Joe Hunter's Mission | Post Mortem | Forensic Files

Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host, Ann Marie Green, and today we're discussing [music] Sacramento Fire
Captain Joe Hunter, who you might know from the CBS TV show Survivor. He competed in season 48, and he's going to
be back again for next year's season, season 50. If you watch the show, you know that Joe talked about the profound
impact of losing his sister Joanna. Back in 2011, 36-year-old Joanna was found dead in her Vakavville, California home,
hanging inside a bedroom closet by a bathrobe sash. Her death was ruled a suicide, but her family believes that
her husband and church pastor Mark Lewis killed her after a history of domestic violence. Now, to this day, Mark Lewis
has not been charged with any crime relating to the death of Joanna. Joining me now to discuss this case is 48 Hours
correspondent Natalie Morales, who was the one who reported on this. Natalie, there's there are so many elements to
this case, so much to talk about. You know, I've done true crime stories now for more than a decade, and I got to say
for me, and I also know for my crew, the team that worked on this, this is definitely one that stands out. It had
such an impact on all of us. Probably the most meaningful and heartfelt, I think, in my career. And I've never
really felt more purpose in telling a story than I have with this one. I am not surprised. As you know, after I
watched it, I immediately emailed you. I was just my mind was blown. I found myself, you know, speaking to the screen
over and over again. I want to remind everyone if you haven't listened to this episode of 48 Hours, head on over to
your podcast feed. You're going to find the full audio of this episode right below this podcast. Go listen. Come on
back. We're going to have a conversation. So, a bit of a recap for everyone. Since Joanna's death in
October of 2011, her brother Joe and mother Patricia have never wavered in their belief that Joanna's husband Mark
killed her and staged the crime scene to look like a suicide. Joe was especially
close to his big sister Joanna and they often talked about competing together one day on the longrunning CBS series
Survivor. >> Yes, he and Joanna had loved the show. They talked about competing on the show.
He was never really thinking he was actually going to apply to be a contestant. But, you know, when he was
overcome with his grief, he, you know, had lost his sister and then later lost his dad. Um, there was just so much
trauma that he was dealing with. He was meeting with a counselor at the time and
the counselor told him, you know, maybe you should do something with with your grief. Here's a clip that didn't make it
into the hour. Why it was important for him to be a contestant on Survivor [snorts]
>> and my counselor said to do something really spectacular would be to help you
manage the situation with Joanna. Just do something for you and her to help close the door. And I thought back and I
said, she had always mentioned it. She actually was a super fan. Wife is wife is too.
>> And I thought she did tell me we should do this. And um I thought, "All right, I'll give it a
shot." So on a whim, I said, "I'm going to give this a shot for her." And it took off. It just was awesome
feeling. It took off. So [snorts] it, you know, my big sis again helping me out. and it went well and it landed me
on the show. [laughter] [snorts] >> He said he sent in his audition and he didn't think it was going to go anywhere
until he got that call back. Um, but he said his his true reason for wanting to be on the show was to bring awareness
about domestic violence and and wanted to bring some sense of justice to her case and to her death. It's sort of
stunning to me, maybe because I'm an only child, but how much they look like each other. And I feel like as I watched
the hour, they began to look more and more like each other, almost like twins. Yeah. And you know, as you said, they
were very close growing up. She always was sort of the protector as the older sister. Um, and that's why I think he
struggles so much to this day is that in the end he felt like he couldn't protect
her from what she was going through. Um, you know, as he said, he had so much regret. You hear that in the episode
because they had actually had an argument in their last conversation before she died.
What did they fight about? He thought she was going to leave Mark Lewis and she was so close. Joanna's mother,
Patricia and Joe said, you know, the year before she died, she was almost going to leave and then she ended up
going back to him. I I'm not surprised that he's doing Survivor again because he really was kind of a standout
competitor. It it these reality shows can be cutthroat, but in this case, you have somebody who was just incredibly
competitive, but incredibly compassionate. I don't know if you remember the episode where I mean, I
think everybody it's it's the moment that went viral from season 48 where he helped a contestant, Eva, out in in a
really big way. Um, Eva was the first cast member on Survivor to talk about living with autism. So early in the
game, she told Joe, I guess she saw him, you know, as this great father always talked about his kids. She felt that she
could trust him. So she confided in him and it was during a competition on the show that she did become overwhelmed and
overstimulated and Joe could see that and he went over to her. He crossed tribal lines to be able to do that and
he took her hands and and held her. It's still still thinking about that moment gets me emotional and it was such an
incredible moment. Um, so in terms of the case, Joanna's case, she's got this brother who would always look out for
her and I think that that is one of the things about this particular hour that really stood out to me. I think it
really sort of reinforced how challenging it is for victims of domestic violence to get out of that
situation. >> Yeah, that's right. And there had been a history of repeated abuse which was very
much documented. She had taken out restraining orders against Mark Lewis. So that said, Joe really believes that
that Mark Lewis killed his sister and then staged the scene to make it look like a suicide, what is called a hidden
homicide. And we're going to talk about that more in a little bit. But I even asked Joe and Patricia both if she ever
showed signs of being suicidal. Um, you know, Joe did say she may have been upset. Of course, you know, she was
going through a lot, but in his heart of hearts, he believed she was ready to leave Mark Lewis. What's interesting is
investigators did find this empty suitcase in the closet next to her with a note that read, "Take care of the
dogs." So the investigators thought that was a suicide note. Now Patricia saw the
note a few weeks later and she vehemently disagreed. She said that when Joanna had come home before, you know,
she she didn't bring the dogs because Joanna's late father had severe asthma. So Patricia believes that she was just
in her mind saying, "Take care of the dogs." Um, so an autopsy report determined that the ligature marks on
her neck were consistent with the suicide. There were no signs of a struggle. Toxicology report comes back.
It is clean. And the county sheriff's office then closes the case. Right. And I and I asked the Solano County
Sheriff's Department spokesperson, Captain Jackson Harris, who's in charge of field operations. Now, according to
to Harris, he pointed out again there was no evidence of a struggle, no evidence of force that another person
was there even to kill her. Um, but as we reported in the hour, there were no homicide investigators responding to the
scene. The bedroom was not treated at all like a crime scene. No fingerprints were taken. No DNA was tested. The cell
phones, cuz there were cell phones in 2011, they were not collected. Um, officers did take pictures of the note
and they did an external autopsy only, not an internal autopsy, meaning that, you know, they just looked at the
injury, the liature marks on her neck. >> And they didn't see, you know, any signs
of struggle on her body. Um, that said, they did do a toxicology test and that all came back clean. So the evidence
according to the investigators supported a suicide. I think we should remind people too, medical examiners, you know,
they certainly look at the body, but they also take the additional information that they get from um
officers who were at the crime scene to help them kind of come to a conclusion. Which then brings me to the history of
domestic violence. Was that not part of their investigation? >> Right. I, you know, I pressed Captain
Harris on that. Mark Lewis, this was 15 years prior, was convicted of domestic violence when he uh sent Joanna to the
hospital with a sprained neck. So, Captain Harris said because this was an incident that happened 15 years prior
that that would not have been available to the deputy in the field at the time. So, then we learn that a little more
than 2 years after Joanna's death, Mark Lewis is arrested and he's charged for something else. arson, stalking, and
conspiracy against another woman who he had started dating, Sarah Noddingham. You spoke to Sarah. What did she say
about that experience? What did you learn from her? Well, Sarah was a member of the church. Um, and she and Mark were
friends at first and then the relationship evolved after Joanna's death uh into a romantic relationship.
She told us that Mark Lewis became more controlling. He would sometimes become a
little physically rough with her. The final straw, she said, was when she discovered that there were text messages
that Mark Lewis allegedly sent to an underage girl. That's when she tried to end the relationship. She said at the
time he wasn't ready for the relationship to be over. um she and her kids had at the time been living with
her parents and he was calling constantly the house and by 2014 um we then hear of this incident where a um
Molotov cocktail was thrown in the overnight hours into her parents' home and it lit a fire. I mean, fortunately,
they they were all able to extinguish the fire before the uh fire department got there, but the police determined
that Mark had hired three people. The three were picked up that night. They [music] confessed to the act, saying
that Mark Lewis hired us to do this. He ultimately [music] pleaded no contest to
the arson and stalking charges, but he was sentenced to eight years in prison, although he served five.
Welcome back. Well, after serving 5 years of his 8-year sentence for the firebombing of Sarah Noddingham's house,
Mark Lewis was released on parole. He's currently living in Arizona. He has a new wife. He is working for a plumbing
and drain cleaning company. And 48 Hours reached out to him several times to see
if he wanted to respond and participate. Um, he did not respond. And so you and producers actually went to his front
door. You had a hidden camera. I'm curious about what that was like. And I want people to know that it wasn't about
sort of catching him off guard. This is about giving him every possible opportunity to respond to these
accusations. Absolutely. You're absolutely. Thank you so much for pointing that out. this was, you know,
our intention truly going there was just to get his side of the story and we and
we tried multiple ways to reach him. We sent him letters. We called people, you know, who were associated with him. We
tried to call him. Um, we were able to find out though that he was living in Arizona with his new wife's family. And
we approached him because we wanted to give him that chance. We didn't know even if he would be home. Turned out
when we arrived there, he was standing outside his front door in the gated area with his wife and his dog.
>> I knew that, you know, we were in a situation where Mark Lewis probably would be surprised that we were there
and maybe I had like two to three questions that I'd be able to get in. So, I point blank asked him, you know,
if he wanted to say anything, if he wanted to tell his side of the story and and he said no and he walked back in the
house and closed the door. So that's when we saw that, you know, the garage door was open and um Lewis's
father-in-law was in the garage. And so we went over there and asked him a few questions and I asked him if there was
anything he would like to tell the Hunter family and and he said anything he wanted to tell them. He already told
them in prayer and he felt um you know that Mark Lewis had served the time that he had served for Sarah Noddingham's
arson and the stalking charges. Well, you know, it is the conviction that he received for the Sarah Noddingham case
that helped to reignite the pressure to reopen Joanna's case. The wheels start to turn. In 2014, the Salano County
Sheriff's Office reopened the case and they tracked down Andrew Alvarado, who had actually called 911 the night Joanna
died. And he'd originally told investigators that he had been with Mark playing basketball since 300 p.m. That
would have meant that they were playing basketball for about 6 hours. But when they reintered him in 2014,
we learned that he actually left during that time frame. And so he wasn't actually with Lewis the entire time and
doesn't know what he was doing when he was gone. >> Yeah. You know, and and it's key nailing
down sort of this timeline. Joe Hunter, as you heard, he found it hard to believe that Mark Lewis was outside
playing basketball for 6 hours straight. Didn't go into the house once to go to the bathroom to get a glass of water. Um
I should point out we tried to reach uh Andrew Alvarado. We never heard back from him. We multiple times. We tried
calling him. He wouldn't return our calls. And I will give it to the sheriff's office because they had
another forensic pathologist look at Joanna's case and that person agreed with the original uh coroner that
Joanna's death was a suicide. The case was closed again. And then in 2015, the county district attorney's office
announced its own investigation, which included testing DNA on Joanna's bathrobe sash, and the result is some
quite interesting. They found uh her DNA, as you would expect, on her bathrobe sash, and they also found the
DNA of an unknown male, not Mark Lewis. They tested it according to Captain Harris in COTUS which is you know the
criminal database system and there were no hits on that. So to this day they still don't know who that male DNA
belongs to. >> Um so then you know Joanna's family is stuck again but for years they kept on
trying to sort of push this case forward. Then an advocacy group called Alliance for Hope asked for another
expert to review the case. And the sheriff's office agrees. The expert is Dr. Bill Smok and he told you, I'm going
to quote him here, "Every injury will tell you a story if you take the time to analyze it." Yes. And you know, he came
to a very different conclusion about what he saw based on the photographs of the scene and the photographs of
Joanna's body. So, you know, at the time, police reported that the noose was a bathrobe sash, as we've talked about.
Well, Dr. Smok looks at the scene and three feet from Joanna's body, there is a nautical rope at the bottom of the
closet. Um, which Dr. Smok said, you know, this is completely out of place. And this was something that was not seen
before or was not taken in as evidence. And Dr. Smok points out there are two different what he sees liature marks on
her neck. One is a red welt. He says it's red because her body was still alive. Her heart was still pumping
blood. Whereas the bathrobe sash mark, which he views in the picture as sort of the wider yellowish mark, he said it was
yellow because at that point in time that was the bathrobe sash was applied after she was already dead, meaning her
heart had stopped. So he believes that Joanna had been strangled with nautical rope and then he believes that then the
bathrobe sash was applied after Joanna was dead. You spoke to Captain Harris about this? Yes, I did. And Captain
Harris questioned uh Dr. Smok's credentials. Let's play a little bit of that. >> Dr. Smok has never done an autopsy in
his life. >> Dr. Smok has reviewed thousands of autopsies. So, he has correct >> and and he has
>> I can review just just as many things and provide an opinion as well. >> So, I asked Harris then if he was
discounting everything in Smok's report. He said he was discounting the conclusion. He was disputing it, saying
um that there was no evidence it was a homicide, that it was a suicide. >> And we should note that Captain Harris
also said that they had the former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners do a review and he
also concluded it was a suicide. That's right. In the hour, we meet Casey Gwyn and Gail Stra, co-founders of Alliance
for Hope International, which is an advocacy group for survivors of domestic violence and their families. They agree
with Dr. Smok's assessment that Joanna's scene was staged in what they refer to as a hidden homicide. Hidden homicides
are when homicides are staged to look like a suicide or an accident. And Casey told me, you know, domestic violence
homicides are the number one staged murders in America. You know, Casey told us, if you kill your wife or you kill
your girlfriend, everybody's going to be looking at you as a suspect. So, you have to stage it to make it look like
something else. Um, you know, Joanna's history of neck injuries documented by her visits to the hospital, by the
number of times that she took out restraining orders on Mark Lewis, that police had to come to the house. Um,
that all informed them that they were looking at a case of a young woman who had experienced strangulation in the
past. And they told me this astounding statistic. If a woman has been strangled more than once before, there is almost a
750 times greater likelihood that she is going to be killed by her partner. This
is based on an academic report, which is just stunning when you think about that.
This is a very important red flag. Um, the experience working on Joanna's case actually led Casey and Gail to create a
checklist of 10 factors to be considered by law enforcement and they began drafting a new law. The law included the
red flags that could signal a homicide. Yes. And I'm going to look down and read
a few of them because they're so important. Okay. First is if the scene of the death gives the appearance of
death due to suicide or an accident. if there is a history of being victimized by domestic violence that includes
strangulation or suffocation and if one partner wanted to end the relationship at the time. Now Casey and Gail told us
that in Joanna Hunter's case there were all 10 factors present. So Anry, remember when I when I told you that
Joanna had left the note in an empty suitcase? We didn't have time to include this exchange in the hour, but Gail
explains why in a case where domestic abuse is involved, when a victim wants to leave the relationship, it is the
most dangerous time in that relationship. Take a listen. >> When you analyze a suspicious death or
when you analyze any death, you have to look at victimology. Was this victim who
died at risk of being killed? So, a victim of domestic violence is at risk. a victim who has been strangled is at
risk. Is she trying to leave her partner? Uh the most dangerous time for victims of domestic violence is when
they leave and that's when those strangers become stalkers. And if they can't have her, no one will.
>> Stranglers become stalkers and then sometimes even become killers. >> Yes. Casey Gwyn shared an interesting
perspective as well. You know, often, you know, as we've heard in these cases of domestic abuse, so much of the focus
tends to be about the victim. Why did they stay is the question. Uh, you know, instead of why did the abuser do this to
them? That should be the question. That's where the focus should really be. So, let's talk about a bright light uh
with this dark tragedy. And it's about the passage of Joanna's law. It became law in California, state law in
California, January 1st, 2025. Joanna's law requires investigators responding to
reports of suicide, drug overdoses, or fatal accidents to check for a history of domestic violence. Uh Casey Gwyn and
Gail Stra helped write Joanna's law. How involved though were Patricia and Joe in
pushing this law forward? >> Very, very involved. You know, Patricia went to every legislative hearing. She
always had on the bench a large 8 by10 picture of Joanna right next to her. One of the points that I want to make about
Joanna's law, you know, Mark Lewis um was the only person who was considered next of kin um back then because there
was no obligation for law enforcement, you know, when Joanna died for them to call Patricia or Joe or the family to
notify them. So, this happens often in domestic violence cases. And Patricia told me, you know, who is more next of
kin than a mother? Uh Joanna's law has now changed that. Now, although Joanna's law is only in the state of California
as of now, Casey and Gail are very hopeful that with all this attention on this case and others, that this will
expand nationally. And I should mention we're also seeing um some cases that we're working on at 48 hours here in the
state of California where Joanna's law is allowing those cases now to come under review again.
>> Wow, that is interesting. So I I presume that that's what's next is is to push
for kind of a national roll out of this law. Anything else? >> That's the hope. We also learned in
terms of Joanna's case that the California Department of Justice has agreed to review the Solano County DA's
decision not to bring criminal charges in the case. The hunters hope that that might change things. However, I should
point out the California Department of Justice told us in a statement that they are not conducting a new investigation.
Um, so Joe Hunter is returning to Survivor. He's going to be participating in season 50. It premieres February uh
2026. Um I know I'll be rooting for him. >> Joe is and and Patricia the Hunter family really one of the most
inspirational families I think I have ever met. And you know I think the message overall is that you can leave.
You will survive. You just need to take that first big step and to find your support.
>> Indeed. Um you and the producers did an excellent job. It's such a moving episode and I'm gonna say it's probably
one of the best for the season for sure. >> Thank you. >> If someone you know is a victim of
domestic violence, call 1 800799 SAFE or visit the hotline.org.

"48 Hours" correspondents Anne-Marie Green and Natalie Morales discuss the "Joe Hunter's Mission" investigation on Post Mortem, in which "Survivor" contestant Joe Hunter raises awareness about his sister, Joanna, who was found dead in her California home in 2011.

Crime. Social justice. Impact. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

Joe Hunter discusses his sister Joanna's suspicious death and his Survivor journey to raise awareness about domestic violence.

Key points

The Tragic Death of Joanna Hunter. Joanna Hunter's death was ruled a suicide, but her family believes otherwise.
Joe Hunter's Journey on Survivor. Joe Hunter competed on Survivor to honor his late sister Joanna and raise awareness.
New Evidence in Joanna's Case. DNA testing reveals unknown male DNA on Joanna's bathrobe sash, raising new questions.
Joanna's Law Passed. Joanna's Law requires investigation of domestic violence history in fatal cases.
Hope for National Expansion. Advocates are hopeful Joanna's Law will expand nationally.
Joe Hunter Returns to Survivor. Joe Hunter will participate in Survivor season 50, premiering February 2026.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is definitely one that stands out.

Natalie Morales reflects on the case's impact.

1:15WatchDec 20, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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