entire interview, and then claims to know how mean and scary he is, but can't give you an answer when you ask if she thinks he could do that to a baby.

And she says, I think Phil is spot on. She knows more.
She just doesn't want to admit it because she's worried it will implicate her. Here's a little bit of what she's referring to in SOT 15.

How likely is it, do you think, that Jersey, John Tinko, was involved in baby Lisa's disappearance?

It's hard to say, honestly.

I didn't know him very well. He and I were together for less than six months, and we only lived together for a couple of months of that.
So I didn't really know him all that well.

And most of the time that we were together,

you know, we were using drugs together. It wasn't a healthy relationship where you learn

what somebody's capable of. What's that about, Phil? It's hard to say.
It's hard for her to say after all this time whether he might have been involved.

It's a classic example of truth in the lie. It is hard for her to say that's the truthful part, but

when it's followed by a convincing statement, which is honestly, now it signals right away, you're looking at this small cluster, but it's immediately telling you to be careful of what comes after that because she's giving you all

untruth. Hmm.
All right. Here's another piece of it that the audience member, M referenced in SOT 16.

I have a lot of PTSD from the things that he put me through that I've tried really hard to work through over the years,

but

there's a lot of it I can't, you know, I can't let go of. I can't forget being that afraid.

Were you thinking,

you know, this guy's kind of crazy. Could have been him.
Yes, I definitely thought this guy is crazy and that he was horrible to me, traumatized me.

But I have no idea what he's capable of. I mean, there is, she's right.
There's an inconsistency in her. Like, it was so traumatic.

I have PTSD all these years later, but gee, I have no idea whether he could commit this crime.

These were phony tears, Megan. If you notice, she was trying to cry

as she initially started explaining. And then when you asked the follow-up question, immediately everything went away and her voice normalized and she's back to giving you an explanation

as if you asked, how do you bake a cake? You know what I mean? I mean,

she's now back to talking normally. People who are genuinely upset don't usually make that transition that smoothly.
And she's certainly not a very poised individual to begin with. And

she's, you know, she I mean she's using the tears to her advantage or trying hard to to do that if Megan Wright had anything to do with the disappearance of this baby why would she have given me the interview that's the thing that I can't get past she didn't have to sit with me I'm not FBI she there's no subpoena she knew I I wasn't going to go easy on her I never said this is going to be a walk in the park

and so she knew that she'd face tough questions and just being questioned about it at all, if you have something to do with it, you would avoid that like the plague.

It's much more consistent like with Jersey's behavior. Get out of here.
He's down the street. I'm not talking to you, random man.
Right.

She was like, I'll do it. And she sat with me for well over an hour, Phil.
Behavioral scientists tell us,

Megan, there's only a casual relationship between human behavior and logic. If you were to ask me, do I think Megan Wright actively participated in New, I'm going to say no.
I'll say no to that.

What I think happened was, so suppose we all knew someone that was fairly close in our life in a similar situation. We did speak about a baby.
He's the number one guy.

The FBI did contact her because that, her number was in the phone. So my feeling is more of a guilty conscience, knowing that he very well could have done it and she just didn't want any part of it.

That's what I think, you know, her participation was. She didn't

vigorously say, hey, listen, we spoke about that and yes, he very well could have. I think given her mental state at that time,

she just wanted out of Dodge, out of the situation, don't implicate me. I don't know who called that phone.
I didn't know the Irwins, yada, yada, yada.

And I think now this is her feeble attempt to try to make good on it that was her motivation to call you to do the interview with you it's that at a minimum she knows it's possible he did it and it's possible she was the inspiration behind it which exactly

kind of the best case scenario for for Megan I mean I guess the best best is he had nothing to do with it and she had nothing to do with it but then if he had something to do with it I don't think anybody believes he just did it for on his own like the relationship with who with her was too significant and volatile and recent.

And there was a discussion in some way, shape, or form, I'm convinced, about her wanting a family.

She kind of denied it in our interview, but I didn't believe it.

And when he went by that baby in the house that night, that was the light bulb that went off in the meth head. Head, let me grab it.

Let me get a gold star from the woman who I want to spend my life with.

Because he had a history, Cindy Short told us, of breaking into houses and committing petty crimes, taking things like cell phones that would be easy to resell on the market and get a price for.

And that's why we all concluded it was probably him and he probably took the baby as a crime of opportunity. And let's not forget he was working on a house up the block that night.
He knew.

What were you going to say, Phil?

The one thing that links her in my mind is

what she did with her phone the night before the call occurred.

In other words, she gave up her phone to other people in the house and said, here, you guys can use this tonight.

Is that just a coincidence? You have the same question as Natasha, our producer for this segment that we're doing right now.

And she wrote her own questions down after having gone neck deep on all of this too.

And her question is: it seems very convenient for Megan to leave her phone behind on the night of October 3rd, the morning of October 4th, when the crime took place. Could this have been on purpose?

Did police ever check out if she actually went to the Waffle House House and the Walmart like she claimed? Do you know the answer to that last question there, Brian?

I don't know.

But they were very thorough. One would have to presume they did.

Yeah.

She left behind this phone. She has a phone.
She's also using drugs at this point.

And she leaves it behind for the trap house. Now, she explained to us, this is like your kind of payment.

You know, you got to show that you're worth something in order to be allowed to live at the trap house. And I had her phone.
So that was a contribution. Yeah.
Nobody eats for free.

You got to pay your rent. And that was her, you know, like just playing devil's advocate to what Phil was saying, like to balance it out.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree, but, you know, to me, that was a plausible answer. You know, okay, I'm going to the Waffle House.

It's not like I have real friends in my life, except that are in this house. Here, use the phone.
And when I get back, I claim it.

Because she had, my understanding was she had the only active phone at that time. And they were all using it.

And we did make contact with a fellow member of the place she was living who admitted he had used her phone. He wouldn't admit on the night in question, but admitted he'd been using her phone.

So she is supported on that, is she not, Brian, that she did allow the members of that house to use her phone? Two people in the house told me that. Yep.
Okay. So on that,

she may be telling the truth. Then there was this that a lot of the viewers reacted to, and Phil, you reacted to this too.
What made her go sober on October 4th of all days this is how

the the question here did Megan never clarify what the situation what the situation was to make her quit drugs cold turkey on the morning of October 4th I would imagine it's pretty hard to quit meth cold turkey especially in her living arrangement would the FBI calling her phone be that big of a wake-up call to a meth addict I mean it is true she

I don't know that she ever fully explained that you know what what the trauma was. You know, you say, Brian, was it like the FBI just randomly called? It was just that.

The FBI called her phone when she wasn't even with it. Or she saw a news item on the television with which she says to us she had absolutely no connection.

Yeah, I'm not sure we have an answer other than just the trauma of the day.

A call from the FBI, news a baby had been stolen, and soon thereafter, news to her that the cell phones had dialed her number.

And one other thing:

in her 20 or 21-year-old life, she already had suffered a lot of other trauma, including living in a domestic violence shelter, some other bad actor boyfriend

in the months before this, before Tanko.

Here is another smart question. Natalia.

I was watching the first episode of Baby Lisa, and I was wondering, what if the neighbor that was drinking with Deborah, Samantha Brando was her name,

what if that woman got her drunk on purpose and had an arrangement or a debt with someone? Here's a piece from episode one, SOT 18. Samantha and James Brando.

Their family was close with the Irwins, but that day the Brandos were separating, something they had decided earlier that afternoon.

James moved out just hours after Deborah and Samantha started drinking. Deborah remembers the conversation.
I was trying to help her through it and,

you know, just give her the best advice I could. And she was kind of spilling her gut, you know, what she went through, what she's hoping she will accomplish next, you know,

custody stuff, you know, just the deep things that come with, you know,

separation of family. What about the Brandos, Brian? We did look into them, Samantha and James.
Samantha would not talk to us. She vociferously refused to speak to us

and was very angry.

James, we had a long conversation with.

And he basically kind of said everything that Jim Spellman told us, that he told Jim Spellman.

He had quite an itinerary that night, and a lot of it was captured on CCTV, like he went to Walmart.

And he was also over

at an Air Force base where he worked. um in the wee hours of the morning so um

we didn't really get any red flags from him.

And the police had rolled him out. The police

say they rolled out or that they moved on from Jersey too. So I mean, I don't know how much stock we put in that.

Why would Samantha Brando be vociferously against sitting with us when both Deborah and Jeremy cooperated with the piece extensively?

Well, here's an interesting, I don't know why I never was able to, I never asked Deborah this, but Samantha and Deborah stopped speaking, you you know, have not been in contact in many, many years.

Like not long after the kidnapping, they no longer talk to each other. And so there was some sort, I don't know what it was,

but I just thought that's

some sort of negative energy that Samantha's not speaking to Deborah, and let alone getting a phone call from someone doing a podcast. But I mean, I mean, I get it.

That happens in relationships, but like you're talking about a missing baby. You'd think, and she's, she's a critical witness.
I mean, she was important.

She was with Deborah the whole night while they were drinking. I don't know.
That's interesting.

Though I will say, to the extent she could say anything that would make Deborah look bad, it's how much worse could it be than what Deborah has told us about Deborah's behavior that night?

It's not like Debra's trying to paint herself as some perfect angel.

You know, she was very open right from the get-go.

just about the first time, you know, well, the first time I interviewed her, when she told us how much she had been drinking and, you know, how she was basically blackout drunk.

And I asked her about this when we did our interview.

Like, why?

Why were you so honest about it? This is actually from part one. Watch this.
Do you have a drinking problem? No,

I don't think so.

Some folks are going to have an issue with you having

more than five drinks while you're looking after a little baby and two little boys. She was sleeping.
I wanted to ask, why did you choose to share that with me?

Because it has nothing to do with Lisa's abduction. And I want to be honest about everything so that people will look for her.

Because I feel like if they're like, oh, she's being honest about that, she's got to be telling the truth about other stuff. So we certainly didn't need Sam Brando to document Deborah's condition.

And I don't know that there was any reason to believe Samantha Brando had, like, there was no evidence whatsoever that she had anything to do with it. We interviewed Sam

and

there was no deception

the,

I mean, Sam told us how, and I think one of the reasons why

there may be some friction that ensued after that is Samantha was the one who

corroborated or told us that

Deborah had been stumbling drunk that night.

And she depicted how much she had to drink. And I don't think Deborah wanted that to come out, obviously.
So, to me, like the question is, why wouldn't she come on camera?

I don't have the answer to that.

I would lean into maybe there was some rancor between the two of them, and she just wants to put it in her rear view. But she gets a pass from me.

The reason being, I was there, boots on the ground, literally days after the occurrence. And, you know, I interviewed her.
I spent some significant time with her.

But for me, the biggest thing why she gets the pass for me is that I asked her to be interviewed by Phil.

And she showed no trepidation and she did it. And at that, to me, that was the most important inflection point was to get Phil and Susan.

to interview Samantha to remove everyone that was within touch distance that evening.

And this is right in the beginning of the case when arrests could still be made at any moment. Like she put herself in potential jeopardy by saying yes to that, and she did it willingly.
Okay.

I just want to touch base with you again on it, Phil. So have you,

where do you stand now? Like what has your analysis changed meaningfully from when we ended the series?

Not as far as Jon Tanko is concerned. I have no doubts about whether he is involved in this.

As Bill noted earlier, there's so many points

of evidence and things and coincidence, alleged coincidences, that it's just

he is, in my

opinion,

he

has at a minimum significant guilty knowledge

and or direct involvement. And I'm leaning much more towards direct involvement than just guilty knowledge.
And with respect to Megan Wright?

Megan Wright knows what happened that night. There's no doubt in my mind, and that's the one thing I went back.
And,

you know,

I have great respect for the panel here. And,

you know, I was sort of a one-off on

Megan. And I really went back and looked at it and looked at a couple of the other interviews and so forth.
And there's a real consistency in terms of her level or volume of deception and

the efforts to distance herself using that deception away from Tanko and

she's piling on to him right and you pointed this out when we did episode five that he was very defensive of her like he he'd shut it down that she had anything to do with it over and over and that that to you was actually kind of a tell

he had criminals often do that they protect each other um

uh to when when it's you know in their best to do so. And it certainly is in their best interest to do so if both of them are involved.

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Now, it's not just you, Phil, or you, Bill, or you, Brian, that thinks Jersey might not have been 100% honest with us, though Brian's probably the best person here for Jersey.

It's

an incredible invention that you've come up with, Phil. It's basically the AI version of you.

At your company, Qverity, you've been working on an AI lie detector into which you've put all the Phil Houston magic. Can you tell us about this?

Yes, it is a tool that we've spent almost, we're short of three years developing. It is an incredible lie detection system.
It's text-based.

So if you have a conversation with someone and that that conversation can be legally recorded and

transcribed, when you put it in, Q will give you the answer.

Forgive me for the genderizing of Q, but when we asked Q, you know, what did he look like, he came back with an image and it's a male, so we're calling him he. So he indicated

to us with a review of some of your interview with John Tanko, a tremendous

deception. Now, Q is better than Phil Houston, and it's better than, I believe, anyone on the planet, and for this reason.
Number one,

Q has no bias. While AI

can have bias,

we went through something we refer to as constructive confinement. In other words, Q's existence has never been exposed to anyone or anything else but the deception,

the job of detecting deception and the training and the the concepts and so forth. And the reason he's better than us is for three reasons.

No bias, his cognitive capacity capability is far greater than certainly mine, but we believe, you know, just because it's AI related, it's better than, in terms of detecting deception than anyone else on the planet.

His analytical processing is faster than any of our processing.

So for example, when I'm doing an interview, I spot

a deceptive behavior here, a deceptive behavior there, so on and so forth. When Q does his job, he looks at each question and answer individually,

individually. He doesn't know what any of the other questions are or what other things at that moment in time.
He just doesn't know it. He deals only with what's in front of him.

So if I can interject, Megan, it's essentially, Phil is Bobby Fisher,

and he invented the computer that could beat him at chess.

Every single one. So I'm just looking at, because you've shared some of this with me

and on some of the items that we went through. Like, for example, here's the,

you fed into him the question of his aggression toward Bill. Who's this big shot lawyer with you? And my question was, we're trying, what we're trying to do is help them.

The way I see it is we're trying to provide them with closure. You can help us do that and with some comfort, you know, and just figuring out what the story is.

And his answer was, who's this big shot lawyer? Annie, or he's this big shot lawyer. Any see that they do these stories and then people just trash my name.
They totally trash my name.

You know what I mean? I was involved with a lot of illegal activity back then. Here's cue.

In the speaker's reply, two key patterns emerge. One, hostile or dismissive attack on the question itself.
Rather than answer, the speaker launches into a confrontational challenge.

He's this big shot lawyer, aren't you? Which serves to intimidate or undermine the questioner instead of providing any direct information.

Two, off-topic commentary that avoids the question's core demand.

The speaker shifts to complaining about how they do these stories and trash my name, introducing irrelevant detail and emotional framing rather than supplying the specific answer sought.

Conclusion, deception, deceptive behavior indicated. Because these two tactics both divert attention and repel the direct inquiry, the response meets the threshold for deceptive behavior.

That's so interesting, Phil. You did this with Q time and and time again on all of these questions.
You and I just went through with the audience. And each time, Q said, he's lying.
Yes. Yes.

He can do all of that. What he does every single question,

it's

segmented analysis.

He's not looking at the transcript as a whole. It's as every single question and answer is

he analyzes.

When he moves on to the next one, you can go back and ask the previous one a hundred times, and each time it will be the first time for him. He has no memory.

So he's not like, he already lied to me five times. I'm going to give him the likelihood of lying on time number six, question six.
Yeah,

that's not a consideration in his analysis.

It is, he's looking, you know, so we ask him, you know, look at this question, analyze it. He analyzes it, says it's deceptive behavior.
We wipe the slate clean. It's automatedly wiped away.

And he moves on to the next when he has no memory of what he just did

or ever seeing that question.

And the significance of that is to preclude the development of bias.

And what the other thing that, Megan, that's unbelievable and why speed is important in the analysis is that unlike myself, I might see a behavior or two, but with him, he looks at every single possible

deceptive behavior in his training and in the book that could, not in the book we wrote, but in,

you know, that we've given him to look for. You know, there's, there's a, you know, a huge number of behaviors.
He looks at every single one of those in a matter of seconds.

And then and then gives you, and then puts that into his analysis and then creates the

narrative.

Okay, here's another one. We're going to play SOT 11, which you fed to Q.
Let's watch it. This is of Tanko.
The other story is that

some just random person came in the house to kidnap the police.

Yeah. So now they have PIC involved.
They vacuum bagged the whole house.

And if my DNA was in there, like from dead skin cells, I'd be charged. It wasn't in the house.
Did the cops talk to you? Yeah, they told me this. Did they ever take DNA? Yeah.
They did? Yeah. Oh.

Or did they like a saliva? They did. Yeah.
Did they tell you that you were cleared? I said I didn't have to, but I didn't anyway. Okay.

And did they tell you you were cleared and you were good to go? No, they didn't say it. They'll say it's an open case.
The analysis.

In reviewing the speaker's answer, I identify two categories of behavior that suggest avoidance rather than a straightforward response. One, referring back to a previous statement.

The speaker says, that's what I'm saying. This phrase explicitly points back to an earlier remark instead of adding new information.

By implying the matter has already been settled, it discourages follow-up and shifts focus away from the core question. Ah, so interesting.

Number two, introducing off-topic details and hypothetical scenarios. Throughout the rest of the reply, the speaker describes how the FBI might collect DNA.
The FBI vacuumed out the house with my DNA.

Speculates about skin cell counts. You have a million skin cells.
Outlines procedural steps. They're going to bag it up.
They're going to DNA it to me and warns of hypothetical legal consequences.

And I'd be charged. There's no doubt about it.
The conclusion is deceptive behavior indicated.

None of these clauses addresses the direct question, what if any role they played in baby Lisa's disappearance? Instead, they divert attention

toward evidence.

and how it might be handled or why charges could follow because the response repeatedly relies on referring back to earlier remarks and on supplying extraneous distraction-oriented content rather than clarifying involvement.

It meets the threshold for indicating deceptive behavior. Phil, it's just like you, Phil.
You're such a humble guy, despite your many accomplishments, to

invent yourself right out of a job.

Yeah,

I think it won't be long. It's hopeful that it will, you know,

well, we'll keep the audience posted because I think there'll definitely be a, if this is commercially available in any way, shape, or form, I know many, many members of the audience will be interested.

You guys are awesome. As you guys know, we'll stay on it.
John Tanko has never been charged with any crimes related to the disappearance of Baby Lisa.

Police have never publicly considered Megan Wright a suspect in Baby Lisa's disappearance.

And we can now report that as a result of our series, the FBI has looked into this case again.

The FBI has reviewed the first five episodes of our Baby Lisa series and they are ready to hear from all of you if you have relevant and credible information.

You can reach the FBI directly at tips.fbi.gov. That's tips.fbi.gov.
They are ready to receive your inquiries.

We thank FBI Director Cash Patel and his team for taking this seriously and we will continue to bring you information as we get it.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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