Black Shadows — Libby Caswell E7

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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.

I cared about Elizabeth more than any human being on this planet.

She was going to be my wife.

You know what I mean?

For the rest of our lives, we were supposed to be together.

You're hearing the voice of Devin Martin, a voice you might have noticed has been largely absent from the series so far.

It's not for lack of trying.

For the past year and a half, I've made numerous attempts to speak with Devin, sending him emails and reaching out over social media, letting him know I was making a show about Libby and that I wanted his side of the story.

I know he's received my messages, but I've never heard anything back.

His mom, Mindy, said he didn't want to talk to me.

What I do have of Devin's voice is the 911 call and the two interviews he's done with the Independence Police Department.

One in 2017, right after Libby's death, and then one two years later.

And it's in that second interview where he gets more personal.

I want my life back.

Libby Casboy was loved by so many people.

No one wanted to believe that she would ever do anything like that to herself because no one could believe that.

Look at us.

We was the fucking, we was the king and queen in high school.

That's what we did.

I was a job, she was a

gymnast and a cheerleader, and that's everyone on the outside looking in.

We was the perfect couple.

Nobody wants to believe that shit happened.

I sure fuck don't, but it is what it is.

That is what happened.

This shit is fucking ruining my life, and people need to leave me alone.

And that's that's how I feel about it because I'm the one who lost someone dearly to me.

There's so much I'd like to talk to Devin about.

Not just what happened the night Libby died.

Devin has always maintained his innocence.

I don't think he'd give me a different account.

And not just his perspective on his and Libby's relationship, the allegations of domestic violence, the drug use.

But I'd also like to hear from Devin about his life and how he grew up.

Because as I've come to understand, it wasn't easy.

I watched my mother get beat my entire childhood.

I've been around health my whole life.

I was picking my mom up off the floor with needles hanging out of her arm when I was five years old.

I know what the shit brings, you know what I mean?

Even if Devin won't talk to me, I still want to try to paint a fair portrait.

Because just as Libby's story didn't happen in a vacuum, neither did Devin's.

In his absence, I've spoken to people close to him, including his mom, his stepmom, and his sister.

These are women who love Devin, who support Devin, who admit he's a complicated character, but who also wholeheartedly believe that he is not responsible for Libby's death.

My son did not murder Libby.

There's no way he could live with himself and just live life if he had done something like that.

I know he couldn't.

I know they did some dumb things together and...

you know, made some bad choices together, but in my heart, a heart, I don't believe that that boy did that.

I feel it in my heart, and if I'm wrong, then I'm wrong, but that's just, then I guess I wouldn't know my brother, you know.

There's a fire through your window.

So I didn't shield my

podcast.

I'm Melissa Jeltson, and this is what happened to Libby Caswell.

I wait across the land.

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

You know, I had to find out after her death.

So was she on her back and he was like straddling her?

Yes.

Okay, and he had his hands around her throat.

Yes.

They were, you know, young puppy love.

It was always, oh, babe this, babe

making up stupid nicknames that they'd probably show.

He really went off the rails with

like some people go off the rails, some people don't.

Watching the water

rise

while I sleep tonight.

Washing the water

while

Chapter 7.

Black Shadows Are Never Good

For most of the time I've been reporting on Libby, Devin has been in prison in Kansas serving time on a drug charge.

He was recently released and paroled back to Missouri.

In and out of jail, this is a pattern for Devin that stretches back years.

It's hard to get a complete picture as his offenses cover multiple states and counties.

But as far as I can tell, Devin has had dozens and dozens of encounters with police since the age of 17, many of them related to drugs and theft.

The summer before Libby died, he had gotten in enough trouble that he was included on the IPD's monthly most active core offenders list.

His mugshot was one of 10 emailed to the entire department, alerting them of his recent arrests for burglary, assault, and disturbance.

It noted that he was, quote, physically violent.

According to IPD, the people added to this list were the ones with the most frequent and recent police contact.

They were then targeted by IPD for, quote, proactive enforcement and by county prosecutors for potential legal action.

So, how did Devin end up on this list at age 21?

More importantly, I wanted to find out, how did this pattern begin?

At Devin's request,

he didn't want me to talk to you, but I don't care if he gets mad at me for the rest of his life.

I feel like I need to talk to you.

It took me more than a year of trying before Devin's mom, Mindy, finally agreed to talk to me to help me fill in the blanks in Devin's backstory.

Once I got her on the phone, she was surprisingly open and eager to share about her own life and about Devin's childhood.

His father and I both had such sensibility problems.

His father and I stayed together until he was,

I want to say, four or five, and then we finally split.

Mindy says after they broke up, Devin initially stayed with her and his half-sister Roxanne, who was seven years older than Devin.

And with Mindy working, it was often Roxanne who had to care for her little brother.

She was making the money, whatever, taking care of us, but I was the one that always

did the laundry, made sure Devin was like, give him a bath, you know, like all this kind of stuff.

If anybody knows Devin, it's me because I'm the one that raised him.

Roxanne told me it took her a while to recognize signs of her mom's drug abuse.

As I got older, I realized she still was getting high because later on in my life, I got high

and I know what it is now, like seeing her in the bedroom smoking cigarettes and then coloring fuzzy posters, falling asleep, like burning her blankets, you know, like because she's falling out, you know.

Mindy, Devin's mom, told me that she struggled with methamphetamine throughout her life.

One relapse happened when Devin was about eight.

I had been cleaned for seven years, seven and a half half years, and I fell off the wagon,

lost my job, and was losing my apartment.

And so he went with his father, who I believed was clean.

I asked her specifically how witnessing drug use at home might have impacted Devon.

Well, I'm sure it affected him tremendously.

He's not ever said anything to me, so

but I'm not saying it didn't happen by no means.

I'm sure it probably did, but I don't know what it is or what he saw, you know.

Devin seems to have spent most of his elementary school years with his mom and his middle school years with his dad and his stepmom, who have since split up.

Devin's dad, Charlie, hasn't wanted to speak with me about his son.

However, I did manage to get a hold of Devin's stepmom, Jamie.

Do you know if, you know, have there been any physical violence or emotional abuse in either of the households that he grew up in.

No, it never got physical.

But I think that verbal is probably what he dealt with.

Jamie is adamant that the periods Devin lived with his dad and her, they were sober and stable.

But when she thinks about the other years when she wasn't around, it's trickier.

Would you say that Devin experienced a lot of trauma as a child?

I would say

possibly.

I don't know if trauma is the right word, but I would say he experienced

maybe some abandonment issues.

As Devin entered his teens, he began clashing with his father.

And according to his mom, Mindy, his dad pulled away.

When he was 14, Devin called me from school one day and said, mom, come and get me.

And I said, what?

He said, your dad's never going to let me come and get you.

What are you talking about?

Charlie signed a piece of paper saying he was buying his rights over to me.

We didn't go to court with it or anything.

But he did that in front of Devin, and that affected Devin tremendously.

I cried for Devin when his father did that.

I also found out that for some stretch of his teen years, Devin lived in a boy's home.

He kept running away.

Trauma, abuse, abandonment.

Those are difficult terms to say out loud, especially when it's about someone you care about, when it feels personal.

I understood why Jamie was hesitant to label Devin's experience.

But when I prodded her on specifics, like the drug abuse he has described seeing as a kid, her tone changed.

I do believe that he,

I guess that would be trauma.

Yeah, I do.

I know that he experienced seeing some things that he probably shouldn't have seen, or I know that he shouldn't have seen, and probably heard some, heard things that he should not have heard.

Yes, I will agree to that.

In my years reporting on men who are violent towards their partners, some similarities have emerged.

It's cliché to say hurt people hurt people, but it's often true.

And it's especially true of kids who grow up neglected or witness or experience emotional or physical abuse.

As they grow older, not only are these kids more likely to have problems with substance abuse, they are also more likely to either perpetrate or be a victim of violence in their own intimate relationships.

Okay, so the brain is extraordinarily complex and we know a lot about it, but there's way, way, way more that we don't know.

Diane Vines is a family therapist who specializes in how trauma can affect neurodevelopment or the way the young brain builds pathways for things like learning, focus, and social skills.

She isn't Devin's therapist, doesn't know his case, but I asked her to talk broadly about how childhood trauma can translate into behavioral patterns.

When your brain perceives that you are under threat, it mounts a stress response.

So a lot of things happen.

You are more likely because of the way your brain is wired to help you either fight, flight, freeze, faint, more likely to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy, like more drinking, more smoking, illicit drugs, you know, casual, dangerous sex, all kinds of things.

Vine says that some children learn to cope with trauma in unhealthy ways that carry over into adulthood.

People think about abuse and then they think about neglect.

And very often neglect is even worse.

You learn not to trust people.

When you grow up in that kind of house where there are no adults who are emotionally present for you, in order to get any needs met, you're going to have to manipulate people and situations just to get basic needs met because you can't just simply ask.

So you basically train to be manipulative just to survive.

That's a pretty easy connection to make.

People who have not been supported by people don't trust people.

They take what they need, they use people the way they need to, and they discard the rest.

They don't let people get close to them because people who get close hurt.

From what I've gathered, it doesn't seem like Devin had many supports in place to handle the challenges he was facing as a young boy.

It's not surprising, perhaps, that as Devin went from kid to teen, he turned to a thing that was readily available, something he'd seen in his own home, something he'd been trying his whole life to avoid.

He kept telling me, yeah, no, I'm not going to do that, Christine.

I don't want, I see what my dad's going through and I see what my mom does.

I talked to Christine, a woman in independence whose daughter dated Devin in eighth and ninth grade before he dated Libby.

For the most part, he was a really polite kid, always saying, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, please, thank you.

He was a hard worker.

Anytime we were doing any kind of work with the house, he helped us with that.

Christine had memories of going to his wrestling matches and football games where Devin showed a lot of talent.

She and Devin spoke often too, and despite his home life, he seemed okay.

But she soon started to worry for him.

In ninth grade, I could tell Devin was starting to separate.

I could see it.

I knew it was coming.

And I had talked to him and talked to him and kept trying to encourage him.

I'm like, don't, Devin.

It's all bad, you know?

And he's like, I know, I know my mom talks about the black shadows that haunt her when she does her drugs.

And I'm like, see, you don't want to do that.

I said, that's not good black shadows are never good

at some point Devin began to use meth the drug that had plagued the city of independence the drug that had wreaked havoc on his childhood homes and after that things changed he dropped out of school no more wrestling no more football No more polite, helpful kid.

Meth caught up with his sister, Roxanne, too.

She told me that it was her goal as a child to avoid following the same path as her mom, Mindy.

But ultimately, Meth was just there.

I always

told myself I was never going to do what she did, you know.

But then, like, I got so tired of it, and I just

wanted to try it because I wanted to know why she wouldn't stop to be there for us kids, you know?

Diane Vines told me that it's common for people who've experienced high levels of childhood trauma to struggle with drugs and alcohol.

I think they're self-medicating, to be honest.

You know, when your body's feeling that tense and that, and you're that upset, you can't get those thoughts to stop.

Sometimes, or often, if you take a substance, it'll stop for a while.

So if you can get that dopamine hit that you can't get from people and that you need so that you relieve that physiological distress, that's very often what they're doing.

Roxanne admitted that this was one reason why she and Devin used drugs, often together.

There would be times to where it's like,

you know, like we'd be sitting there crying with each other.

And then it's like

we hate our lives.

And

it's as ridiculous as it sounds, like we both sit there and cry together.

And then,

like, right after we say all that stuff, there we go, light up a bowl, you know, because

it's like the only thing that would just make us stop crying or feeling anything, you know.

I didn't want my life to turn out how it was and how it is, and he didn't either.

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I was at Charlie's apartment and I heard somebody out in the living room and I came up out of it because I heard Devin was like, I just found Libby dead.

I just found Libby.

Jamie, Devin's stepmom, remembers seeing Devin on that day, December 11th, 2017.

She and Charlie had split up by then, but she said she was over at his apartment.

In her recollection, it was evening, but she admits she'd been using drugs at the time, so her memory is a little hazy.

Still, she can't forget how Devin was acting.

The look on his face, he was terrified.

I remember being terrified and he was shaking, and he said he had just found her.

And he's in panic mode, straight panic mode.

He said he found her and he called 911 and he left.

This, of course, is also the same story that Devin told police the night of Libby's death.

Jamie couldn't remember any other details from that night, including Devin's phone call from jail, where he seemingly asked her and Charlie to tell police he'd been at their house.

But Jamie told me she is convinced that Devin's story is true and points to the fact that in 2019, IPD interviewed him again and offered up a polygraph.

There is a way that you can show me

that you did or didn't do this.

Yes, right now.

Would you take one?

Absolutely.

Would you pass it?

No question.

You would?

Absolutely.

I mean, if you pass it, that would settle this.

Well, let you come.

What happens if you fail it?

There's no, that's not an option.

Devin eventually took the polygraph, and he did pass.

But the idea that the results could, quote, settle the issue of whether Devin was involved in Libby's death wasn't actually true.

Polygraphs have long been discredited because they're just not accurate, and their results are no longer admissible in court.

These days, police use the polygraph mostly as an investigative tactic, a way to put pressure on a suspect to confess.

Still, voluntarily taking and passing the polygraph was important to Devin and his family.

They saw it as proof of his innocence, something that showed just how far he'd gone to clear his name.

He had went through eye detector tests and stuff

and he passed them and all of this still was out there.

Devin's sister Roxanne was upset about continued accusations against her brother and about something Cindy did shortly after Libby's death.

She had put up posters around independence asking for information.

The posters included photos of Devin and Libby and the text, quote, last seen with the male above.

We were walking at that little hot dog store.

I seen my brother's face on a flyer on their window.

And Cindy was like posting all of these things out there saying that he was a murderer.

And if you see him report, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

How can you call somebody a murderer when they're not even convicted or charged or anything?

You know?

I understand her updrive.

But I feel like she is looking at the wrong person.

Devin's mom, Mindy, despite everything, actually has a lot of empathy for Cindy.

I tried to talk to Cindy after Libby passed.

I wanted to tell her, and I still do, that

I am so sorry for what happened.

I couldn't imagine losing a child.

I couldn't imagine it.

Cindy's not the only one hurting.

Devin's family says that losing Libby has been immensely painful for Devin.

And especially in the immediate aftermath of Libby's death, Mindy worried for her son's sanity.

I'm sorry, this is hard for me because I loved Libby.

She was a part of our family for a long time.

I remember thinking, I hate that that's the last vision he will have of her forever.

You know,

after Libby,

he was lost for a long time.

When Libby died, Devin was just lost.

Devin himself said as much in his second interview with IPD in 2019.

And I lost myself that day.

Suicide's never been something that I talk about.

But suicide was on my mind heavy after that stuff happened because I didn't want to be alive.

But I knew our son needed somebody.

And that's the only reason that I'm still here.

And his stepmom, Jamie, saw the change in him too.

He didn't care what happened to him after Libby had died because he lost the love of his life.

This attitude is reflected in his arrests and interactions with the police.

The summer before Libby's death, Devin may have been one of the IPD's most active core offenders.

But in the years following Libby's death, Devin seemed to go on a crime spree, accruing multiple convictions, possession of a controlled substance, tampering with a motor vehicle, stealing, two counts of resisting arrest.

And that was just in the state of Missouri.

In nearby Kansas, I can identify even more.

By any measure, Devin was clearly struggling.

You know, so he was

ripping and roaring through people's lives like he didn't care if he died and he didn't care what happened to himself.

Of course, you can analyze this behavior in a number of ways.

On one hand, this recklessness, this hopeless disorientation, could be a sign of guilt.

On the other hand, it could be a response to an all-consuming grief.

And the latter is what Devin's family holds on to.

The women I interviewed made it clear that they believe that Devin was not responsible for Libby's death.

I asked Roxanne directly about this.

Are you 100% certain that she died by suicide and that no one else was involved?

How can anybody be 100% certain?

Do you have any suspicions that Devin might have been involved?

Absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

Like, they loved each other

like

no other.

I don't think I know he did not do anything to her.

But when I asked them about physical violence prior to Libby's death, the physical violence that so many people have alleged happened in the relationship, they are decidedly less certain.

Here's Jamie.

I did not see any violence between the two of them, but I did hear of it.

And when I left

Devin's father,

I went about my own way, so I wasn't there for the worst part of it, of the relationship.

They just never got like that in front of me.

So it's hard for me to think that he is like that.

Mindy, Devin's mom, conceded the relationship did involve some abuse.

Just of a different kind.

I mean, my son emotionally abused her.

I witnessed that.

But

I never witnessed any physical abuse from Gevin to her.

Besides maybe restraining her, you know, they fought a lot

and a lot of the physical part actually

was from Libby, you know, and she was a feisty little thing.

But Mindy admitted there may have been things she hadn't seen.

Behind closed doors, you know, nobody really knows, honestly.

And with drugs involved,

I mean, I've experienced it myself.

You know, I've lived through it myself.

Mindy, Roxanne, Jamie,

their responses don't entirely surprise me.

In my many years reporting on domestic violence, I've interacted with a lot of family members of men accused of hurting their partners.

And by and large, they tend not to believe the allegations of abuse, regardless of the strength of the evidence in front of them.

Denial is a powerful coping mechanism.

It allows us to press on without having to critically examine the past and our roles in it.

I saw an example of this denial in my conversation with Roxanne.

When I asked her about the alleged strangulation of Libby that occurred one week before her death, the strangulation that was witnessed by Gary Stevens, she told me, she thought Gary had made it

So do you not believe that he's telling the truth?

No, no.

Why would anybody in their right mind

allow a man that

is supposedly choking this chick,

leave together, and then not report it until after she's dead?

I'm telling you, I've interviewed him, and his story is very credible to me.

Like, he cares about that event, and he's very conflicted that he, you know that he had to go to the police and report what he saw but later in our conversation she conceded that it was possible gary was telling the truth the more we talked she backed off her black and white response to the accusations about devin's behavior and seemed open to exploring the uncomfortable gray area of domestic violence in fact Roxanne recognized a similarity between Devin and Libby's relationship and the one she herself had been in back then.

A relationship that she acknowledged wasn't especially healthy.

In both of our relationships, they're not in abusive ways, but like it was toxic.

More mental, you know, like mentalistic sociopaths, mind-manipulating, gaslighting masters is what I call them.

So that could be considered like emotional abuse.

There's certainly different ways that people can hurt their partner.

That's not only physical.

But even emotional you know can turn into physical like in your body you know what I mean like it can make you make you sick you know

Roxanne had been shocked when she heard the story that Libby had died by suicide she too had seen how much Libby loved Xavier and how dedicated she was to her son

but Roxanne also believed the toxicity of Libby and Devin's relationship could have been partially responsible.

So are you saying that you believe she might have

been

driven to suicide because

you know there was so much like emotional abuse and stuff going on in her relationship with Devon?

Yes, that's the first thought that came into my head was that she was just so tired of being tired of having to

keep up with Devin just to feel loved and to love him.

Roxanne told me she could imagine why Libby might have felt like this because it's something she had felt too in her relationship with her ex-boyfriend.

And that's right,

but it's like

I have tried multiple times to kill myself because like

I loved him so much and then he just wouldn't stop doing drugs, you know.

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Probably the most surprising thing is that we keep looking for conscious intent.

You know, we keep thinking, well, abusers must know what they're doing.

They're consciously setting about to be controlling and domineering.

I don't think it operates at that level.

This is David Adams, a psychologist and co-founder of Emerge, the first counseling program in the nation for men who abuse women.

Most abusive men, in my experience,

somehow think of themselves as victims.

And it all comes from this sort of self-centered orientation.

And these are men who are being extremely controlling and domineering, and yet they somehow manage to think of themselves as victims.

I wanted to talk to David Adams because just as it's important to work on improving the systems of support for victims of domestic violence, I also believe people who use violence against their partners deserve help too.

They often have their own trauma to process, their own struggles to overcome.

And if we truly want to end the cycle of violence, we can't afford to ignore those who perpetrate it.

We don't have reliable statistics on how many men commit domestic violence in the U.S., but we know it's a staggeringly large number.

Consider that, according to the CDC, one in four women will experience physical violence by their intimate partner at some point during their lifetime.

Back in the 1970s, when David Adams first began working with this population of men, the U.S.

was finally beginning to reckon with the pervasiveness of domestic violence and the permissive culture that allowed it to thrive.

States began to develop specific laws that criminalized abusive behavior.

The first shelters opened for victims.

But for men who were using violence, there were very few options beyond jail.

And that's where eMERGE came in.

The founders of eMERGE were 10 men.

Some of us were social workers, just fresh out of graduate school.

Some of us were teachers.

I think we had one taxi driver.

What we had in common was that we had female friends who had been involved in establishing some of the first so-called battered women's programs, our friends, would tell us that they would get calls on their hotlines from men.

And these were abusive men, and they were actually seeking help.

And the women didn't feel it was their responsibility to help the abuser, but they still felt that there should be some sort of help available.

So they asked us as a group of men that they knew and trusted, would we be willing to take this on?

David and his friends did take it on.

but in 1977, there was very little research to guide their approach.

They spoke with a bunch of women who'd been abused, and one of them gave them something that shifted how they'd been thinking about the issue.

One of the women actually had encouraged her abusive partner to send an audio tape to us.

And so one evening we sat around listening to this hour and a half audio tape in which he was apologizing.

I think he was desperate to be back in the relationship with her.

But what was really interesting to us was that his apologies pretty quickly turned to making excuses for his abusive behavior and even romanticizing his abusive behavior.

That somehow his feelings are so strong, you know, that he loves her so strongly that his jealousy comes out.

That was eye-opening for us because we were very naive about domestic violence and we thought, well, we'll just tell them that it's wrong.

And so this kind of introduced us to the idea that it was a lot more complicated.

There was not just the abusive behavior, but there was ways that it was justified and rationalized.

The intervention program that developed from these conversations decades ago has been refined over time.

EMERGE is now a 40-week program where men meet regularly to discuss their history with violence and work on developing critical skills to change their behavior.

About half of the men who participate are court-mandated.

The other half show up of their own accord.

EMERGE has two cornerstones, respect and empathy.

Both are skills Adams believe can be taught.

In weekly sessions, the men do exercises to model respectful behavior and learn how to empathize with their partners and the pain they endured as a result of the abuse.

I wanted to speak directly to someone who'd used violence against their partner and was working to address their issues.

And so David Adams connected me to an eMERGE participant who was willing to share his experience.

His name is Tyler.

He's 24 and works in a restaurant in Massachusetts.

Me and my

girlfriend at the time got into an argument because I suspected her of cheating.

And instead of having a full conversation about it and being rational, I just kind of acted out fully and

instantly went to angry.

Didn't have any other emotion other than that.

So I started yelling.

I started throwing things.

I pushed her

and it just kept escalating from there.

And I ended up breaking her phone.

She had cuts on her hand.

I grabbed her throat for a second and instantly let go.

Tyler was arrested, charged, and convicted of domestic violence.

As part of his sentence, he is mandated to attend 40 weeks of eMERGE.

At the time I spoke with him on the phone during a work break, he'd been in the program for 16 weeks.

It brings up a lot from like my childhood

seeing the abuses I from my father and my mother and hearing everyone else's stories.

Yeah, there was quite a bit of trauma in my life as a kid.

I was molested, was taken advantage of by multiple people in my family.

It was kind of all just, you know, everything ran after another.

Tyler said the men in the group had a lot in common, especially as they looked back on their upbringings.

It's like me realizing that, hey, I've been around it my whole life.

I've never really realized it.

But hearing everyone's different stories kind of brings up like...

Okay, there's other people that are in the same boat that I was or have done the same things and they're trying to better their actions.

The assault that led Tyler to emerge, it wasn't the first time he was arrested for domestic violence against his girlfriend.

He told me it happened once before, three years earlier.

And though he said he wasn't physically violent with her in those intervening years until the recent arrest, he's since come to see more of his behavior as abusive, the way he talked to her, monitored her activities, and controlled their finances.

I asked him to describe his feelings now about how he treated her back then.

I feel defeated and I feel hate towards myself because

not only did I do what I saw happen to my mother, I did what I saw happen to my mother to the mother of my three kids, everything like that.

I caused her pain in a way that I never wanted to.

Tyler imagines that his girlfriend, now ex,

feels betrayed.

He said they haven't spoken since the night he strangled her.

She has a protective order that bars contact.

Instead, he's working on himself at eMERGE, and he's optimistic about his capacity for change.

You always hear the instruction, once an abuser, always an abuser.

I don't want to be that.

That's not who I want to be.

I don't want to be the person that everyone's afraid of, that someone flinches around.

or you can't talk to or where you're afraid of having someone taken away.

I don't want to be that person.

For Tyler's sake, for his future partner's sake, I hope he succeeds.

That he's able to recognize and refrain from all forms of abusive behavior.

Going through a merge certainly improves his chances.

But hearing about Tyler's ongoing journey made me reflect on what I know about Devin.

As far as I'm aware, Devin has never had an experience like a merge.

An opportunity to interrogate his past and learn how to move forward in a healthy way.

I think about Devin who, as a teenager, was exhibiting lots of signs of being vulnerable and in need of help.

What types of interventions could have made a difference?

All those times IPD showed up and did nothing to help Libby, they also did nothing to help Devin.

And all the people in Devin's life and all the institutions that are supposed to prevent kids from slipping through the cracks, did they miss all the signs that Devin was headed for disaster?

One of the more stable adults in Devin's life back then was Cindy.

Do you have any empathy for Devon?

I really do.

It's very hard.

Because I knew him as a kid.

I knew the potential as a kid that he had.

He was academically on top of things in school.

He could have been a star football player.

He really

was funny, you know.

I'd seen how he had it with his family members, you know, and I would think sympathetically, well, that poor kid, you know, he just never had a good chance.

He's got these drug-addicted people in his life that he's depending on.

And I helped him get some help through the child services, like get a clothing voucher.

But he didn't have

anybody to like enroll him in school or anything.

I wanted to help him.

I really did.

But that was several years ago, long before Libby would be found in a motel bathroom with Devin's belt wrapped around her neck.

Those early feelings of empathy for Devin have been replaced by anger and grief.

Feelings that are even more complicated because Cindy is raising Libby and Devin's son.

And even though Devin's parental rights were terminated after Libby's death, he's still Xavier's father.

Cindy has to grapple with how to raise a child who in many ways has lost both parents.

So we made a memory book and that was one of my first things I did for him so that he could see his mother's face and every picture is him and her.

I just decided I was never going to tell him about his dad.

He didn't need to know him.

He's not not even in part of his life.

But in therapy, Xavier wants to know who his dad is, you know, so

that's real hard.

You know, I didn't ever want to do that.

But

so we added two pictures to his book, and it's of him and his mom and dad.

And I told him his name, you know, and

you just can't

pretend he didn't ever have a dad, you know, it was unrealistic of me.

In the next and final episode of what happened to Libby Caswell.

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

Why is this a secret?

It feels like a secret, you know?

When I seen that story, I was floored.

I really was.

That's not what happened.

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.

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

This episode was edited by Zubin Hensler.

Our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch.

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

Fact-checking by Maya Shukri.

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

Original music by Aaron Kaufman with additional music by Jeremy Thall.

Our episodes are mixed and mastered by Carl Kadel.

To find out more about my investigation or to send a tip, please email me at whathappenedtolibby at gmail.com.

Thanks so much for listening.

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