Ep.2: The Original Investigation - Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom?

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Test 1-2-TES-1-2-TES-1-2.

Okay, this will be a taped interview. Case number is 9311-0576.

Date is 1117-93. This is Detective Kevin Putnam of the Mobile County Sheriff's Office preparing to interview someone as part of his investigation into the brutal murder of Renee Bergeron.

For nearly three decades, this murder has remained unsolved. Renee Bergeron's file has sat, collecting dust, untouched for all these years, until now.

For ID and ARC Media, I'm Sarah Kalen, and this is Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom? A podcast documenting my three-year investigation into the 1993 murder of Renee Bergeron.

Last episode, we learned about Renee, a 26-year-old woman from New Orleans who lived in Mobile, Alabama. In 1993, Renee was murdered and decapitated.

Her body deposited on a service road off Interstate 10 in a rural corner of Mobile County. It had no head and it was laying on its stomach.
The body had been cleaned up, had no fluids.

The wound and the manner in which this perpetrator did this decapitation appears to be somewhat amateurist.

You know, when there's a crime such as a beheading, that spreads throughout the law enforcement community because it's unusual. They start to have a huge injustice by not looking at it thoroughly.

It's kind of like one less prostitute on the street.

There are approximately 4,000 to 5,000 pages of files as part of the investigation into the murder of Rene Bergeron. And I need to go through these files, every single page of them.

There are interview transcripts, forensics documents, crime scene photos, cassette tapes, press releases, tips, even police reports from other investigations that at some point might have been considered relevant to this case.

I even find copies of Renee's personal documents and effects. Her calendar and address book, mail from her house, letters, photos.

But there's one thing, well, technically four things, I find that will become my Rosetta Stone in this case. Four stenopads, filled entirely in handwritten notes, each page covered front and back.

Mostly in the handwriting of a guy named Kevin Putnam. Detective, Kevin Putnam, that is.
Present is Kay Putnam, P-U-T-N-A-M.

Now, Putnam was one of the two lead detectives on the René Bergeron case in 93. The other lead was Sergeant Estes, but most people just called him Cookie.
We'll talk more about him later.

Back to Putnam. Like most officers, he writes in all caps, block letters.
It's the way many of us are trained, an attempt at uniform legibility.

I had this same writing habit drilled into me almost 25 years ago, back when I first started work as an officer. In law enforcement, an officer's notebook is practically sacred.

Like being taught to write in block letters, we have it drilled into us early and often that our notebooks are forever.

It's a permanent record that can be called upon for court or referenced in future investigations or even serve to protect us from claims of negligence.

This is why when it came time to understand the original investigation in 93, I went straight to the notebooks.

These notebooks are written in a kind of code. They're meant for the individual officer to be able to reference later, if necessary, to recall people or events.

Jotted notes, names in the margin with an arrow drawn to another name or to an address, phone numbers with only initials next to them.

They are not exactly a clear narrative, but they are in chronological order, documenting the progress of the detective.

These four notebooks tell the story of the initial investigation into the murder of Renee Bergeron.

They begin with the date and time Putnam was first called to the scene: Sunday afternoon, November 14th, 1993.

There, he logs a few bullet points describing what he saw when he arrived. He sketches a quick diagram showing the location of Renee's body in reference to the roads and buildings nearby.

From there, his notes progress, with interviews, leads, pieces of evidence continuing until the spring of 1994, when they begin to peter out.

This is when the Mobile County Sheriff's Office appears to have hit a dead end, even though her case was not yet solved. Not even close.

Basically, these notebooks show the meat of the case and help me piece together how the initial investigation went down, who investigators spoke with, what they looked into, and how they talked about Renee.

And all of this is important because as far as Renee's family is concerned, Law enforcement is to blame here. Not for the murder itself, but for the fact that Renee's case has yet to be solved.

It was never looked at her as a human being, or definitely not as my mom, or anybody's mom, or anybody's daughter, or anybody's sister. It was looked at as one less prostitute we got to worry about.

So I was like, good luck dealing with them because,

you know, we had no luck, no help.

Amanda's skepticism is understandable.

She believes that the early investigators, including Putnam, made stereotyped assumptions about who her mom Renee was and who might have been responsible for her murder.

And worse than that, she says that detectives ignored Renee's loved ones, even as they begged them to pursue new leads.

So I'm now going to examine the original investigation into Renee's murder, who worked it, what they did and did not do, and whether they might be responsible in part for the fact that this case remains unsolved.

When I first got on to sheriff's office, it was a small group of guys that were best friends. They partied together.

They drank after work together. I never fit in.

This is Mitch McRae. He worked at the Mobile County Sheriff's Office for 27 years before retiring as a detective sergeant.
He describes his early days in the office in the 1980s and 1990s.

I came in and worked. I worked hard and I worked long hours.
I'm not that smart, so I gotta make up for it by working harder than anybody else. That's just my mentality.

And these other guys, the way I pictured them is I'd come in a substation, they'd be sitting at a desk, feet up on the desk, waiting for the phone call of somebody wanting to confess to a murder, where I was always out trying to chase people down, find out.

who did it. And their opinion was, well, just sit here.
Somebody will call. You know, we'll get that magic phone call and solve the murder by somebody calling us and telling us who did it.

I'm speaking with him because I need to learn more about the sheriff's office back then, the same office that led the investigation into Renee's death. How did this even happen? I need some answers.

I need a real look inside the culture of this office in the 90s. And Mitch isn't the only one I'm speaking to.
I ask almost every officer I meet, what was this place like back in the day?

And according to just about everyone you ask, the answer is

not so great.

Well,

there's some things I could tell you, but it's not going to be on camera.

It's difficult to get cops to speak publicly and critically of their own department, even if it was in the past. They don't want to be unprofessional and disrespectful or air dirty laundry.

But privately, internally, these things are discussed, criticized, complained about even.

It's fair to say that the Mobile County Sheriff's Office of the 1990s was a vastly different agency than the one it is today.

And that included the major crimes division, the guys responsible for solving murders.

There was two superstars here. It was Larry Tillman and Cookie Estes.
They were the murder police. They worked all the cases, and they were the best.

It's important to remember one name here, Cookie Estes, Detective Sergeant William Estes, actually. Cookie was a nickname.

I actually trained under Detective Sergeant Estes. He had a lot of street smart, and I learned a lot from him, a tremendous amount, but he also taught me a lot of what not to do.

And Cookie's passed away now. He's a good man.
He tried hard, but my personal opinion of him, he would put on blinders. He would focus on you, and if he could prove it was you, fine.

If he couldn't, he'd just lose interest in it. One other thing about Cookie is he didn't want anybody else interfering in his cases.
He didn't didn't want anybody else's opinion.

So that's Cookie for you. He was one of the two leads on the investigation into Renee's murder.
The other lead on the case was Putnam. It is his handwriting that is all over the cenopads.

Still, both detectives show up in the cassette tape interviews.

And these, combined with the notebooks, give a loose account of how the investigation went down.

Following the taped interview, taken with the purpose. Today's date is 121.94.

Time is 9 a.m.

This is an interview at Metro Jail with Archie Lorenzo McPherson.

In the first days after Renee's body is found, the detectives interview a number of people.

Following the taped interview taken with Maurice Hill, Maurice, the purpose of this interview is a reference to a young lady that you know by the name of Maria Martinez.

They interview Renee's boyfriend, Maurice, which makes sense. When is the last time you saw Maria?

From the best of my knowledge, it was starsuit when I got off from work.

They also interview a friend of his named Freddie. And you would describe Maurice as your best friend.
So I like him. He's a good guy.
Maurice is a good honor to fly.

Okay, the purpose of this interview is in reference to a situation I showed you a photograph earlier of a white female. Have you ever seen her before?

They interview a local sex worker named Paulette who said she had seen Renee on Wednesday.

We don't care what you girls done or who you done it to or how much dope you smoked or what you stole from the dollar general. All we ain't concerned with is who killed Maria.

That's all we're concerned about. All this other conversation we had, don't worry about it, okay?

Thank you. And I want you to know I'm not doing this for the money.
I'm doing it more for Maria.

They interview a guy who Renee had hung out with on Thursday. John, I understand that you weren't acquainted with

Maria Martinez. Is that correct? That's correct.

Funny enough, they actually interview three teenagers who Renee had gotten into a spat with in a parking lot outside a convenience store shortly before her death.

Tell me what that woman was wearing that night that you remember. A blue jean jacket.
I don't know what the shirt look like.

Some tight blue jean pants and some ugly boots that had three different sites all the way around with purple and green and orange and pink on them.

It's not clear what the spat was about exactly, but it must have been bad for one of the teen girls to still take the time to insult Renee's boots after she died.

The detectives also chat with a convenience store clerk who calls in a tip. Someone came in talking about the murder in graphic detail.
They collect security cam footage from that store.

As I go through the files, I create a database of every single name, address, phone number, vehicle license plate, and detail in the file.

I want to see patterns to connect names and addresses to interview transcripts.

But still, I'm not totally sure how some of these people came onto their radar, and I'm struggling to understand how relevant some of this information is to the case.

But what's an even bigger mystery to me is who they didn't choose to interview.

The detectives do not take the time to speak at length to Renee's mom, Joyce, or her dad, Raymond.

They do not ask Renee's boyfriend Maurice about whether he knows of anyone else who they should speak to, at least not in the recorded interview.

There are other tips called in. A guy who goes around town with a laminated picture of Renee, he describes her murder in detail, first to a DMV employee and then to his doctor.

Another guy calls in a tip on a friend of his who drunkenly bragged about raping someone who matched a description of Renee. A woman calls the office repeatedly the week after Renee's body was found.

She leaves a message for the detectives saying she heard screaming in the middle of the night in the woods near the crime scene.

The notebooks include her original tip, then another note left saying she called while the detectives were away. But there's no record of the detectives following up with her.

What Putnam and Estes do is canvass the community. They print flyers offering a $15,000 reward.

Do you know who killed this woman? The flyers read with woman in all caps followed by three question marks.

They use an old mugshot of Renee on the flyer from a time when she was arrested.

despite the fact that they have other, more recent pictures of her on hand, including one of her with her young daughter in her lap.

In press releases, the sheriff's office makes mention of her record, writing, and I quote, she made her living through prostitution, was a frequent user of crack cocaine, and spent much of her time on the street, end quote.

Maybe the detectives think they are being smart about this.

They probably think they stand the best chance of getting real information if they present Renee in the terms by which they view her, a sex worker and drug user, because that's how they assume others will know her.

The press takes this narrative and runs with it, not that they needed much encouragement. Prostitute, crack addict, mugshot, lather, rinse, repeat, a toxic feedback loop.

When the detectives canvass Theodore, the small town where Renee lived and was later found dead, they speak with two men who claim they saw a woman resembling Renee get into a car with a known drug dealer named Daneski Brown on either the Thursday or Friday before her body was found.

But they state they only saw this from a distance and don't know for sure if it was her.

This tip, written down in the stenopads, will become the first lead that Cookie and Putnam pursue.

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Casual Friday. I didn't know.
I didn't get the memo. Yeah, I'm not staying here all day.
It's Friday. I'm not on call.
Hallelujah.

This is Detective Matthew P.

Matt is the most all-American guy I know. He loves baseball, chews tobacco, celebrates National Hot Dog Day.
Today's National Hot Dog Day. Wait, it was National Hot Dog Day the other.

Maybe it was international. Yesterday.
It was probably National Hot Dog Day without a bun, and now it's Hot Dog Day with a bun. Hot dog and chili and sauerkraut.

God, that sounds good.

When I am at the Mobile County Sheriff's Office, Matt is my partner in this investigation.

Together, we look through the case files, interview suspects, walk through theories and hurdles, and figure out next steps. I trust him.

Matt and I want to learn more about the original investigation beyond what we could read in the case files.

So we decide to speak to Detective Kevin Putnam, one of the two lead detectives on the original case, the only one still living, and the guy whose handwriting fills up most of the stenopads.

So we ask him to come in and review his notes with us.

Putnam is tall, very tall. He seems to almost fill the doorway when he enters Matt's office before sitting in a chair beside the desk.

In speaking with people people at the sheriff's office who knew him back in the day and know him now, there's always a pause. They say he's an odd duck or just different from most cops.

Stuff like that.

You know, we were talking about the other night. There's 10 commandments.

One of them is thou shalt do no murder, and that there are more murder victims out there than we will ever fathom.

There's as many murder victims out there as there are liars or lies that have been told.

As we go through the case files, Putnam offers up whatever pieces of information he can.

And then

Tammy. Which one? Hutchinson? Tammy Hutchinson, yeah.
Her name was all up in it. She used to run with a crowd down there.

We discussed the sources Putnam interviewed, the people who seemed to know Renee. Now, here's William David Young's name in my book.
I didn't think it was there.

Yeah, it seems like somebody talked to him once,

briefly. He even says that he came in and talked to somebody once.

Came to get DL, had laminated picture of victim talking about murder. On the whole, things line up with how I had thought his investigation went.
I just, I thought I kept better notes than this.

Look, honestly, if you didn't keep the notes that you kept, we wouldn't have anything. Cookie and Putnam zeroed in on a lead suspect within the first 48 hours after Renee's body was found.

Donesky Brown, the drug dealer mentioned earlier. So here's what happens next.

The detectives drive to Doneski's house.

They ask to speak with him about a case they are investigating. Smartly, Donesky asks for a lawyer.
The detectives ask to search the inside of Doneski's car, a blue Toyota silica.

Again, Donesky asks for a lawyer. So the detectives bring cadaver dogs to sniff around the car.
The dogs signal that there's an odor related to human remains inside the Toyota.

So now the detectives have probable cause, that is, a legal basis to search and seize the car.

As they search the car, they find sneakers, shorts, and a buck knife, the folding kind often used in hunting. The tip of the knife is broken off.
The blade has a single blood smear on it.

The handle has blood in the crevices.

They send the knife to the state lab for testing to see if the blood matches Renee's. A month later, the results come back.

No, the blood does not match Renee's.

At this point, the detectives have nothing else to go on, except some guys saying Renee maybe got into Doneski's car. No other evidence suggests that Doneski is connected to her murder.

The detectives are left with just hunches and biases. Doneski was black and a drug dealer, and maybe Renee owed him money since she was known to use cocaine.

It is at this point, when their lead suspect, Doneski, is reasonably excluded from consideration, that the case begins to go cold.

Over the next few months, the detectives pursue a few more leads, but none quite as ardently as Doneski Brown.

But talking to him in the present day Putnam does remember other suspects including one particular suspect Renee's boyfriend Maurice but I do remember going to the house and I do remember him saying sure go ahead and look around

I remember walking through a room and looking around the floor especially the floor because I think it had a wood floor and you know blood gets in wood floors and it just gets way down in there deep it's dark that night you went at night yeah we went at night Was there blood on the porch?

There was, I know there was. It seems like there was something worth looking at on the porch.
Right.

Cookie would have collected it.

So Putnam confirms this. There was blood on the porch at the house Renee shared with her boyfriend.
He saw it the same night that Renee's body was found. I just never got the sense that he was

involved in it. He just seemed like he was, you know, he had her around

because they were friends and buddies, and I'm sure they had sex. They were together for six years.
They were a couple for six years.

And what makes him go off the reservation? But I am of the same mind as you that in this case, I don't think that he's the one who did it.

I think he was probably a shitty boyfriend, but I don't think he killed her. You know what I mean? I mean, she's got a place to live.
He's paying her bills. He wasn't paying her bills.

That was her house.

That's not what we heard.

It doesn't matter what you heard. The lease was in her name.
That was her house. She made $42,000 that year.
She wasn't living off of anybody.

I'm not saying she was a saint, but I also, I think it's important to recognize that there were a lot of tales about her at the time that were not accurate.

Everything I could find in the original case files makes it very clear that Renee was not living off anyone.

She had money in the bank. She owned her car outright.
She lived in a house leased in her name. She tracked every penny that she brought in and that she spent.

Putnam should have known this. There's the title to her car in the original case file.
Notes in the steno where her landlord says he leased the place to her, not Maurice.

It just feels important to clarify because these kinds of misunderstandings about a victim can shape a case, lead it in different directions, and bias those who are supposed to solve it.

And even if the detectives did not suspect Maurice, someone did, and she was beating down the agency's door, pleading for them to please pursue new leads, to please solve her daughter's murder.

I'm Joyce Bozan.

And I was Renee's mother and still is.

She's still in my heart after 29 years.

This is Joyce, Renee's mom. I speak with her early in my investigation because I want to get to know the people who knew Renee best.
And who knows you better than your own mom?

Today, Joyce lives in the same house she raised Renee and her five siblings in. It's also the house that Amanda grew up in.
It's a modest ranch just outside of New Orleans.

I gave you the mature to see all of the nutcrackers.

She loves to collect things. Her kitchen is filled with Coca-Cola memorabilia.

Her living room has, I kid you not, hundreds of nutcrackers, all gifted to her by her children, grandchildren, neighbors, and friends.

The Bergerons were and still are a picture family. There are stacks of photos, album after album, the walls of the family home adorned in every room with more and more pictures of them all.

Even though Renee is gone, she's still present in the household. Her photos are everywhere.

Joyce first found out that Renee had died when the sheriff's office called her and her husband, but she didn't learn the exact details until she traveled to Mobile to recover her daughter's body from the funeral home.

The guy from the funeral home

told me, he says, Miss Joyce, before we make arrangements, I want you to talk to the guy that did the autopsy autopsy in Mobile. So he got him on the phone

and he's the one that told me. He said, are you aware how your daughter died? I said, I was told she was found onside the road.

And that's when he proceeded to tell me that her head was found two days later.

Given the extent of injuries to Renee, the family had to identify her body through small, cropped pictures of her tattoos, a butterfly in the web between her thumb and index finger, and a broken heart above her ankle.

We went to the Mobile Police and I wanted to talk to him.

She says Mobile Police Department here, but she really means the Mobile County Sheriff's Office. It's a common misnomer, but important to clarify.

But the guy was in charge of the police department at the time was a total home.

His attitude was that she was a street person

and that she didn't have a place to stay and all this. And I said, you're going to tell me she was homeless.
I said, the house she was living in, she rented it.

The funny that was in there, she had on that.

Regardless, the agency dismissed her. But Joyce pushed back on the detectives.
She knew her daughter rented her own place, bought her own furniture, took good care of herself.

She wasn't a, quote, street person.

And that when he backed up his chair, he crossed his leg, put it on the table, and could see to the sky my daughter to me, how she was a street person.

And I looked at him and I told him, I said, I don't know if you're married. I don't know if you have kids.

But I said, you got to remember. That girl was somebody's daughter.
She was somebody's mother. And she was somebody's sister.

One of the detectives dismissed the mother of a murder victim, literally putting his feet up on the table and telling her that her daughter was a street person.

Can you imagine?

The thing is, Joyce knew about Renee's occasional sex work. She says Renee reassured her that it was closer to chaperoning rich guys than working as a street prostitute.

Joyce says that she knew she couldn't control Renee. It was better to make peace with her daughter's choices at any given point in her life, even if she didn't agree with them.

But what she did not make peace with was how the sheriff's office treated her. Not only was it cruel, it also hurt their investigation.
Because Joyce knew who Rene's good friends were.

She knew who they should talk to. And Joyce had her own suspicions.
One that she wanted them to investigate. Renee's boyfriend, Maurice.

Joyce remembers that Maurice did not come to the funeral. But more than that, Joyce remembers another crucial thing about Maurice.
Renee had told her mom that Maurice was abusive towards her.

Apparently, Renee and Maurice would get into huge, awful fights. In fact, right before her death, Renee told her mom that she was going to leave Maurice.

She says, well, mom, she says, it's at this point.

If I don't leave him, either he's going to kill me or I'm going to land up killing him. She says, I can't take it anymore.

Joyce told the detectives that she thought they should at least investigate Maurice more. Not that I felt Maurice did it

because, quote, the Mobile Police,

the man is a magician. He wouldn't use his hand to kill anyone.

Any professional man didn't do it. And I looked at him.
I said, what about O.J. Simpson?

I said, wasn't he a professional football player?

And I said, don't handle me that boat just because of your profession that you can't commit murder.

Despite being rebuffed, Joyce continued to write letters to the sheriff's office.

One reads:

Since Renee's death, I have mailed you a copy of a book. I know you got it.
I have written you five letters, this being the sixth.

Please write me some kind of report as to what has been done and what is being done.

Please don't let her be an unsolved case.

I know I'm looking for answers, and answers are what I need.

But those letters went unanswered.

The same day that Renee's body was found, back in November 1993, detectives interviewed her boyfriend Maurice.

The following is a taped interview taken with Maurice. Maurice, the purpose of this interview is a reference to a young lady that you know, other named Maria Martinez.

As we both know now, we found Maria dead this afternoon down off the March Road.

Marchborough? Yeah, where is that?

West of here. There's a cassette recording of this interview.

The recorded interview runs less than 20 minutes. That's pretty short for a criminal interview.

You said sometimes she just leaves. She goes away for a few days and comes back.

She got a sort of assorted past, is it?

She does drugs, more particularly crack cocaine.

I understood you to say that she also been turning some tricks.

I mean, I didn't

condone what she was doing, and I never followed her, and we really didn't discuss it, you know, because

I just felt less than a man when she told me about a trick. She didn't discuss her tricks with me.

So I don't know who she was tricking, but I know that she was tricking because she'd leave home and she'd come back with money or drugs.

Sometimes she goes out of town and does this,

Houston, Dallas, wherever.

She just sort of comes and goes.

Is that right?

Do you have any idea

where she may have been staying during this period that she was gone?

None whatsoever.

None whatsoever.

It's clear that the officers and Maurice had talked before the recording started.

I gather from the conversation you and I had earlier that initially you and her, you felt pretty close to her.

but because of her lifestyle and some of the things she's been doing that you

not really intimate but I still love her but you know

I can't you know it's just

black and white just two opposites so yeah but we we would we have always been the best of friends and

lovers

Up until the last time she left a couple months ago, we had decided really really that we were going to kind of part.

And when she got back Monday, I thought that maybe we would try to make another go at it. She was going to try to straighten her life up and everything.

And then that Tuesday, she was ripping and running again. Were you happy or sad, the two of you breaking up?

You're a hurt you feel?

I would have really been relieved.

But I really love Maria. We've been through thick and thin, through this, that, and the other for many years.
I wouldn't want to see her hair hurting her head.

I can't understand why somebody would want her dead other than she ripping somebody off or something. I mean, I'm used to it, you know.

Do you have any knowledge of how Maria came to be dead? No, sir. I sure don't.
I'll take a lot of detective tests or whatever I have to do.

I have no knowledge whatsoever. I have not seen Maria since Thursday night.

She hadn't been back home because I can tell when Maria comes in, she just tears everything up, and I was waiting for her leave before I could clean the house back up.

She came in, put dishes all over the place, and clothes all over the place.

But I knew that she was close by because her luggage was still there. See, if her luggage was gone, that means she would have been gone, but her luggage is still there.
So

she couldn't have been too far. She doesn't go anywhere without her luggage.

Do you have any knowledge of how Maria came to be dead?

I can't imagine her. I still

just don't seem like she's dead to me.

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There is a tongue-in-cheek joke tossed around in True Crime. The husband did it.
Sadly, this trope exists because it is statistically, overwhelmingly, the case.

When a woman is murdered in America, she is 15 times more likely to have been killed by a man she knows than any other type of offender. Half of them are directly at the hands of an intimate partner.

And it appears that Renee might have experienced abuse from Maurice. Both Joyce and Amanda remember Renee coming to New Orleans with bruises on her body that she said were from fights with him.

So I know it's important that I speak with Maurice myself, not only to investigate whether he might have had any involvement in Renee's murder, but also to talk with someone else who seemed to know Renee pretty well, even if he knew her as Maria.

Hey, Sheriff's Office.

Sheriff's Office.

Thank you.

Good morning.

How are you? Hey, is Maurice around?

Good morning. How you doing? I'm well, sir.
I spoke with you on the phone the other day. Yeah.

Maurice lives in a quiet residential section of Mobile, not far from downtown. The street is wide, the homes are lovely, mid-century ranches.

The oaks are enormous, creating a canopy over the whole neighborhood. It's the summer of 2020, peak COVID, so we stay outside, keeping our distance.
The audio, unfortunately, reflects this.

As we talk to Maurice, we learn some of the basics about him. He has adult children children who live nearby.
They seem like a close family.

He's certainly getting up there in age. He was 15 years Renee's senior.
Today, he moves with the help of a wheelchair, though once he gets where he's going, he stands up to speak.

He is an imposing figure. He is tall, very sturdy.
He seems very sharp. And though we are there to discuss dark, difficult things, there are moments we get a glimpse of what I suspect is a quick wit.

And I can see why Renee was drawn to him. I I do remember her following me around

because

I would be so happy to see her.

Because a lot, most of the time,

when I played, she was out of town.

And I would be glad to see her still.

One time,

I was playing in a club and this woman was in that was married and she was fixated on me.

And Maria got her straight.

You don't mess with my man. I'm like, oh my God.

I don't know you were my woman.

Maurice shares fond memories of Renee, like when she would come to watch him play music at his gigs. But he is also frank about problems in their relationship.

He hones in on her drug use, just as he did in his original interview from 1993.

So you two kind of kicked it off when we all first met and then started dating. Is that right?

Okay.

And

any problems during that dating? We had problems with

she was she was a drug addict. I mean she had a bad

cocaine. Yeah, she'd be gone sometime for two or three days.

I would get her sit or whatever, but not enough to kill her or nothing like that.

It'd be like cutting my own throat.

Other than that, man, it was great. We used to go to New Orleans every weekend.

I played music and I worked on appliances on the side every week.

And I didn't we didn't we didn't have any money problems.

She would even give me money for for rent and stuff. So

we didn't have any big problems.

He still remembers that Sunday in November. When you found out, I'm sure the investigators asked you, but I didn't see any notes in the file.

When was the last time that you saw her prior to her death? Because she was found on a Sunday morning. I think I saw her that Wednesday.

It was one of them weekends she was on a bench

and I hadn't seen, I was looking for.

Maurice worked as an electrician during the day and a musician during the evening. Time cards show him clocking into and out of work during most of that week before Renee's death.

He also had music gigs at night. He says Renee seemed to be on a bender during that time.
They didn't cross paths much that week.

And according to Maurice, he did not find out about Rene's murder until detectives showed up at his door.

When it happened,

I didn't even go. I went to New Orleans the day they have a funeral, but I didn't even go to the funeral.
I didn't want nothing to remind me that she was gone.

Well, it would have been a shock. I mean, it was.

Oh, that was horrible.

I have my theory on who killed her, but.

And what's your theory?

That she got some drugs from somebody on credit.

and when they came to her she was so out of it

She didn't have the money, so they killed her

That was my

idea

But honestly did you ever know her to to get drugs on credit prior to her death

Because she she usually had money she had I mean and at the time of her death she had money according to her banking records which she kept really meticulous notes

You know

I didn't keep up with how much money she had

I knew that she had money,

but I never kept up with it how she got it She was the sweetest thing in the world.

I never will forget her

But I call her Maria, but we found out later her name was Renee Bergeron.

But she always be Maria Martinez to me.

I went into this meeting expecting to dislike Maurice simply by virtue of what I had heard about his alleged history of domestic violence. To be clear, my thoughts on that are no different now.

Domestic violence is an intolerable condition. It is a cancer on society.
It is endemic. It is on the rise again in this country.
And it is a predictor of so many types of violent crime.

But But when Maurice speaks about Renee, it is very difficult, even for me, to not feel empathy for how much sadness he still seems to carry at her loss.

Above all, my read on him is that he is being very forthright with us. His answers are clear and natural.
There are none of the telltale signs of lies.

Nice to meet you, Sarah Williams. Nice to meet you.

If you think of something, please call us, okay? I sure will. Take your hand, bud.

Y'all have a good day.

There's a term of art in law enforcement and in criminal justice in general. The totality of the circumstances.
There is no one thing that eliminates Maurice as a suspect.

Maurice appears to have a credible alibi that weekend, and no other accounts of Renee's whereabouts include Maurice. Plus, he seems forthright.
There are no red flags.

When I look at the facts of the case, I can arrive at one of two conclusions.

Either an overarching sense that it just doesn't add up to his having done this, or perhaps even being able to do this, or I must land in a place where I want to continue pushing in this direction.

To me, there is nothing that stands out, nothing glaring that says, keep going, there's got to be something there. And frankly, that is a mistake too many investigators make.

As I see it, there are witnesses placing both Maurice and Renee at different locations during almost all of the key points in the timeline leading to her death.

There are a few small gaps, holes we can't fill in. But in those holes, we have evidence pointing us away from Maurice and much more clearly to other suspects.

There are interviews with people who knew them both in Mobile, none of which raise any suspicion of Maurice.

He doesn't match the psychological profile of someone who would do this. And there's no physical evidence, like a weapon, tying him to this case.

Given our impression of his forthrightness with us, his statements to detectives in the immediate aftermath of the murder, and the complete absence of anything even coming close to proof that he did commit it, I'm going to side with the totality of the circumstances.

I don't see any reason to keep Maurice at the top of the list. I don't think he's our guy.

Still, the question remains: who on earth would do this to Renee?

Next time, and why can't we talk about Amanda's mom? I think the public needs to know how long the surveillance goes, how much that the offender gets out of stalking, silently stalking his victim.

You cannot assume that the victim is a stranger to the offender. It builds the fantasy.
It builds into what he wants to do and how he's going to do it.

Everything on the surface to me looked like a sexual homicide, potentially a serial. There was something about her sexuality that was particularly offensive, but that's actually really key.

Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom is produced by Arc Media for IED.

You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love it if you could subscribe and take a second to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

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