Off The Record /// April Tinsley Update | Forensic Files

foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I can see your beautiful face now I can
hear your beautiful voice I just got my headphones on I've been hanging out too too long this week well I was gonna say
a very busy weekend so I I we were very lucky I had several of the out-of-state listeners emailed me over the weekend
that said hey I saw you guys are doing something this weekend obviously I won't be able to attend because I live all the
way over here I'm hoping to hear yeah I'm hoping to hear about whatever you guys do this weekend on off the Record
so made me feel good about several things one being that people were interested in the things we're doing off
the show but also we keep getting lots of praise for this show off the Record which we are very much enjoying so thank
you for the great feedback what we did this weekend we went to the Ohio History Center and there we gave two
presentations on the Sam Shepherd case which is one of the the most famous one of the more famous cases from Ohio
and it's it's an old case it's an unsolved case and that's one thing that a lot of people don't remember is that
according to the courts here Sam Shepard did not kill his wife or at least was not was once convicted but then the
conviction thrown out ten years in jail so and F Lee Bailey comes in and gets them out and the event that we
were a part of we were kind of a small part of the Ohio crime and Corruption event it was the first year that they've
done such an event and they're hoping to do it again next year we're hoping to be
once again a part of it and maybe more of the listeners come out we had a great crowd this year and the thing that I
loved was people were eager to raise their hand and ask questions about the Sam Shepard case and ask us questions
about True Crime garage and me and you and everything else now we didn't have the setup there to record because the
thought would be much like we did with the podcast festival with the Brian Shaffer case art discussion there just
record it you know throw it on here off the record for people out of town and out of state to get to be a part of that
to listen in on the good discussion that we had well our intentions were to kind of
cover that and talk about it and go through that here today but but something even more exciting and more
wonderful happened between that period on Saturday and before we could get in the garage today what could be more
wonderful an arrest talking an arrest an arrest in a cold case that we covered a
case that you and I have been uh angry about but excited to see that they finally made an arrest in this case and
we're talking about April Tinsley for those of you have not heard the news yeah I was getting my bike fixed
yesterday and I got a text message from my good friend Stephanie and Stephanie CrossFit I'll call her but
she's from Indianapolis and she sent me a screenshot from uh her mom actually posted that you know there's been a
break in this case so you know that's what's so awesome is whether it's a a friend or through social media
anytime there's a break or anytime there's some immediate information that I need True Crime World wise
I get it from the listeners well in a conversation that you and I have had many times about throwing things
throwing good positive things out into the universe out into the stratosphere and sometimes good positive things come
of that energy that we put out from time to time and maybe us covering the case had something to do with it one thing
that was interesting to me too which just strange coincidence is after one of our presentations on Sam
Shepard we were chatting with people in the audience afterward and one one listener asked me hey
do you have any updates on the April Tinsley case or do you expect any updates soon
and we got to talking about the case for a while turns out she was from or is from I should say Northwest Ohio so this
is a place a case that's close to her Fort Wayne Indiana not being far from I'm guessing where she lives but I told
her I said look there's no updates as far as I know and but my suspicion is this I said with what's going on and
with this case in particular because there was so much DNA collected in this case I told her I said I actually expect
this thing to be solved within the next two to three years well yeah what's crazy is
I kind of overheard this conversation and I hear you say I expect this to be solved and I kind of thought that's
that's interesting that this kind of pretty bold statement and then when I got the text message the following day I
thought oh [ __ ] how did he know well it was just speculation on my part and here's the thought okay so we saw
this with the Golden State killer we saw this with other cases throughout the United States and we saw it yesterday
with the arrest of John D Miller uh who is suspected of having killed April Tinsley and we'll go through that and
kind of update you on what we know about the arrest uh in just a minute but my thought my speculation is this because
what we're seeing seeing with the new way that they're using DNA and using tools to kind of find DNA uh talking
mainly about the genealogy sites some of them being public some of them being private but some of these are getting
used and utilized in a way that they might not be able to track down the suspect or the person that left the DNA
at the scene but they're tracking down relatives of this person and then honing in on the relatives and figuring out
sifting through information and finding who left that DNA at the scene and I think that this is a incredible because
I think we are going to be living in the Golden Age of solving cold cases yeah and what I mean by that I think it's
going to be rapid fire it's going to be like once a month so bam you're going to
hear about some old case that we thought may never get solved something 20 years
25 30 years old that police have been working on and guess what boom they're going to get an arrest and if somebody
asks me like uh you know top five cases that I'd like to have solved April Tinsley's case is definitely up there
yes yes certainly so to kind of go quickly through that case for those of you that aren't familiar we did cover
this uh fairly extensively in episode seven we were very young in the garage was apologize for uh
our lack of knowing what the hell we're doing it was episode 7 of ours and this was a
case that on April 4th 1988 the Indiana State Police and the local DeKalb the DeKalb County Sheriff's Department
they were called in to a young girl's body that was found in a ditch there okay this was off of County Road 68.
now the way that this went down was this poor girl April Tinsley she was abducted
near her home just days earlier and there were there were eyewitness reports of who may have taken her and if I
recall correctly I think that they thought maybe some kind of van was used in this abduction and yeah there was
definitely a creeper van in the story and we had talked often about um could it have been a utility worker
or some kind of delivery route person that had picked her up so she was abducted on April 1st 1988 and her body
was found April 4th 1988 and it was her parents that had reported her missing around 3 P.M on April 1st so the police
recover her body on the fourth and they also found what they believed to be her shoe uh one of her shoes they found this
about 1 000 feet west of where they found her body yeah it matches the shoe that she was that was still on her foot
at the time now the case doesn't stop there it gets more strange as this goes on because on
May 21st 1990 police were called to a barn this was on Schwartz Road in Indiana route 37. there there was they
found like writing that appeared to show the suspected killer taking credit for killing April Tinsley and a portion of
the note said I kill eight-year-old April M Tinsley did you find her other shoe hahaha I will kill again yeah and
then in 2004 police were sent to three different locations and at these locations they recovered used condoms at
each location now along with the condoms police also found notes this again taunting the police and taunting the
community that this individual is taking credit for abducting raping and killing
April Tinsley well we have the DNA profile of the individual right at some point they took the DNA that they had
and they made like a computer composite sketch yeah they've done and this is interesting because we've seen
this done in other cases and what they did here was this this loser this scumbag decides to talk the [ __ ] taunt
the police in the uh Community years after the murders well those used condoms that they found in those three
different locations they matched DNA evidence that was collected from articles of clothing that April Tinsley
was wearing when she was found dead in that ditch okay so they knew that these taunts were coming from the killer the
killer in this person is one in the same this is a unique case Captain because we're talking about because of these two
separate incidences the the finding of the body and then later the taunting we have a lot of not to be gross but we
have a lot of DNA evidence in this particular situation and that's why a lot of evidence well and I I hated that
I said that to the the lady that I spoke with on Sat Saturday but I said to him I
said to her I said that's why I think this one is is going to be one of the first ones you know one of one that
could be solved very soon is because we know that there was DNA collected and we
know that they have enough of a sample that they probably have good good samples to still test and and find the
the donor of that DNA to still to this day right and it was like two months ago from from what I read now mind you this
is like breaking breaking news this happened at what you text me I think at one o'clock yesterday one in the
afternoon and it was so weird because um we you and I had something else going on that we won't talk about here uh but
I I assumed you were texting me regarding that matter and uh I I looked at my text and you had sent there was a
picture in there stating update and man I get freaking excited when I see that because I was like [ __ ] this is
something the captains found something good and he's he's updating me something good is definitely Stephanie did but
yeah yeah however however it gets to me thank you Stephanie I don't care how it gets to me as long as it gets to me it
brightened my day man I was I was out working hard yesterday and it was I wanted to have like a celebratory drink
and cigar after that I did that's how good I felt about this case and well and it's also you know at weekend and week
out and then like normally you know uh you know a little behind the scenes and we record normally you know twice a week
together we hang out in the garage and then we don't talk a lot on the phone because our
conversations tend to lead towards to uh cases and different stuff in in True Crime world and so it's difficult to
talk about these cases and these people going missing and cases not being solved
or even the cases that were saw because you have a victim that lost their life it gets dark
and if you're around it all the time or in this case this last week we gotta throw on an extra day other than
recording and other than the research We Gotta Throw on an extra day to talk about a case that we haven't talked
about in a couple years right and so to have all that Darkness to have these things like the Golden State killer
finally be you know that's a case that I just got into my friend was super into it and Morgan was super into it would
sit there and drink beers by his fire and he'd tell me all about the Golden State killer and then all of a sudden
boom shabam solved and then in this case too you know we have you know it was a nice day to meet fans
and to to you know to have somebody travel a couple hours to to meet you that's awesome and that's uplifting but
it's another day of talking about a murder that is technically not solved and then the next day shabam
we get a we get another um it's almost like a ray of light if that makes any sense and it feels in a
way like a weight has been lifted doesn't it because like we have this just piles of cases and cases and cases
and cases that we've covered and now we get to take one off of off of that pile and put it elsewhere we can put we need
to start like a solved file so they'll be like here you go put these ones over here because we've had the the uh we'll
solved since we started right so the missing Welch girls was one that has been recently there was an arrest
um and that one looks like it's solved now to be clear though regarding this individual John D Miller this is the
individual that they have arrested and believed is the killer of April Tinsley the way that this works is they use like
genealogy and stuff like that to kind of hone in on this individual and they actually locked in on more than just him
it was him in at least one other relative now this is information that's less than 24 hours old so let's keep
that in mind the newspapers could have it wrong but from my understanding what's going on with this case as they
arrested John D Miller on a probable cause warrant and what that means we've talked about this before but from my
understanding Captain what that means is we're going we don't have a warrant from
maybe the prosecutor's office but we have enough in-house evidence against somebody that we're going to go arrest
them on probable cause because you have to do these probable cause warrants on occasion they're not often but you do it
when you think somebody is so dangerous we need to get them off of the streets immediately we can't wait to take this
to a judge and get an official deal here so what that means is there's been no indictment by a grand jury at this point
at some point a grand jury will have to indict this guy and that's when they will have the quote-unquote official
charges against John D Miller now what they did was they honed in on this dude and they were able to eliminate the
other person that he's related to somebody that has similar DNA as him right because what they did was they
followed this dude around and when he wasn't uh so aware they collected some items from his trash okay they take
these items they test these items and they find that his DNA the DNA that he left on items discarded from his home
match the DNA that they found on April Tinsley's underwear right okay sick so son of a [ __ ] they were able to make
this arrest and I believe the arrest was yesterday and today they will walk him into court
and try to to file official charges now from what I heard and what I've been able to find online is not only did they
arrest this dude but when they approached him and they said hey look we need to talk
to you do you know why we would want to talk to you Miller reportedly said April Tinsley
so then they take him to Police Headquarters they interview him and at first he's not saying much he's not
giving anything up eventually he decides to explain what happened to April Tinsley and allegedly he confessed to
abducting and murdering her now he says that he took her from uh the street near
her home and he took her back to his Fort Wayne mobile home okay now we know that she was she was
dumped closer to that area closer to his home than to her home he says there at his home he sexually assaulted her and
then he choked her to death he he said that he killed her just so she wouldn't report him to police right uh
I'm unclear if the two would have known each other what what it sounds to me like Captain and one reason my why this
may have gone unsolved for so long is I think this was I think it was likely a very random
abduction right I think this sikka was cruising the streets I think he had it in his mind that he might abduct
somebody and sexually assault them and I think their paths just happened to cross
and I think he saw a young small victim that he could easily take and I think that's what he did I think he jumped out
of his vehicle I don't I couldn't get any information on what kind of vehicle he may have had at the time to confirm
if the eyewitness saw the right and reported the right vehicle because we did have some vehicle information that
we went through when we covered the case but he said that he on the morning of April 2nd
now again this is allegedly he said that he drove he drove and dumped her body where it
was later found now on the next day by the next day he had seen and heard no news reports about anybody you know
about the case or about anybody finding the body so he decided he was going to drive back by it well
now we have an idea of what was going on with the shoe because remember we said there was one shoe found on her person
the other one was found about a thousand feet away well that was because after he dumped her body he realized
that one of the shoes either had fallen off or for some reason was still in his car
so when he drove back by the body sometimes these dudes can't stop themselves they drive back by and just
to see if it's still there and that's likely what he did and he said that when he was driving by the
body he tossed the shoe out the window at some point well right because after the and you know the crime
this is going to weigh on this person heavily you know that's why they're going to drive by and see if there's a
body or not and that's also probably why when they please come up to him after all these years after the Golden State
killer was caught right it's probably Weighing on his head like ah they have they have me they just have to find me
right they have basically they have uh you know this footprint not a footprint but I mean DNA but it's almost like this
like key like we we have the key we just need to find the other matching key and
then they did so and I think he kind of knew it and um you know and I I don't want to applaud
him for confessing but that also makes the process a little bit easier you know I mean he could obviously try
to fight things but uh I think after all this time um you know and and he's 59 now
so he would have been well it's 30 years ago approximately right right so he had
been 30 um he would have been 29 ish um that's garage math for you so he would have been 29 at the time it
it sounds to me like he was living alone at the time and it also according to the
reports I found when he was arrested this weekend he was living alone in a mobile home I'm unclear if it's the same
mobile home but the general description of the two sounds like he might have been living in the same mobile home or
at least the same mobile home park all of these years for 30 years and one thing we speculated when we covered the
case was that it appeared that this individual had some kind of location that he could take the victim to and
keep her there for some portion of time and we hit question does that mean that this individual lives alone or because
it was a I'm going off a memory here man but I think it was a holiday weekend that
weekend and we suspected maybe whoever this whoever this perpetrator was maybe the people that he lived with
were going to be out of town because of the holiday that weekend or was in town because of of the holiday and it turns
out in fact he was living alone at the time you find this weird like when they arrested um
D'Angelo Golden State killer when you see a image of him he just like just looks like a grandpa
right and then sometimes like with this individual he looks like a monster John D Miller he they he just looks like a
goal or I mean he just looks like if you were walking down the street and see he
has a turtle suit on and his uh um do you know what a turtle suit is a turtle suit that's the shell so he
doesn't get shot no no no no this is called a turtle suit they put um he must have did a hunger Hunger Strike
or he must uh threatened suicide or they might have thought that there was a possibility of suicide and he's stripped
down naked and they put a turtle suit on him for his own safety so he doesn't harm himself yeah so I'm guessing this
is just pure speculation but I'm guessing that they pull him in and they um questioned him he probably confessed
um might have seemed like he was you know um remorseful remorseful maybe a little
bit and then maybe he was maybe he was I'm just saying that there's there's some reason that they put this Turtle
suit on him it could be protocol it could be protocol four no I don't think this is a murder charge
they may have certain protocol for the first 24 48 Hours of a of a murder charge yeah yeah you might be right on
that and here's the thing what's interesting is today when they March into court and actually they they may
have already done so would be my guess because usually here in Columbus where well I should say Franklin County it
seems like when these people are arrested over the weekend and then they have to go to court face arraignment or
whatever it is on that Monday it seems to me like here in Franklin County that usually goes down between like 9 A.M and
by like 1 p.m they're kind of done with that so I don't know if they've already arraigned this guy by now uh but what
I've been told is that what they're marching into court with not only they're suspect in in handcuffs which
bravo bravo for that but they're also marching into court with the DNA evidence I'm sure some other evidence
events as well and that alleged confession that he gave to police so I think this thing's going to very quickly
turn from these and forgive me if I got this wrong but like I said we're reporting on stuff that's happened
24 hours ago and so yeah I won't even call it reporting we're just talking passing well we're passing this along
what we've what we've been able to find and what we've heard is that my understanding I think this probable
cause charges are very quickly uh switched to official charges now one thing that we speculated when we
talked about this case uh man if it was our seventh episode I gotta believe that
would have been late 2015 that we would have released yeah it's really confusing
uh you know when talking to listeners because I think we recorded about six episodes or so that we kind of set on
um yeah where we we recorded them and then there was a break before we decided to start recording again and and then
releasing them to the public because when we started it really was just like like we've said a million times let's
just see if we can do it um I don't even think we I mean maybe we Loosely planned on
releasing them but um we kind of sat on it for a while so yeah and I know that we released some
episodes before uh the new year just because we did that um I think we did a New Year's Eve show
[Music] um and I don't know where April Tinsley Falls if it was ju one of the later ones
of 2015 or maybe even the first case we covered of 2016. but this picture looks like um
looks like the house or the or the the trailer so is that single wide I don't know and I
couldn't tell you anything about it's a lot of things it's it's some it's like somewhat kept up and somewhat
dilapidated right but that's I mean it's kind of scary looking yeah and well and
he's scary looking and I don't know if it's just because we know and have a good idea of what he did and then what
he hid from all these years this the weird thing with this case to me was always the the taunting of the community
and it almost seemed like you know he couldn't stop himself from taunting the community and taunting the police when
he might have gotten away I I actually looking back on it now he wouldn't have gotten away because there was DNA right
right but at the original crime scene what I wonder is what his record looks like after you know after 88 from 88 to
now what what kind of trouble did he get in or did he not get into any trouble yeah
is this a one and done thing because we are you know we've often argued um with like the Amy mahalovic case is
that a one and done thing and is that even something that we should have on our radar I mean when you think of uh
like the show mind Hunter and you talk about profiling should we have this one and done perpetrator
mentality on our list of possibilities I think so and I tell you why because I think sometimes the
the murder is a reaction to another crime that has been committed and that sometimes that individual may have woke
up that morning and the initial crime is premeditated that there's some there's some thought that hey today I might go
out and commit this crime and then they do and then the reaction to that is murdering the individual that could tell
on you and I think we see that more often with child killings because it's such a heinous crime to
abduct and sexually assault or rape a child right that I think that the reaction is they freak out afterwards
freak out well and if we're to believe Jacob wetterling's Killer that's kind of what
he said he he went into kind of instant panic and he killed Jacob wetterling and
it sounds to me like this could be a similar situation where this guy he's he's a sick bastard and he can't control
himself enough that he's not who knows if he was even looking for a child that day but for whatever reason this was the
victim that he took that and let's not be let's not mince words here this is the victim he selected right because he
at some point he chose to pull this poor girl into his van and then when he couldn't react when he couldn't handle
what he chose to do he murdered this little girl and I and then on top of that you try to taunt the
P you know it's just it's um throwing salt on the wound you know well and we did speculate
that this individual could be a one-off killer because that's we wondered why he
would be uh go unnoticed and unapprehended for so long especially with leaving so much evidence and DNA
evidence now the thing here is you almost have to wonder those on those two occasions it's actually Four occasions
but it was only two uh dates okay so so he leaves incriminating taunting evidence at four different
sites but it's responded to by law enforcement on two different dates so when you think about it you have to
wonder was that taunting of the police was the going and doing those despicable acts and leaving disgusting things at
four different locations was that some way of him controlling himself stopping himself from doing this again was it was
it was that good enough for him to get him by a little bit longer did he did he kill April and did he freak out about
killing April and and and realize look these crimes that I did commit before the murder
I wouldn't mind necessarily doing that again but look it led to murder and I can't do that again so is this some if
is this some more another way for him to infringe his pleasure and things that he
likes and things that he wants on society and on that Community without getting himself into further trouble
because you gotta wonder if they got this dude's DNA you got to wonder they how much time are
they spending looking through other stuff to see if he's connected to anything else yeah um do you think he'd
be forthcoming if he was if he was uh it didn't sound like he was super eager to
say what he did to April or the details of the crime but it sounds like he gave them plenty of it eventually right
it's funny because this uh this initial sketch looks a lot more like him sorry I'm
no you're fine I think the thing too is like so it seems like uh I will kill again on the barn
and looks like in the letter he says something about killing again yeah yeah and I I wonder if this is a one-off
right I wonder I wonder if it's like okay he couldn't control his urges to to molest her
and then that led to killing her and maybe the whole I'm gonna do it again maybe there was a
part of him that wanted to get caught and almost like you know I'm a monster for whatever reason and I'm gonna do
this again and maybe on some maybe subconsciously through that he's taunting the police
but not really taunting but also like almost like trying to help them out a little bit where he he didn't have the
balls to go in there and turn himself in but maybe he was trying to be like hey look I'm I'm a monster I'm going to do
this again it's like almost killing yourself like wanting to commit suicide but not being able to go through with it
in some or something like some way and and that's weird because when I was speaking with and I wish I remembered
this lady's name and I hate to just keep saying this lady but we met several people that day and in my defense she
made enough Jackson she may not have told me her name but anyway um Paula Abdul one thing I said to her was
just that I said you know that sometimes and this has been you know this firsthand but this has also been my
experience from covering these cases you've learned this firsthand from talking to an individual very close to a
case that had something to actually do with the case and that will Fest took it that will face charges yeah we'll we'll
spend some time Behind Bars eventually but one day we'll be able to talk about that the thing is
you know firsthand and I know this from doing this long enough that sometimes these sick bastards sometimes they want
to tell somebody what they've done because the guilt is eating and eating and eating away at them and I told the
lady when we talked about it I said look one thing that's weird about this case with the taunting of the police and the
community you almost wonder did this individual have to felt like they had to tell somebody and this was as close as
they could get to doing it by leaving notes and disgusting items at these different locations let me say something
about John D Miller you the D is for douchebag you use a piece of [ __ ] but for whatever reason and I
don't know why this is or how this came to be you raped a child you murdered a child
and you're gonna get everything that's coming to you in jail and that's just how it's always been so
prepare for that and I'm looking forward to the news that's going to come out with this thing maybe this week maybe
it's a month from now I don't know but I'm looking forward to seeing where and what kind of sentence John D Miller will
get [Music] foreign [Applause]

Off The Record /// April Tinsley Update

www.truecrimegarage.com

Brief Summary

John D. Miller was arrested for the 1988 murder of April Tinsley, following advancements in DNA technology and community engagement.

Key points

Arrest in April Tinsley Case. An arrest has been made in the long-unsolved case of April Tinsley, bringing hope for closure.
The Golden Age of Cold Cases. New DNA technology is leading to rapid breakthroughs in solving cold cases.
The Monster Among Us. The suspect's appearance is described as both ordinary and monstrous.
The Turtle Suit Explained. The suspect was placed in a 'turtle suit' for his safety.
Anticipation of Justice. The speaker looks forward to the sentencing of the suspect.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is a unique case Captain because of these two separate incidences.

10:35WatchSep 29, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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