Epiphany — Libby Caswell E8

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Oh,

hear that?

That's the Spam brand singing you a love song.

Spam, sizzle, pork, and mmm.

This is an iHeart original.

This story can be hard to hear.

There's detailed talk of suicide and violence, but we think it's important not to gloss over the reality of what happened to Libby Caswell.

Please take care while listening.

People don't understand why survivors just don't leave.

When you're in love with an abuser, your logic changes to a point where abuse is all that you know.

It's all that you think about.

It's all that you justify.

I would have done anything to make my abuser happy.

His happiness was the most important thing to me on the planet.

He was like the most kind, generous, charming young man.

Everyone loved him, my family, my friends, everyone.

I was one of those like fiercely independent women like no man's ever gonna put his hands on me.

And then that situation came to me directly.

Libby will never be able to share her experience of domestic violence with us.

But everything I've learned about what she went through, it's painfully familiar to me.

And that's because over the years, I've talked to dozens of other women, victims, whose stories are remarkably similar to Libby's.

He was controlling, but at that time I was really young and I kind of romanticized the control and the extreme jealousy.

It was very sporadic at the beginning.

There were other behaviors that probably should have been a red flag.

I thought like he's got a temper.

He can be really mean, but I didn't see it as abuse at that time.

He was always angry.

He would punch walls or punch trees or slam doors and punch the bed to create an environment of physical intimidation, threat.

The first time he hit me was a punch where I lost air.

It was punching my gut, and I remember I thought in my head, I'm dying.

I remember I fell to my knees.

It took me a while to grasp my air, but it was a shock because it's

those seconds feel horrible.

The first time that I experienced my ex-husband, the father of my kids, put his hands around my neck.

I was about 17 years old and he was 18.

The first time I experienced strangulation was on my 30th birthday.

And he looks at me directly and put his hands around my neck.

And he is a pretty tall guy around 661 and he's big hand so it only took him one hand to just go around my whole neck.

And he grabbed me by my throat and slammed me against the garage.

And then he slammed me on the ground and cracked my head open.

I just was in shock and I was scared.

He would do it to the point before killing me.

It was more of proving a point.

I'm the boss.

You listen to me.

You obey to me and then release you he was

i'm so sorry about what happened i didn't mean to hurt you i was just really jealous and that's how the cycle stayed right you just forgive and it's not gonna happen again i always wanted to believe that that was not gonna happen again

I felt so incredibly alone.

I never told anyone what had happened.

And it was shameful too, right?

Just like, oh my gosh, I have this

wonderful, charming, handsome boyfriend.

What is people gonna say?

I got to the point that he was strangling me and I was welcoming it.

I was like, please just effing kill me, you know, and just fucking kill me.

And that really, really was what kind of kicked my ass into gear.

That scared me, that I was welcoming it.

And

I had gotten so desperate and wanted out of that situation so badly that I just wanted him to kill me.

I always had the hope that he was going to change initially.

And then that hope turning to fear of leaving him.

And at that point, it probably was my third or fourth time trying to leave the relationship.

The only reason I left really

was because I wouldn't be here today if I had stayed.

He would have killed me.

I'm sure of it.

From iHeart Podcasts, I'm Melissa Geltson, and this is what happened to Libby Caswell.

302, what exactly happened?

Tell me again.

I don't know what happened.

I mean with nobody on scene to tell him what happened.

He was crying and upset and I was like, man, what happened?

If they were just going back and got the video, one or two things would happen.

To fit this to rest a little bit, something bad happened that things got out of control.

There's a fly through your window.

So, why did she mind?

What had happened is we were at the scene.

But that actually happened to her, and I have pictures of it.

She didn't ever tell me of the extent of all the things that happened.

I don't honestly know what happened.

Nobody wants to believe that shit happened.

I shouldn't have fucked her.

But it is what it is.

That is what happened.

And how many times do you estimate that this happened while you knew her?

I am so sorry for what happened.

When I seen that story, I was blored.

I really was.

That's not what happened.

There could be a thousand.

Maybe I shouldn't, but that isn't what happened.

Watching the water.

Watching the water.

all I see

tonight.

How do you even tell a child this story when they ask, what happened to my mother?

Chapter 8, Epiphany.

There's somewhere between 3 to 5 million abused women every year.

This is Jackie Campbell, a pioneering researcher in the field of domestic violence.

Even though we know prior domestic violence is the biggest risk factor for a woman being murdered by their partner, there's only about 1,200 women, 1,200 to 1,500, that get murdered every year.

That's a tiny, tiny fraction.

of all of the abused women.

And that's why it's important to figure out what are the characteristics of that abusive relationship that you say, ah, that's dangerous.

The danger assessment is meant for those women.

38 years ago, Campbell created the danger assessment tool.

It's essentially a series of questions to help victims of abuse better understand the danger their partner poses to them.

It's based on research into known risk factors for lethal domestic violence.

Has the physical violence increased in severity or frequency?

Has he ever forced you to have sex when you did not wish to do so?

Does he ever try to choke, strangle, or cut off your breathing?

Does he use illegal drugs?

Does he control most?

Campbell's goal was that someone, a social worker or a health care provider or a police officer responding to a domestic violence call, could use the questions to assess how much danger a victim was in and intervene before it was too late.

The tool is now used by law enforcement in dozens of states as a proactive approach to reducing domestic violence homicides.

As far as I can tell, Libby was never given a danger assessment.

No professional ever asked Libby questions about the increasing level of abuse she was dealing with, about the types of abuse she endured, or the threats that went along with it.

But what seems clear to me is that Libby's relationship with Devon was extremely dangerous.

Instead of being labeled uncooperative or a nuisance, what if Libby had been given this assessment?

Would it have changed how IPD interacted with her and her family?

Would it have changed her own behavior, knowing just how much danger she was in?

Cindy had never heard of the danger assessment, but after she began working with Alliance for Hope, she was introduced to Jackie Campbell.

And one day, she sat down with her to do the assessment on Libby's behalf.

She said she was going to ask me a series of questions, answer them to the best of my knowledge, and so that's what I did.

Before Campbell gave Cindy the results, she explained how the assessment is scored.

Zero to eight is called variable danger.

That's the lowest level, but we never say there's no danger in domestic violence.

Any domestic violence situation could escalate to a homicide.

The second level is 8 to 13, which is called increased danger.

14 to 17 is severe danger.

And then 18 or more is extreme danger.

So she got a 36.

This is, I think,

the highest score I've ever gotten on a danger assessment.

The absolute highest score you can get on it is 39.

I don't think I've ever seen that.

That almost made me faint.

I'm serious.

It also made me think if any person involved in her case, in the court system, if any one of them would have offered up an assessment, could that have helped her?

Would she be alive today?

And so in my mind, I thought, why don't they know about this?

Why haven't I heard about this?

Why is this a secret?

It feels like a secret.

This was a bit of an aha moment for Cindy.

I understood from our many conversations that beyond wanting to discover the truth of what happened to Libby in the motel room that day, Cindy was looking for more answers, deeper answers, about why things went so wrong for Libby.

and where they could have gone differently years before her death.

Jackie Campbell's danger assessment confirmed what Cindy felt in her gut, that Libby had been failed by a system that was supposed to support her.

It also got Cindy thinking about better ways to help victims of domestic violence like Libby.

Because around this time, Cindy was also becoming something of an advocate.

She told me she wanted IPD to begin using the danger assessment with domestic violence victims, and also for the city to rescind the nuisance law that had been used to penalize her family all those years earlier.

Since I've learned so many things about

domestic violence, I am ready to try to get the right ears to listen.

Hopefully our state and city officials will start to recognize how important that is.

In In October 2022, Cindy and I both traveled to Colorado to attend a conference called Getting Away with Murder.

It was an opportunity for law enforcement from around the country to learn how to spot staged crime scenes and strategies to prosecute them.

Cindy had been invited by Casey Gwynn and Alliance for Hope to speak about Libby's case.

Cindy, you want me to come to you?

Chair, just come to you.

I feel less nervous by my chair.

Hi, I'm Cynthia Caswell.

My daughter was Libby Caswell.

And she was a beautiful young 21-year-old girl.

In Colorado, I got to watch firsthand as Cindy tested out her new role as an advocate,

telling the large crowd details of the most difficult experience of her life, all in the hopes that it would someday be useful.

That's my goal.

I would love for the police department to really

examine a situation and ask questions to the family.

We were never asked anything.

No questions.

We tried to offer information and

really they just had their minds made up.

So

anyway, thank you for listening.

During one of the sessions, photos from the crime scene were projected on a massive screen.

I was sitting next to Cindy at a long table and I watched as she kept her eyes averted, trained on the floor, to avoid seeing her daughter's dead body.

I asked her about it later during a break.

It's just a lot of different things and have had to sit back and kind of process it.

All day I just felt this

blue feeling and I didn't know why.

I thought, you know, I talked to myself, you're okay.

Take some deep breaths, smell a flower, blow out the candle.

You know, I'd learned that recently.

In between the panel discussions and events, Cindy and I tried to buffer the intensity of the conference with the serenity of our surroundings, situated as we were at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park.

When the talks became too much, we would take quiet walks through the snow.

Maybe it was just having a moment in nature away from Cindy's life and independence.

Or maybe it was her growing understanding about her daughter's experience with domestic violence.

But something in Cindy's past came to the surface.

One evening, she mentioned to me that many years ago, long before Libby was born, her older sister, Dieta, was killed by her ex-husband.

I was pretty taken aback to hear this.

In reporting this story, I've interviewed Cindy well over a dozen times.

I've asked her some incredibly personal questions and she's always answered them, no matter how difficult.

But not once had Dieta's name come up.

I didn't press Cindy for too many details at the time.

It had been an emotional weekend and I could tell it was hard for her to talk about her sister.

But back at my computer, I did some googling and found a newspaper story from 1987 with the headline, Six Die in Murder-Suicide.

Here's what happened.

One week after Dieta Knight, who was just 27, divorced her husband Virgil, he came to her home and shot and killed her and their two young sons.

He also killed a friend Dietta had been hanging out with earlier in the evening and the friend's boyfriend.

He then took his own life.

Looking at the date on the article, I realized it happened almost exactly 30 years to the day before Libby's death.

And there was more.

As our time in Colorado went on, Cindy continued to open up to me about the cycle of domestic violence, not just within her family, but within her own marriage too.

You know, Virgil did it to my sister.

And

then Devin did it to Libby.

And of course, my husband verbally abused me.

Cindy told me that her husband, Robert, was never physically abusive, but had a habit of raising his voice, calling her names, making her feel bad about herself.

Robert declined to be interviewed for this podcast.

Cindy also told me that like Libby, like so many victims, she tried multiple times to leave her husband, but faced resistance.

He took my

Before the third and final where I divorced him.

And it was always that same

thing that they talk about of how the man will beg and plead and try to point out all the places where he's a good guy.

He works every day.

He works his butt off for us.

Except he didn't use nice language.

And so I'd be like, well, and it's not, he's not hitting me, you know, but really it's a severe punch in the gut, some of the words that are used when someone's verbally abusing you.

I kept trying to help him.

And this is why I think Libby did the same thing with Devin, because she witnessed me trying to love her dad through some stuff.

And so I'm in therapy about that, you know, because I feel like I should have gone when they were littler.

After her death, I moved out later that year, 2018.

And then I never came back.

That was like it.

I think I finally just like, it all just kind of,

I had an epiphany.

It was a wake-up time.

You know, I was, I just kind of was shaken

and awakened

by that.

There's a lot going on in Hollywood.

How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

Variety has the solution.

Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

Where do you see the business actually heading?

Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.

The only constant in Hollywood is change.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's

shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Over the course of working on this podcast, and even since the first episode came out, I've been hearing rumors about Libby's death that could take the investigation in different directions.

I've heard, for example, that people other than Devin were involved.

Nefarious characters who may have been at the sports stadium in the day Libby died.

And not just random strangers, but people in Devin's orbit.

I know IPD has heard all kinds of rumors too.

But as of now, they've remained just that.

And I actually have a little sympathy for IPD in this regard because every rumor I've tried to chase down seems to come to a dead end with someone's drug-fueled memory and little else.

Except for one.

In late 2022, a witness came forward who claims to have seen Devin in a panic at his dad's house the day Libby was found.

But not at night, in the morning, 12 hours before Devin called 911 to report Libby's death.

The witness is named Tommy.

He's a friend of Devin's father, Charlie.

When I interviewed him, he told me he came forward with this information five years after Libby's death.

because it was only then that he saw a news report about the investigation and learned what Devin had been telling police.

So what happened in room 319?

Libby's boyfriend told police he and Libby checked into the sports stadium motel around 6.30 that morning.

When I seen that story, I was blored.

I really was.

That's not what happened.

He had the story straight, but the time, the timeframe was wrong.

Tommy told me he had been visiting Charlie a lot around this time in late 2017, helping him in various ways through a rough patch.

Charlie was going through kind of a hard time, going through divorce and some other struggles.

So I was helping him out to keep his kid in school so he wouldn't get BHS involved.

A week or so before Libby's death, at one of these visits to Charlie's house, Tommy met Devin and Libby.

He saw that they too were struggling.

He says he lent the money for a hotel.

and helped Libby with some car troubles.

He also made plans with Libby to do more work on her car that Monday, December 11th.

But when Monday morning rolled around, Tommy would learn that there wasn't going to be a meetup to fix Libby's car.

I went to Charlie's house to pick his son up to take him to grade school.

Devin and a friend of his pulled up in Libby's car.

His dad and his stepbrother was just coming out of the house to get in the car.

And Devin stopped his dad to ask him what he should do because he woke up and found Libby dead hanging in the bathroom.

And I remember the exact words his dad told him.

I don't know if I could say it on air, but.

Yeah, you can say it.

Okay.

He told him, I'll tell you what to do.

You get your ass back to the hotel, you call the fucking cops.

And if you were to estimate around, what time of day was it?

Well,

since I was there to take Devin's stepbrother to school, I don't remember what time grade school starts.

It was around 8.30 maybe, 8.

I'm positive it was morning time.

I'm positive it was on a Monday morning.

Tommy actually brought this information to the police in December 2022.

Someone gave me your name and said that you might have some information on the Libby Caswell death.

Steve Schmidley, the lead detective on Libby's case, asked Tommy what he knew.

I know for a fact that he knew she was dead in the morning

It was the morning because I seen him over there at his dad's.

That's when he confronted his dad about it.

It was in the morning time.

Detective Schmidley listens to what Tommy says, tries to clarify the story, and responds.

I mean, but I mean, there's consistencies with what you're saying, but you're saying that this was the morning of.

I don't know.

I mean,

we got called that evening there roughly around 8 o'clock.

They're convinced that this was that that more.

I'm 99.9 on that.

Like I said, it's been a lot of years.

I kind of was doubting, you know, what if maybe it was the day after.

Okay, well, if it was the next morning, Devin wouldn't have been there asking his dad what he should do.

You know, I've got no reason to be

absolutely making this up.

No, no, no, no.

I don't think you're making anything up.

Like I said, there's a lot of consistencies that you're saying, you know.

But it's just trying to,

you know, I don't know i'm glad that you did come in absolutely i don't know if this is going to change anything because again unfortunately at the end of the day you know when when libby passed you know the only people in the room you know are probably going to be devin and libby it does appear that she did hang herself you know the family obviously thinks that she was murdered by devin obviously if there was enough to charge devin with the murder right it probably already been charged so obviously there's not enough at this point to indicate that Devin and he's denied any wrongdoing.

Like I said, I'm going to take a report.

I've got your phone number.

We need anything.

If true, Tommy's story is significant because it contradicts the time Devin said he discovered Libby's body and raises questions about how he spent the day.

But as far as I can tell, IPD doesn't seem alarmed or particularly interested in this new information.

Maybe they don't think Tommy's story is credible, or it's just too much work to confirm or deny either way.

I can't explain the logic or reasoning behind their actions, but former prosecutor Casey Gwynn has his own cynical take.

If this was a powerful

woman with status in the culture, this case would have been resolved by now, and the killer would be in jail.

But Libby Caswell didn't have status.

She didn't have privilege.

She was was a nobody to the Independence Police Department and found dead in a scummy motel.

I think when they got to the point that they couldn't clearly just prove that it was a homicide, they chose suicide as the easy way out of a comprehensive investigation.

About six months into my investigation, I received a strange email from the Independence Police Department.

They told me they were denying my most recent request for public records, internal emails and text messages that included Libby or Devin's name.

I was confused.

They'd already given me a bunch of material without pushback.

But I quickly realized there was a reason they couldn't release any more information.

Libby's case had been reopened.

And, as I was later told, the FBI was now involved.

I called Cindy to tell her the news as soon as I could.

Hi.

Hi.

So you're pulled over?

I am.

Okay.

I'm sorry for the noise behind me.

I'm at a kids' soccer game, so it's very loud.

But

I wanted to let you know right away.

So I just found out that the FBI has reopened the case.

Oh, my goodness.

Thank God.

This is what Cindy had been waiting for.

Another agency to look into the case, to investigate what IPD hadn't.

I am a mixed bag of excited, I'm emotional feeling, you know,

because for five years, we've been waiting to get justice for her.

And now I feel like we're on the track.

We're starting the race.

Now we're going to get the right things going.

There's a lot going on in Hollywood.

How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

Variety has the solution.

Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

Where do you see the business actually heading?

Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.

The only constant in Hollywood is change.

Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It was an unimaginable crime.

It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger, who killed the four University of Idaho students.

The defense are on a sinking ship.

It was clear at that point he was out of options.

Nearly 30 months of silence until.

Bombshell Development Brian Koberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.

No trial, no testimony.

He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary and then four counts of murder.

In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.

Why did the prosecution take this?

They were holding all the cars.

How on earth could you make a deal?

What message does that send?

Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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In March 2023, Cindy finds herself, files in hand, at a drab office building in downtown Independence.

She's been invited to a meeting to talk about the status of Libby's case.

Cindy's eager to hear what the FBI has uncovered in the past few months, and also to meet the new IPD detective taking over for Schmidley, who'd retired.

But scanning the meeting room, Cindy quickly realizes Schmidley's replacement isn't there, nor is anyone from the FBI.

Before she has a chance to ask any questions, Erin Hunt, a prosecuting attorney for the county, kicks off the meeting.

She just introduces herself and then she just starts talking about how they are really sorry about what has happened and given their condolences about Livy's death, then started telling me the story of where they're at.

And so

she told me that this isn't a pride thing.

They want justice for their citizens.

They want justice for me.

They wouldn't let pride standing in the way of justice.

That's not what they're about.

Cindy feels a pit growing in her stomach.

They're trying to sugarcoat something.

This FBI team, they were called the behavior analyst team.

She says they did an independent investigation of their own and their conclusion was that

my daughter committed suicide and the case is now closed.

And I said to her,

how could they come up with a conclusion when they didn't even gather the evidence needed to make an informed decision?

Despite all the hopes Cindy had going into this meeting, this was exactly what had happened before.

IPD, and the FBI, it appeared, had shut the case once again without talking to her, without doing a full victimology, without seeming to take into consideration the undetermined ruling or what Dr.

Bill Smock had found in the forensic evidence.

I said nobody even asked us, nobody asked us anything.

And then I left.

I sat in my car and I cried for a long time.

I just cried and drove around.

I didn't really want to come home yet because I didn't want to bring that in the house.

I did not cry in front of the police.

I requested public records involving Libby from the FBI over six months ago, but have not yet received a response.

I also asked the FBI for an interview to explain the length and breadth of their investigation.

They declined and deferred comment to IPD.

I was told, quote, the FBI only assisted with this case.

The Independence Missouri Police Department was the lead investigator.

I was really struck by the discrepancy between how the prosecuting attorney described the FBI's involvement, characterizing it, according to Cindy, as a full investigation, and how the FBI responded when I inquired, which was to distance themselves from significant involvement in the case.

It is very clear that the FBI never did an independent investigation in this case.

Because Casey Gwynn has worked with law enforcement for more than three decades, I was curious what he made of this.

There is always an opportunity in these cases for a local law enforcement agency to say to the FBI, we need your help.

We need independent review.

We need you to take over this case.

We need you to come in and re-look at everything we've done.

That did not happen.

There is little doubt that the only thing that happened is that the FBI was asked to look at the motel room, take some pictures, take some measurements, do an on-site review.

That's it.

And that is not enough to conclude whether or not this was a homicide or a suicide.

For the Independent Police Department to say that the FBI agrees with them and their conclusion is, in my opinion, one of the most dishonest things I've ever seen a police department do.

I also asked Gwen what options Cindy had left.

Sooner or later somebody talks.

Sooner or later other evidence comes forward.

We have said to Cindy and we will continue to say the Alliance for Hope International team is with you.

We will not give up.

We will not stop.

We will not back down.

We will continue to advocate for justice for Libby.

After all this time, and all the

stuff we've been through, I'm not intimidated that easily.

I just keep picking at it and I keep showing up and I'm not going to give up.

I think they didn't expect us to fight like that for this girl on the bathroom floor.

This fight, it takes up a big part of Cindy's life.

There are days she's optimistic.

and others where she feels hopeless.

In between, she carries on.

She's essentially a single mom now, raising Xavier as her own.

And in the last few months, her life has gone through some big changes.

She quit her job at the Price Chopper Bakery, and she got a new job, driving the special needs bus for the school district so that her work hours align with Xavier's time at school.

She's also pursuing a degree.

in early childhood education.

As this episode comes out in December 2023, it will have been six years since Libby's death.

With time comes the sting of realizing how far Cindy has gone without her oldest daughter and how her grief has been folded into a new rhythm of life.

I think she would have turned 27 in March.

Sometimes I

do the math.

You know, I have to get my calculator out because

I forget, you know, and it's, it makes me sad that I would forget that, but

I have a lot going on.

When her birthday comes around, we all go to dinner together as a family.

We ask for a big table.

We leave a chair open for Libby.

So we toast her and we talk about all the good things and funny things that she did.

We usually tip the waitress really well because it's usually a young woman that is making her living, you know, with tips.

And if Libby's case, even if it never becomes more solved or resolved than it is now, but if other things were to change, like the nuisance law got overturned or independence changed how they dealt with domestic violence, would that make a difference for you in terms of thinking about what Libby's death meant?

If you would have asked me that a few years ago, I would have said, I'm not hearing that you know what i mean now i think

there still needs to be some changes and if i can see some changes made to help the next young woman i think libby would be happy with that

i think that she would be

saying right on mom you didn't give up

During the year and a half I've immersed myself in Libby's story.

I've had the privilege of watching Cindy change.

The first time I met her, she spoke so quietly I wasn't sure the mic was even going to pick her up.

Now when we talk, she's still reserved, but she's got a certain confidence that seems to grow by the day.

I wish I could give her the resolution she so desperately wants and deserves.

I still can't say for sure what happened to Libby inside room 319.

I don't share the certainty that some others have expressed in this podcast.

I believe it was possible, even probable, that she was murdered based on the forensic evidence and what I've learned about the circumstances surrounding her death.

I also believe it's not outside the realm of possibility that Libby took her own life.

due to pain emanating from an abusive relationship and a prolonged struggle with drug abuse that threatened the things she cared about most.

Ultimately, I hope that sharing Libby's story will continue to stir up conversation to motivate people who might have information about her death to come forward.

But what I am certain about is how profoundly Libby was failed when she was alive.

As a teen, she was taught through the police's actions and inactions that her problems were a nuisance and that seeking help was likely to get her in trouble.

She got the message that she had to handle it alone and that isolation, it would come to define the rest of her short life.

She kept her struggles private even as they became more and more unmanageable.

I think a lot about that last week of her life, when Devon strangled her and she finally told someone in a position of authority about his abuse.

I think about how terrifying it must have been to have someone hold your life hostage, literally in their hands, and how scared she was, as evidenced by her final conversations with her friends Nathan and Brian.

It never should have got to the point where Libby was in that motel room with Devin.

She needed help that week, months before, and years earlier.

Despite the fact she was exhibiting all the most critical red flags, the systems in place for people like her did not support Libby.

And I consider that a failure for all of us.

I wish Libby had felt less alone.

I wish she had gone to the shelter when Colleen got her a bed.

But that time is past.

Now all we can do is try to to make the system better for victims like Libby.

And it's worth saying, for people who use violence too.

Because they also deserve saving.

Often, I find myself thinking about Xavier.

Cindy still hasn't told him this story.

But sooner or later, she'll have to.

I think about what we can do to make sure that boys and men who are exposed to traumatic events get help, break the cycle, go on to live healthy lives.

And I believe that process starts with people like Cindy.

Every day after school and I get home, I sit with him and ask him about his day.

Sometimes he'll answer me in Curious George language.

which is really funny.

And because you know, Curious George just kind of goes, ah, ah.

And I'll say, that is monkey talk.

I don't know what you're saying, you know, and then I'll tickle him and laugh.

He calls me mom.

We tried, we tried and tried to get him to call us grandma and grandpa.

We've had him see psychologists and therapists.

And they all say, you know, it's not that he doesn't know you're not his mom.

He just

he sees other kids have mom and dad, and so that's why he's doing it.

Because when you ask him who his mom is, he says Libby.

What Happened to Libby Caswell is written, reported, and hosted by me, Melissa Jeltson, with writing and story editing by Marissa Brown and Lauren Hansen.

This episode was edited by Jeremy Thal and Zubin Hensler.

Our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch.

For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Jason English and Katrina Norvell, with our supervising producer, Carl Kadel.

Fact-checking by Maya Shukri.

Archival material courtesy of KSHB 41 News.

Our theme song is written by Erin Kaufman and performed by Aaron Kaufman and Elizabeth Wolf.

Original music by Erin Kaufman with additional music by Jeremy Thal and Zubin Hensler.

Our episodes are mixed and mastered by Carl Kadel and Zubin Hensler.

I want to give a special thanks to Libby's family, especially Cindy and Natalie Caswell, as well as Libby's friends, Alliance for Hope International, Sarah Plague, and countless other experts and academics who gave me their time.

An extra special shout out to Pete Monica for being an early listener and a constant support, and to Evie Monica, who was born during the making of this show.

There's a firelight through your window.

So, why do she

miss

anyone start splitting two

Holy wait across the line

and the light reflects

in my head, it slips

and the siren cold.

I fall under

it

watching the water

rise

I see tonight

Washing the water

tonight

Washing the water

tonight

So the fire is cool and coward

And you die in love

is coward

If it was was intended,

I would have slowed it down the night

and I played it back

only at half speed

like an alternate

for a time

and lead

washing the water on

the rise

while I sing tonight

Washing the water on

the rise

while I sing tonight

Washing the water on

the rise

while I sing tonight

waited in the river

half awake within a dream

She said I walls all fleeting

till there's nothing

between

And I fall apart

and we overlay

And I find myself

in a different

place.

Watching the water run

the rifle.

I'm sinking again tonight.

Watching the water run

the rifle.

I'm sinking again tonight.

This is an iHeart podcast.