The Twist — Libby Caswell E6

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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.

Feeling safe is a privilege a lot of people in domestic violence relationships don't have.

And by the end of her life, a sense of security seemed to have eluded Libby wherever she went.

She said as much to her sister Natalie the last time she saw her.

And she said, he would know I'm here and it's not safe for you and it's not safe for Zabe.

And to her friend Nathan the last time she saw him.

Libby looked at me and said, I don't think I feel safe with Devin anymore.

Her parent aide, Colleen, picked up on the danger lurking around Libby during their last visit.

I felt like she needed to be in a safe place.

It wasn't just how Devin treated her, the physical and emotional abuse, that made Libby feel unsafe.

It was also the people Devin hung out with and the illicit and risky activities he engaged in frequently.

Devin was accused of stealing many times, particularly it seemed, from people he knew.

Small things like TVs and cell phones.

Big things like cars, cash, drugs.

These kinds of behaviors gave Devin a reputation, left a lot of bad will in his wake.

They also, by association, added an extra level of danger to Libby's life.

Libby admitted as much to Cindy.

She talked about it a lot that last,

you know, 2017, she was like, he knows some bad people.

There's a Facebook post I came across on Libby's page that I keep thinking about.

It's from August 14th, 2016.

Libby posted a close-up photo of herself.

You can't see her full face, but her cheek is bruised and her neck has numerous cuts and scratches.

Libby writes that two nights earlier, she had been walking to a 7-Eleven when she was attacked by a stranger.

The man forced her behind a building and strangled her until she blacked out.

She says she later woke up and discovered that the zipper of her pants was broken.

She writes, quote, in between being in and out of consciousness, I remember him mentioning my baby daddy, end quote.

Devin.

Natalie and Cindy both told me about this incident the first time I met with them.

Libby had called Natalie after she came to.

She woke up behind somewhere.

7-Eleven is what she said.

And next to a dumpster or something like that.

So she was laying there all night.

She had woken up and her pants were down and the zipper was broken.

Yeah, she peed on herself.

Yeah, and she was, uh,

she couldn't freeze very well.

And she was trying to get a hold of mom and she was saying to have mom come pick her up.

I picked her up down, you know, in kind of a bad part of town.

Libby was still visibly terrified when Cindy arrived.

And she looked pretty beat up.

She told her mom she didn't remember much about what had happened after she was attacked, which could explain why she had urinated on herself.

When strangulation victims lose consciousness, it's common to also lose control of their bladders.

You know, she had bruises and scratches, and I tried to talk her into going to get a make a report and go to the hospital.

And she was very scared at that point.

She told me a lot of the detail about the guy and that he how she couldn't move and he was choking her on and off and she thought that that was going to be the day she died.

I remember her saying that she thought that

Devin had done something to him and he told this guy that he could do this to her for payment of whatever it was.

She thinks that he was sending people to get her and I used to think maybe she was just paranoid because, you know, maybe she was using again and, you know, how they get some sometimes they just kind of feel

like that but that actually happened to her and I have pictures of it she was upset and balling so I was like you know this is this enough are you gonna

you know is this gonna be the time or are you just gonna die you know because you are gonna die if you continue this way

from iHeart Podcast I'm Melissa Jeltson and this is what happened to Libby Caswell

There's a fire light through your window.

So, why does she mind

and it wants us fitting to

put away to cross the line?

She was just somebody that I really wanted to help.

I'd say if one is a really poor investigation and 10 is a perfect investigation, I'd give them a 0.5.

Cindy struck me as somebody that was just getting stonewalled at every turn.

Did you ever hear from them again?

No, I didn't.

No follow-up, no nothing.

The medical examiner ruled Libby's death undetermined.

I go, what do you mean they ruled it undetermined?

She started advising me: get your stuff together because this is going to be the fight of your life.

Watching the water

all I see tonight.

Watching the water

tonight.

Chapter 6

The Twist

We had reached out

to the medical examiner like, okay,

what are you talking about?

Why is this undetermined?

One of the biggest, most perplexing questions I've had with this case is why Libby's death was ruled undetermined by the medical examiner.

And it turns out the Independence Police Department wanted that answer too.

And

really no explanation, just, yeah, it's undetermined.

I had reached out, oh, I don't know, maybe personally, maybe a half a dozen times.

IPD Major Mike Anka said he wanted clarity from Dr.

Robert Pytak, the deputy medical examiner who performed Libby's autopsy.

I would go at it so non-confrontational.

I'm not questioning.

I'm not doing anything.

I just need to know some more details.

I need to know a little bit more about what's going on, why this is undetermined, so we can do something different here because I don't feel good about this.

This sits really, really bad inside me that this has been ruled undetermined.

Pytek doesn't explain his reasoning in the autopsy report, and he's since left Jackson County.

He now works as a medical examiner in Florida.

I've tried to reach him many times unsuccessfully.

I've also tried to get comment from the current medical examiner without luck.

However, based on my research, I do have a theory about why Dr.

Pytak ruled Libby's death undetermined.

In 2013, the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office, including Dr.

Pytak, came under intense scrutiny.

An investigation by the Kansas City Star brought to light that Pytak had made a series of rulings that he later reversed.

One involved a young woman who was found with a trash bag over her head.

Pytak initially ruled that death a suicide, but it was later changed to undetermined.

Another involved a woman whose body was found covered in bleach with a red mark across her neck.

Pytak ruled that death an accident.

It was later changed to homicide and a man confessed.

Pytak defended his work in both cases.

Beyond that, the investigation uncovered that the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office was disregarding best practices and failing to autopsy around three-quarters of suspected suicides every year, allowing possible murders to slip through.

After all this, it's not hard to imagine that PyTech would be extremely cautious going forward.

in ruling a death a suicide when the forensic evidence was inconclusive.

Whether my theory is true or not, it leads me to another, equally perplexing question.

Given the undetermined ruling, why did IPD close the case without any further investigation?

I asked Major Anka about this.

It sounds like this was a very unusual situation that we rarely, if ever, got these undetermined.

So this choice to close it at this stage versus like leaving it open,

just if you could just sort of talk me through the reasoning.

I think it was more of just

there's nothing more at this point I can do because

we're not experts when it comes to body examinations.

I can look at a body and say, that's got bruises, that's got marks, that's got this.

I don't have the training and the expertise to say what caused that.

So that's what we were trying to get was we were trying to get that information from the resident expert.

We just never got it.

So at that point,

you know, Detective Smiley, I made the determination to close it.

With the case closed, Cindy was left to pore over the investigative files herself, looking for clues on how to move forward.

The light at the end of the tunnel for me was that the ME stuck by,

you know, undetermined.

It seemed to her that the undetermined ruling was an opportunity that forensics might be the key to finding more answers.

The medical examiner ruling it undetermined has been a gift

in that it leaves the door open for another agency

to re-examine the physical evidence.

This is Dr.

Bill Smock, director of the Clinical Forensic Medicine Program for the Louisville Metro Police Department.

He's an expert in cases where a person dies from asphyxia or lack of oxygen.

You heard from him a little bit in episode one.

After Cindy's private investigator, Jim Murray, had taken Lippy's case as far as he could, Cindy reached out to Dr.

Smock.

I told him my story.

I said,

here's the facts.

I have all this information.

Dr.

Smock spent a month reviewing Libby's case, analyzing the autopsy report, studying hundreds of photos of her body, and even reconstructing her death using a weighted dummy and a belt.

He ultimately documented his findings in an 84-page PowerPoint.

It's actually a big reason why I decided to explore Libby's death in this podcast.

Smock believes the Jackson County Medical Examiner missed or misinterpreted a slew of forensic evidence in Libby's autopsy, and his analysis is very compelling.

Smock began his investigation by looking closely at the marks around Libby's neck.

There's physical evidence on Libby's neck that was transferred from the belt ligature to her skin.

A ligature is anything that's used to tie or bind something.

In this case, Dr.

Smock is referring to Devon's belt, which was made of fabric, had visible stitching, and grommets around the belt holes.

When wrapped around Libby's neck, the belt created recognizable patterns on her skin.

So the first thing I did was to look at the photos of the belt and determine what part of the belt had to be in what position in order to create that imprint.

Dr.

Smock explained to me that in a hanging, the place where the ligature is knotted, in this case the belt buckle, will almost always rotate to the back of the head.

That is the physics of a hanging.

But he found evidence of the belt buckle pressing into the front of her neck.

So that was the first thing that jumped out at me.

And there was something else.

Typically in a hanging, Smock says, you will see a mark that goes almost all the way around the person's neck like a ring.

Almost, but not quite.

The point where the ligature is fastened, again here the belt buckle will raise up off the back of the neck where it's attached to a suspension point so the mark that's left behind has a gap the circle is not complete but this is not what he saw on libby what was documented in the autopsy was circumferential marks around the neck that too is inconsistent with the hanging So in layman's terms, the imprint from the belt went all the way around her neck instead of an unbroken line and there wasn't a gap.

Correct, there was not a gap.

And when you hang yourself, there is always a gap at the back of the neck.

Smock also found a small but crucial detail.

The pattern of bruising around Libby's neck was consistent with a belt that laid flat.

But when Libby was found, the belt around her neck had a single twist in it.

meaning that the belt had been twisted once before it was threaded through the buckle.

Dr.

Smock explained to me that if the belt had a twist in it when Libby died, we should be able to see that mark on her skin.

The injuries did not come from a twisted belt.

If the belt were twisted when pressure was applied, you would expect a different pattern on Libby's neck.

When you look at the imprints that are there, the belt wasn't twisted.

That tells me that at some point, the belt was placed back on her neck.

And it was twisted.

This discovery in particular gave credence to a theory Dr.

Smock was developing about Libby's death, one that he didn't think had been considered by the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office or the IPD.

That the belt had been used a number of times on Libby's body.

The belt that was around Libby's neck is somewhat unique in that it has grommets, holes in the belt.

When I look closely at the autopsy photos and the scene photos, there is evidence of these grommet grommet marks in areas other than

where the belt was around her neck.

So what that tells me is that at some point those grommets created other pattern injuries, which is why the belt, in my opinion, was applied at least twice, maybe even three times.

Smock suspects not only that someone put the belt around Libby's neck, but that they also wrapped that same belt around Libby's chest, trying to restrain her, and maybe even use the force of their own body weight to pull the belt tighter.

There's a unique bruising pattern right in the middle of her back, which to me appears to be consistent with a boot print or a shoe print.

How does that get there?

Doesn't get there from a suicidal hanging.

This is a lot to take in.

And when I first read it, in the PDF Smock sent me, it stopped me cold.

If Smock is right, this being restrained, then strangled, is a very violent and a very scary way to die.

And it means that though Dr.

Smock agrees with the Jackson County Medical Examiner's opinion that Libby ultimately died from asphyxia, he has a very different opinion about how it happened.

It was clear that the physical evidence, principally the marks on Libby's neck, were not consistent with a suicidal hanging.

They were consistent with a homicide.

Dr.

Smock took his conclusion a step further.

Libby's death was, in fact, a homicide staged to look like a suicide.

There is no doubt that Libby was murdered and the scene was altered and things were staged.

A staged murder is a big accusation.

The implication is that someone or someones murdered Libby, then methodically staged the scene to send authorities in the wrong wrong direction.

Smock believes this theory explains a lot of the evidence at the scene, including the mark on the top of the bathroom door.

There is evidence of green fibers on the top of the door.

So I do think at some point the belt was over the top of the door.

If she was hanging, I do not think she hung herself.

I think it would take two individuals to place her body up there.

When you look at the location of the tub and the door, I think it's physically impossible for an individual to stand on the side of the tub, put the belt over there, close the door, and then jump off.

Staged crime scenes are pretty rare, but often have telltale signs if you know what to look for.

Smock wanted to know if IPD had ever considered the possibility.

Maybe he thought it wasn't even on their radar.

Which is why I called the Independence Police Department.

I talked talked to Captain Mike Anca.

I told Mike, what I would like to do is to meet with you, your detectives, the current medical examiner, and your local prosecutor, present the case and why, in my opinion, based upon the physical evidence alone, this is a homicide staged to look like a suicide.

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IPD Major Mike Anke told Dr.

Bill Smock that he was eager to hear his analysis of Libby's case.

Anke said that by this point, two years after Libby's Libby's death, IPD had exhausted everything they could do.

He had reached out and I had had a lot of conversations with him.

I set up the meeting with him and the current medical examiner, and then we had the prosecutor, we had Cindy in the room.

I came alone.

I came straight from work.

Bill asked me not to say too much, and so I sat quietly.

And it was just a big room, and it was packed with detectives, police officers, Emmy,

the prosecuting attorney Michael Hunt.

The meeting takes place on January 13th, 2020 in a third-floor conference room of the Independence Police Department's downtown headquarters.

Dr.

Pytek had left the department by then, but the county's chief medical examiner, Marius Tarot, attends in his place.

Dr.

Bill Smock arrives with Beth Weakley, a forensic nurse who had also studied Libby's case.

And it starts off well enough.

It was very cordial.

Invited in as a law enforcement colleague.

I was there to present the case and answer any questions.

Smock brings the PowerPoint presentation he'd made of his findings, which includes forensic analysis, crime scene studies, and photos of a recreation he did of Libby's injuries.

was circumferential marks around some point those grommets created other pattern injuries

Injuries did not come from a twisted belt.

The prosecutor and the detectives in the room take it all in, but according to Anka, the chief medical examiner pushes back.

Dr.

Smock had his,

you know, his theories and his beliefs.

He would say, the belt caused this, this, and this.

And then the other doc said,

yeah, the belt could have caused this and this and this, but don't you agree that this could have caused this, this, and this?

Turned into the two doctors kind of debating back and forth.

Obviously, both of them are trained, both of them are very knowledgeable, but a lot of what they were talking about was way beyond anybody else's in the room's skill set knowledge.

We didn't get anything out of it other than

some of the injuries could have been caused by

homicide and some of the injuries could have been caused by suicide.

There was never a definitive answer as to what we were looking at.

But Beth Weakley, the forensic nurse, remembers the situation a little differently.

I remember the medical examiner.

I found him very

defensive and abrasive.

And he's entitled to his opinion, but I remember him being extremely defensive about anything that contradicted.

In the end, it was frustrating to kind of see this resistance.

And frankly, I just think it boils down to no one wants to admit they did something wrong.

Cindy told me she felt the same way.

They seemed put off that anybody was questioning, that they didn't have the skill to investigate this properly.

They were

very,

I would say, almost rude in laughing us off.

At the end, it was clear I didn't convince them.

The medical examiner said, yeah, it may be.

But he said, it wasn't my case.

I wasn't there.

And we need to contact the pathologist who did the autopsy.

So I made that effort and no response.

Dr.

Smock and his team were left with little hope that Libby's case was going to get any more attention from IPD.

And without a new investigation, the prosecuting attorney wasn't going to pursue charges.

The

prosecutor, Mr.

Hunt, said, yeah, it may be a homicide, but if I can't win it, I'm not going to take the case.

I asked the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office about this meeting, but they declined to comment.

We left and exchanged pleasantries and said we'll be in touch.

But you could sense that it was not anything that they were pumped up about to like, yes, let's, you know, reopen this up and get excited about to

make a, you know, bad situation better

I felt that that was the coward's way out

that it was going to be an uphill battle to

have independents whether it was the Jackson County prosecutor's office or the police department

want or be willing to take a closer look at the evidence that I presented to them Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night.

We see

ineptitude, inadequate investigation, turning a blind eye to the physical evidence on the part of the Independence Police Department, on the part of the medical examiner's office, on the part of the prosecutor's office.

This case of doing thousands of cases in my career stands out as the most

clear

staged homicide.

And having having been involved in thousands of investigations in my career, this is the one that says you did not do your job.

You could have done it.

We have a young woman who has been murdered and those three agencies are failing to do the right thing.

As for Cindy, the meeting was another gut punch.

In the lobby of the police department, there's a huge glass thing that reads, to serve and protect the citizens of independence.

And it, I mean, it just

goes totally against what my experience was as a human being living in independence.

I left there just totally discouraged.

And by the time I got home, Bill was calling me and he said, well, that didn't go as I planned, you know, but he said, let me tell you this, though, Cindy, we don't give up.

This isn't the end.

And good on his word, Dr.

Bill Smock wasn't taking no for an answer.

He was already pursuing another angle.

After Bill got involved in it, then he reached out to me and to the rest of our team and said, I believe we've got a staged crime scene.

Casey Gwynn is a former prosecutor who has spent his career working on how to better serve domestic violence victims.

He's one of the founders of the domestic violence organization, Alliance for Hope International, where Bill Smock also consults.

Bill Smock really took the forensic side of this, and the rest of our team took the victimology, which is really the history of a relationship and understanding the history of the life of the victim and her relationship to the potential suspect.

Gwynne was appalled at the lack of background investigation that IPD had done in Libby's case.

Why wouldn't you do a comprehensive investigation when you've got a history of domestic violence and then you've got a dead body?

That should be a cardinal rule in every law enforcement agency in America.

That is homicide investigation, suspicious death investigation 101.

You always want to know that entire history.

And you should want to know what his history is with other women as well.

And you would have to interview.

You'd have to identify his prior girlfriends.

You'd have to interview his friends.

You'd have to interview his family members.

Since the mid-1990s, Alliance for Hope has primarily focused on preventing domestic violence homicides.

But in 2017, the organization expanded into a different type of work, consulting on cases involving domestic violence victims where the crime scene was potentially staged.

These cases come to them directly from victims' families, like Cindy, and also from prosecutors and police across the country who are stumped on how to proceed.

Alliance for Hope believes there may be hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand deaths of domestic violence victims in the U.S.

each year that are going undetected, written off by local law enforcement as unfortunate accidents or tragic suicides, when, in actuality, there is a perpetrator who has never been held to account.

We now call this the Hidden Homicides Project.

Our focus is on cases where there is a death after a history of domestic violence.

We now have about 20 active cases at the present time.

Every time we speak somewhere, we are learning of more cases.

They recently had their first major success, a case in Colorado where, after Dr.

Smock got involved, A husband was convicted of murdering his wife seven years after he tried to make her death look like an accident.

To help law enforcement understand how to spot such cases, Alliance for Hope has come up with a checklist of 10 red flags, commonalities among the staged murders they've uncovered.

When Gwynn compared his checklist to Libby's case, he was shocked.

Number one, the victim dies prematurely or the victim dies unexpectedly.

Number two, the scene appears to be a suicide.

Police advising woke up, went to the bathroom, and found her unconscious and a belt wrapped around her neck.

Number three, one partner wanted to end the relationship.

All she wanted to do was clean up and get things right and get away from him.

That was literally her goals on her table every time we talked to her.

Number four, there was a prior history of domestic violence.

That time he laid on her and she couldn't breathe.

I called 911.

Number five, the victim was found dead in a home or in a place where they've been living or staying.

They wanted the room so they can have some alone time.

Number six, the victim is found by the current or previous partner.

I was asleep and then I had moved up and found her.

Number seven, the prior history of domestic violence includes an act of strangulation or suffocation.

When they would get in fights and it'd be really bad, he would push her,

hold her down, and choke her.

Number eight, the partner is the last person to see the victim alive.

I took a shower, remember laying on the bed, and passing out.

Number nine, the partner has has control of the crime scene before the police arrive.

10 a.m.

and 11 a.m.

this morning, and then at that point you remained asleep the entire time until you woke up this evening.

Yes, sir.

Number 10, the body has been moved or the scene or evidence has been altered in some way.

Body's all the way clear on the right side of the toilet still.

Just didn't make sense.

We have every factor that we've identified in the Libby Caswell case.

That's enough for me to say these red flags are not just waving, they're screaming at you.

If one is a really poor investigation and 10 is a perfect investigation, I'd give them a 0.5.

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Initially, I thought somebody killed Louby.

Whether it was Devin, whether it was somebody else, obviously he was the most logical because he was there.

But,

you know, you can't just, you can't let those

opinions influence you.

You have to, that's fine to have them, but

you have to go by the facts and the evidence that you have.

Now that I'd heard Dr.

Smock and Casey Gwynn's criticisms of IPD, I wanted to ask Major Mike Anka about how short their investigation was and how they seemed to make up their mind so quickly that it was suicide.

I mean, they told Cindy that night that Libby had killed herself.

Anka brought me back to the crime scene when IPD first got to the motel.

We came out working this like a homicide.

Hence why we called a PIO, why we called a captain, why we called two sergeants and two squads of detectives.

So you're at the scene.

There's a bunch of people have arrived, right?

There's like over a dozen people there.

They're processing the scene and you're still approaching it as a potential homicide.

What happens next?

Like, does that change that evening that it starts to move towards the state?

What had happened is, so I, along with several others, had responded back to the station.

We were in the process conducting interviews.

We were in our briefing room, and I had gotten a phone call from the sergeant on scene.

And he had told me that he was standing there with our crime scene tech, and the medical examiner was on scene, and the medical examiner had said, everybody slow down.

This is not a homicide.

This is a suicide.

So that's kind of what slowed down and changed gears: is that the medical examiner is on scene and they're saying, you guys are blowing this out of proportion.

But the medical examiner that Anka's referring to wasn't a medical examiner at all.

She wasn't even a doctor.

She was a recent college grad in an entry-level position at the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office called Investigator One.

And this comment she allegedly made wasn't noted anywhere in her report that night, nor in any of IPD's notes.

Let me ask you a question about that.

The

medical examiner on scene, it was a medical examiner's investigator, right?

Not like the medical examiner.

Yeah, that's the way they operate here in the state.

Yeah, to send out an investigator.

And when I look at the

the contact sheet that shows who was on scene that night, I can see who that investigator was.

And she, it was a woman who was 24 years old.

I reached out to her.

It looks like she'd been working there for about six months.

And I asked her about this to see what her recollections were.

And she said she didn't remember the scene that she'd been to, you know, a bunch.

But she said it was not her role to determine

manner of death and that her role as an investigator was just to gather the evidence and bring it back for the autopsy.

So she really pushed back and said it wasn't up to her to guide the investigation or send it in any direction.

Right.

No, and that's exactly true.

And that's why we finished what we were doing.

But like I kind of mentioned earlier, and

I'm not going to get into pinning us against the medical examiner or nothing like that because we've got a good working relationship.

Anka went on to explain that IPD didn't just immediately stop their work after hearing the perspective of Investigator 1.

But nonetheless, it did change how they were thinking about the case.

I told the guys, we're going to go ahead and we're going to finish everything we're doing.

But medical examiner saying that this is a suicide, this is not a homicide.

So that's what changed the gear.

That's what went from, you know, we were running and gunning on it like a homicide and we were in essence shut down.

This question.

What happened to change the focus of the investigation from homicide to suicide?

It's one that's been nagging at me since I first first started working on Libby's story.

I figured there had to be something more, something I wasn't getting.

I spoke to Major Anka for more than an hour.

He was unfailingly polite the entire time, listened to my questions, and answered each one.

He seemed forthright, and honestly, I got the impression he really did want to help.

But the answer I kept getting about what changed that night was simply unsatisfying.

It felt to me like the police, without realizing what they were doing, might have been primed to deem this case a suicide from the beginning because of simple confirmation bias.

The challenges for law enforcement really start right at the scene where they first arrive.

Here is Casey Gwynn again.

They face this framing of it as a suicide or as an accident scene.

And that confirmation bias then just begins to expand moment by moment, day by day.

And as they pass on information to the next investigator or the next medical person or the forensic medical examiner, it seems that that confirmation bias that starts at the scene of the crime contaminates the rest of the investigation in many of these cases.

In Libby's case, Devin called in her death as a suicide.

And then at the scene, the medical examiner's investigator also allegedly remarked that it looked like a suicide.

Back at the station, Devin and Nick both talked about Libby's supposed suicidal ideations.

And then IPD found the mark on top of the motel bathroom door.

Because of confirmation bias, it might have been easy for IPD to latch onto evidence that confirmed the suicide story.

and overlook evidence that pointed the other way.

And this kind of thinking could have permeated the choices IPD made throughout their investigation.

Choices that, to outside experts like Casey Gwynn and Dr.

Smock, now seem questionable.

For example, IPD chose not to explore Devin's alibi, that he had slept all day, found Libby dead when he woke up around 8 p.m., and then went directly to his dad's house.

An alibi that was made ever more flimsy when Devin was caught on camera seemingly asking his dad and stepmom to lie about his whereabouts.

IPD could have confirmed Devin's alibi by going back to the sports stadium inn to get the security footage from the parking lot.

But when I asked Anka about this, he admitted the crime scene investigator made a mistake.

He was instructed to go back and get that later, failed to do so, never did.

That's the one piece that would have been wonderful to have.

That would put my mind at ease.

Is Devin out walking around all day long, in and out?

He's saying he slept.

If we had that video, we could tell he was out walking around.

If any, you know, obviously many things, you know, to go back and do and do different.

That video is probably the number one.

Yeah,

we wish we had that video.

In the days and weeks after Libby's death, IPD could have conducted more interviews, talked to those who knew Libby and Devin best.

what Casey Gwynn called victimology and suspectology 101.

To their credit, IPD did eventually conduct more interviews in 2019 after Cindy's private investigator, Jim Murray, brought his concerns to their attention.

When Jim got involved and I started talking to Cindy, the case was opened back up.

I gave it a fresh set of eyes with another detective and another sergeant.

One of the things IPD did was follow up on a tip that Devin confessed to Libby's murder.

to his new girlfriend.

But this was a dead end.

The new girlfriend wouldn't talk, and when IPD interviewed her mom and her sister, each of them denied having heard anything.

The new detectives assigned to Libby's case also interviewed Devin again.

They asked him to go over the events of that night and Devin told them basically the same story.

When I got out of the shower, Libby was getting to take a shower.

Me and Libby were talking kind of an argument

about how she didn't think that we were going to be able to stop using.

Police press him on a few details, like the broken watch and the argument overheard by another motel guest.

But the most notable difference about this second round of questioning is that they specifically ask him about domestic violence.

Is it possible that you messed up about a mistake?

No, it's not possible.

How come?

Because

I know that that's not me.

I've never in my life.

Yeah, but when you get real high, that's never been that high.

That's not you, though.

I've never, it is, it's never, it's not that.

It's not that.

I would never harm a woman.

Never.

Never, no matter, no matter.

I got stab wounds in my back from Libby hitting me with a stake knife.

Never did I put hands on her.

Have you ever been arrested for domestic violence?

Never, not once in my life.

And I would do anything in my power to bring her back to hit me with the steak one more time.

You know what I'm saying?

Given what I have uncovered about Devin's abusive behavior,

domestic disturbance.

What you've heard in this podcast.

What IPD would have had in their own files.

The extent of their questioning feels woefully brief and under-researched.

They don't press him on any specifics.

And so, that's it.

The case is soon closed, again, as a suicide.

When I asked Anka about this, He said it was out of his hands.

Even with the work done by Jim Murray, the presentation by Dr.

Bill Smock, and the additional investigation by IPD, they didn't have enough evidence to convince the prosecutor's office to move forward.

I feel

having kids myself, and

I don't want to get dramatic, but I'm brokenhearted for Cindy.

I can't imagine what she's going through and what she's went through and what she's continuing to go through.

So the human side of me is heart-wrenching.

Anka has been open to the many outsiders, including me, who have wanted to re-examine Libby's case.

I'll just be candid.

I don't have that arrogant, condescending nature about me.

I don't put myself on a pedestal above anybody.

I'm probably one of the last ones in the room that bought that

this was a suicide, that this wasn't a homicide.

So,

for me, if you know, if you can come up with something we haven't thought of, by all means, let me have it.

Coming up on what happened to Libby Caswell, we learn about Devin's life, both before and after Libby.

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

And Devin reacts to the shadow of suspicion he's been living under.

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

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

Trump through men,

night.

I think I did from the rain and the tempest.

Keep your ear to the ground.

And don't make a sound.

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.

Episodes are edited by Jeremy Thall and Carl Cadel.

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.

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

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

Our episodes are mixed and mastered by Carl Cadel.

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.

Let's be real.

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