“The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals in the suburbs of Las Vegas when a single mother of two vanishes.”
“You start thinking, uh, bad things have happened.”
“The bureau mobilizes.”
“This is my house. He was able to stay one step ahead of us. I thought, ‘This is going to be quite the adversary.'”
“The most offensive thing that can happen is when a law enforcement officer becomes a predator.”
“Sunday evening, August 20th, 1995. Joanne Albanese’s two young daughters get out of their father’s car.”
“Since their parents’ divorce, the girls spend weekends with their dad. Now they’re heading home to their mother.”
“Joanne Albanese was a very beautiful woman, very professional, single mom, hard worker, uh, employed at the MGM Grand and trying to make a living taking care of two daughters.”
“So Joanne’s daughters enter the house through this door and they notice that the car is not in the garage. This door is unlocked, very unusual for Joanne. The lights are all on in the house, but the girls are more disturbed that their mother isn’t home.”
“Mom?”
“She’s never not been there.”
“The two girls head upstairs, concerned growing with each step.”
“Joanne’s daughter went into Joanne’s bedroom. The door was unlocked, which was very unusual for Joanne’s bedroom, and she found Joanne’s prize jewelry in the bathroom, and this was jewelry that Joanne rarely, if ever, took off.”
“The finding of the jewelry in the bathroom and the fact that Joanne had not been home really terrified her daughters.”
“The girls begin to panic. The oldest calls her father, then the police.”
“Hi, um, my sister and I came home from our dad’s for the weekend. We called for our mom to let her know that we were here, and she’s not here.”
“She is told that nothing can be done until 24 hours have passed. She breaks down.”
“This is Las Vegas, people disappear all the time, and so it’s not unusual for authorities to think that, well, this person will just come back.”
“Concerned by the girl’s tears, the police dispatcher sends a cruiser to assess the situation.”
“The girls are taken to their father’s and spend a sleepless night hoping to hear from their mother. They wait in vain.”
“Joanne Albanese would have never have left under the circumstances when she did, particularly the fact that she was a mother of two young children, um, two young daughters. Everybody knew that this was suspicious.”
“By Tuesday, Joanne’s family is convinced that something terrible has happened to her. Detective Larry Hannah in the missing person’s unit is brought in on the case.”
“First time I heard from the family was on the 22nd of August, and they were wanting to know what progress had been done on the case and what they could do to help.”
“He interviews the Albanese family, paying special attention to Joanne’s ex-husband. Could a fight over money or visitation have turned ugly?”
“But her ex was with his daughters all weekend and has a solid alibi. He does reveal something important, however. Joanne had a boyfriend, a personal trainer named John Edwards.”
“Hey John, this is my friend Joanna I was telling you about.”
“Going on, ladies?”
“Hi, how are you?”
“Sophia’s told me a little bit about you, too.”
“Yeah, she didn’t tell me you were so famous.”
“The chemistry was immediate.”
“She called me. She said, ‘My god, this guy is beautiful, he’s very handsome, he’s a trainer, you have to meet him. Can we go out for dinners, you know, and see what you’re going to think about him?’ The relationship really took off very quickly.”
“Joanne and John were supposed to go on a date the Friday night before she disappeared, but Joanne hasn’t shown up for work since, and Edwards is missing from his job as well.”
“Did the lovers run off together, or did something happen to both of them? Joanne’s family is totally in the dark.”
“The family knew John through Joanne. They knew nothing about his family, his history. They just knew that he worked at the, uh, gym where she attended, and they really couldn’t say much at all about who he was or what his background was.”
“The mystery deepens when the family finds Edward’s truck parked in Joanne’s neighborhood.”
“So we’re in the cul-de-sac where Joanne lived, two doors down from her house, and right here is where the truck belonging to John Edwards was parked.”
“The family was very concerned about Joanne’s whereabouts, and they decided to get into this truck and they found some very suspicious items in there. They found license plates to other vehicles, they found identifications to multiple individuals. Red flags start going up for Detective Hannah.”
“He researches the truck and finds out something even more bizarre: It doesn’t actually belong to John Edwards.”
“The license plate that was on the truck was a Florida plate. It came back with no record at all on it, meaning the DMV down there didn’t recognize it. The VIN showed was registered to some people in Florida, and we called them, and they said, ‘Well, the truck had been sold several years earlier, and they had no idea to whom it was sold, and it had never been registered.'”
“Where is John Edwards, and are he and Joanne in some kind of trouble? Detectives head to Edward’s residence, where he rents a room from one of his co-workers.”
“There was some gear in there, like maybe a sleeping bag, backpack, computers, boxes of personal items that had never really been opened or stored. Given what was there, it wasn’t tied down to anything. Easily mobile and could leave in a moment’s notice.”
“Hannah also uncovers a hunting knife that was concealed in Edward’s backpack.”
“Why someone would need to hide something like that? To me, that means that somebody’s expecting trouble.”
“And there’s more evidence that Edwards was prepared for something bad to happen.”
“We started finding multiple IDs, driver’s licenses from Las Vegas, from Utah, from other places, of just people. You know, we don’t know who these people are.”
“Also within that duffel bag was a wallet repeatedly wrapped in duct tape. I mean, it had a thick wrap around it. We got into that wallet, opened it up, and we started finding IDs in the name of John Addis.”
“The owner of the house confirms that John Addis, the person pictured on the ID, is the same man he knows as John Edwards.”
“Also found in the duffel bag are adhesive materials, cutting knives, and decals, all items commonly used to create false IDs.”
“It was obvious from the materials we found that John Edwards, whomever he turned out to be, was very skilled at making false identifications. There was nothing there to tie him to any place or thing.”
“That’s when the alarms start going off. Is John Edwards really John Addis, and if so, what darkness is he trying to hide?”
“It’s probably indicative that he’s either on the run from something else or he’s engaged in some other criminal activity.”
“At the time, Detective Hannah enters Joanne’s name and vehicle information into the national database for missing and endangered persons, but he still doesn’t know whether she’s in trouble or if she left by choice.”
“They both disappear at the same time, okay? His truck’s still there, but there’s that’s not evidence he did anything to her. We have no evidence that she was murdered. We have no evidence that she left against her own will.”
“It’s not until Detective Hannah begins exploring John Edward’s secret past that the pieces of the puzzle start coming together. His findings will launch a manhunt for a target so skilled and elusive that only one agency can track him: the FBI.”
“He was probably one of the more difficult fugitives that, uh, that I’ve ever been involved in pursuing.”
“In the suburbs of Las Vegas, Joanne Albanese, a single mother of two, has vanished without a trace, along with her mysterious boyfriend, John Edwards. No one has heard from them in 5 days, and her family fears the worst.”
“I’m sure it’s very frustrating for them to have to sit and wonder each day: where are they? How are they? What’s going on?”
“Detective Larry Hannah is concerned as well. There’s evidence that John Edwards is leading a double life and that his real name is John Addis.”
“They start to give us concern on her safety because we don’t know who he is. We don’t know his background. You start thinking, uh, bad things have happened.”
“Hannah’s fears deepen when he runs the name John Addis through the criminal database.”
“John Addis is a felon and has served time for parental kidnapping. But what’s more shocking is that he is a former Alaska State Trooper who spent seven years on the job chasing criminals like himself.”
“He knows all the tricks of the trade and how to get around them, and if he’s done something to harm Joanne, he is going to be incredibly difficult to find.”
“I knew that, um, he had done what I was about to do, as far as searching for someone, uh, building a case, this things he’s done. And yes, I thought, ‘This is going to be quite the adversary.'”
“Detective Hannah’s research reveals that Addis began working as an Alaska State Trooper in Fairbanks in 1974.”
“The married father of four was a rugged outdoorsman, even by Alaskan standards.”
“They lived in a log cabin without indoor plumbing, without running water. They had to bucket water from a nearby stream up to the house. They were living very, very basic, and that was his preference.”
“But according to Jim McCann, who spent years on the force with Addis, he loved being a state trooper above all else.”
“I liked John Addis. He was, uh, he was easy to get along with, uh. What I liked most about him was he seemed to have a passion for forensics. You could count on him to process and conduct crime scene investigations, uh, on a top level.”
“But John Addis also had a dark, abusive side.”
“I was sitting in a living room with him one time, and he and I were talking about this particular rifle, and he would summon his wife and say, ‘Mother, get me that so-and-so rifle out of the closet. You got to see this gun. I’m going to show it to you. Mother, get out of here, won’t you go to the closet and get my new rifle so I can show it to Jim? Go!'”
“And that was kind of shocking to me, because if I had said that to my wife and in that tone, she would have gotten the rifle and probably broke it over my head.”
“John Addis exercised extreme control over his wife. He didn’t want her to work. He didn’t want her to socialize with friends and family, and so she increasingly found herself isolated, separated from the world, and really under John’s dominion.”
“Certain that Addis would one day kill her, the young mother packed up her belongings, fled with the children, and filed for divorce.”
“Suddenly, everything changed.”
“He was someone who had to have complete control over his wife, and all of a sudden she’d filed for divorce and was now controlling, in many respects, his fate and his ability to have the kids. So people noticed that John was starting to come unraveled a little bit.”
“Within 6 months, the trooper remarried and announced that he was moving to Florida, and he left that abruptly. He and his new wife end of that story. But John’s romance was short-lived.”
“Within months, John’s new wife left him and moved back to Alaska.”
“Addis began working in gyms. That’s where he met his third wife and managed to sweep her off her feet.”
“It’s a short time after his second marriage fails that he meets another woman in Florida. They would fly to the Caribbean, the Bahamas, to Mexico, and would travel extensively.”
“Can’t wait till we have an addition to the family.”
“I know.”
“When his third wife became pregnant, me too, Addis’s old demons resurfaced.”
“Man, that first wife of mine, she took my kids. Sometimes I think I’m going to kidnap him, take them out to the wild, and teach her a lesson.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
“He became obsessed with reuniting with his children from Alaska. Addis became more violent after she had the baby.”
“What did I tell you about that?”
“There was an incident where she was holding the baby, and John had grabbed her and pulled her hard against him and was simultaneously stepping on her feet and just roughing her up, and it really scared her.”
“John’s third wife filed a petition for a protection order, then left. John was alone, but he formulated a plan to get back at the women in his life.”
“In August 1986, John Addis’s four children flew in from Alaska to spend time with him.”
“All right, kids.”
“The visit turned into a nightmare when he abducted them and told them that their mother was dead.”
“They were even at one point asked to assume a new identity and be recognized by different names, with new birth certificates.”
“Back in Alaska, Addis’s first wife pushed to get the FBI involved in finding her missing children.”
“When you talk to someone like that, they definitely want their children back. They’re concerned about their children’s safety, so it puts a face on the investigation.”
“Wanted posters went out across the country, and tips started pouring in. Finally, after 8 months, a man working out in a gym recognized Addis. Within hours, local authorities had him in custody.”
“A few miles outside of town, the police found the children in a cabin, and they were locked in there and hidden from view so that people would not see them.”
“Addis, the former star state trooper, was found guilty of parental kidnapping and sentenced to 18 months.”
“He served his term, then relocated to Fresno, California. He broke parole within 3 months and once again became a fugitive. This time, he was determined not to get caught.”
“This is where you see John Patrick Addis start to adopt new identities and use aliases, and he was very sophisticated in this regard.”
“One of the things that he did frequently was change his name, move to a new jurisdiction, and he seemed to like to obtain employment at gyms.”
“Addis began his new life on the wrong side of the law, and he honed his developing craft: seducing women and conning them into doing what he wanted.”
“He would look for women at fitness clubs and at gyms who had low self-esteem, who seemed to be oftentimes a little bit overweight, and John was a very good-looking guy, and he would befriend them, weaseled his way into their lives, and convince them that he was in love with them.”
“When he got tired of the women, he would end the relationship and disappear, but not before emptying their bank accounts.”
“Is that what happened to Joanne Albanese, or has Addis done something far worse? Before authorities can answer those questions, they have to find Addis, and he has no intention of being found.”
“There’s no doubt that as a former law enforcement officer, he knows how fugitive investigations are conducted. He knows the things that people are going to look for.”
“It’s been less than a week since Joanne Albanese disappeared with her boyfriend, a man she knew as John Edwards. Authorities have discovered that Edwards has many dark secrets.”
“His real name is John Addis, and he is an ex-convict, kidnapper, conman, and former Alaska State Trooper.”
“The most offensive thing that can happen is when a law enforcement officer goes bad, when a police officer or or somebody that’s supposed to be protecting our citizenry now becomes a predator. That confuses people, it upsets people, and I got to tell you as a law enforcement officer, I’m more offended than I think the average citizen.”
“For years, Addis has swindled women in California, Oregon, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Florida, Utah, and New Mexico.”
“But what has Addis done with Joanne?”
“Her family is panicked, fearing the worst. Ellie Cotch, a close friend shown in this home video, tries to comfort Joanne’s heartbroken mother.”
“She said, ‘I hope she comes home. I’ve been waiting for her, I miss her. My baby, my life is destroyed.'”
“The family is always want to know what’s going on, what’s happened? Have you found anything? And one of our problems was we were stalemated because all we had was speculation and circumstantial information.”
“The case may be circumstantial, but Detective Larry Hannah is worried that it points to a devastating outcome. His fear grows when Joanne’s car is unexpectedly found by some deer hunters in the middle of the Arizona desert.”
“We received a call from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office that they had found Joanne’s car in an area outside of Prescott called Little Hell’s Canyon. It was found in a very remote area, driven up into some bushes or trees.”
“Joanne is nowhere to be seen, and the vehicle has been wiped clean. No fingerprints, relevant DNA, or evidence.”
“Yavapai County did a thorough search of the area where the car was found. They used, uh, dogs, divers, everything at their disposal to try to find anything they could regarding Joanne and John.”
“A search of Joanne Albanese’s house yields no clues as to why she would have been in the desert.”
“We believe that because he was a crime scene investigator, he wouldn’t have left anything like blood or any telltale signs of a struggle.”
“Where is the elusive John Addis, and what has he done with Joanne? Investigators interview family and friends about their relationship and learn it was troubled from the beginning.”
“For one thing, John immediately took advantage of Joanne’s financial stability. Within a few weeks, he’s living at her house, driving her car, she’s paying his bills.”
“He was not typical of what she generally dated. She generally dated successful, um, wealthier gentlemen who were more established in life. John rented a room, he had an old, beat-up pickup truck, he made very little at the gym, and Joanne wasn’t used to paying for everything.”
“This is getting ridiculous. You have got to get another job.”
“The tension led to frequent arguments.”
“I do what I got to do.”
“You always lying! You are the problem! Why are you lying? Where are you all the time?”
“And the more they fought, the more John’s dark side grew.”
“What are you wearing?”
“He was so possessive with her. He would like to make her, uh, have sex all the time. She had to be nude all the time. You know, ‘I don’t like you wearing clothes to bed. Take it off now.'”
“He forced her to sleep with his penis inside of her. Joanne started to tell her friends that she was scared of him, that he was exerting complete control over her sexually. He wanted to have sex with her all the time, uh, he wanted to watch her go to the bathroom, and he was just obsessed with everything about her.”
“Yeah, like a few weeks ago when I went, big bright light kind of came down.”
“There were other disturbing sides to John’s personality.”
“Alien. He was completely interested in UFOs, alien abduction, and believed that the federal government was covering up, you know, the existence of aliens and UFOs. And he had even talked to people about having once been abducted by aliens.”
“John even wrote a screenplay based on those themes, a movie he entitled ‘Purposeful Deceit’. Joanne considered ending the relationship, but her misgivings only fuel John’s fire.”
“John becomes completely obsessed with the idea of marrying her and goes to the extent of lobbying her friends and family.”
“Yeah, I’m going to go out to dinner tonight.”
“Mhm.”
“Joanne had seen enough. Joanne calls her mother and says, ‘This is it, I’m getting rid of him.'”
“She’s going to take him to a nice restaurant and tell him that the relationship is over. She’s going to break up with him and that she doesn’t want to get married.”
“The mother warns her to be very, very careful.”
“I know, I know.”
“She planned the breakup for Friday, August 18th. While getting dressed that night, she spoke to her mother one last time.”
“I just think he’s probably…”
“Before he arrived there, the mother was on the phone, Joanne’s mother, and didn’t want to get off the phone, and she thought was kind of funny feelings about it, whatever. But finally, Joanne said, ‘Mom, I have to go because John going to be here very soon, and not ready.'”
“So he knocked on the door and he said, ‘Mom, I have to go.'”
“Bang. Hang up. The phone was the last time the mother talked to her.”
“Here, I love you, okay? Bye.”
“Detective Larry Hannah believes he knows what happened next.”
“Given that she was supposed to break up with him about this, he didn’t like that idea. The two of them fought, and he probably killed her, either intentionally or by accident.”
“If Hannah is right, he needs to prove it, but the case is still classified under missing persons. It has to become a murder investigation to get the resources Hannah needs to track Addis, and to do that, he’ll have to get an arrest warrant.”
“I had verbally spoke to some of the DAs down there, but they said, ‘You don’t have a body. You really don’t have enough to go forward with.'”
“Hannah is deadlocked. The warrant is the key to bringing in the FBI, and without the FBI, John Addis could get away with murder.”
“I think with John Addis that his controlling behavior really had no limits. If things didn’t go his way, you know, murder was in play with him. That’s how he was going to solve his problems. It just showed what an evil person that he was.”
“It’s summer 1998, and Detective Larry Hannah has spent three years investigating the disappearance of Joanne Albanese. He believes the single mother has been murdered by a fugitive and conman named John Addis, a former Alaska State Trooper who is now on the dark side of the law.”
“Investigators theorized that Addis murdered Joanne when she tried to break off their five-month relationship.”
“I think this was a man that was so controlling that, uh, he, he just couldn’t deal with, uh, you know, a dissenting opinion in, in any factor, in any phase of his life. He had a way that he wanted to do things, and if people didn’t agree with it, you know, they were going to be in jeopardy.”
“The investigation abruptly stalls when Hannah tries to get a warrant for Addis’s arrest.”
“Not having a body so far, all we had was circumstantial. We had no physical evidence tying John to her disappearance.”
“Finally, Detective Hannah finds an ally in Abby Silver, a prosecutor with the DA’s office.”
“Abby Silver is one of the toughest prosecutors you’ll ever meet, and Abby Silver agreed with Larry that Joanne had definitely been murdered.”
“Though there is no question in Silver’s mind that Joanne Albanese was killed, some of her colleagues aren’t so sure.”
“It was some of the other attorneys, including the District Attorney’s belief that there was this possibility that she wanted to disappear, that she’s on an island with him drinking an alcoholic beverage with an umbrella.”
“Silver decides to take the case to a grand jury to seek the arrest warrant despite the District Attorney’s apprehensions.”
“He actually forbid me to take it to the grand jury, and I decided to take it anyway. It was an uphill battle and, um, a lot of controversy.”
“Joanne Albanese’s family, friends, and co-workers are brought in to testify. For many, the process is painful.”
“Joanne’s mother’s testimony was really, really sad and tragic. They were best friends, she did everything with her mother. Um, when initially when I asked her the question, ‘Did you have a daughter named Joanne Albanese?’, she said, ‘I do have a daughter, Joanne Albanese,’ and she explained to the grand jury that she had hoped that Joanne was still alive.”
“Silver’s case is persuasive. On July 31st, 1998, the grand jury comes back with a murder and kidnapping indictment. A warrant for John Addis’s arrest is finally issued.”
“Two months after the indictment, a hiker in Little Hell’s Canyon, Arizona, comes across a skull and jawbone less than a mile from where Joanne’s car was found.”
“It is the remains of Joanne Albanese.”
“Her mother was really heartbroken. Oh, Joanne was her baby and she always had hope and hope and hope that Joanne was coming back, until she came with news that too late, you found Joanne.”
“The bones, but you’re not a body.”
“The hunt for John Addis is on, and finally Detective Hannah can call on the agency he’s wanted on the case since the beginning.”
“The FBI Special Agent Scott Bakan takes the lead.”
“First thing that the FBI did in this case was obtain an unlawful flight to avoid prosecution warrant at the federal level.”
“Even for the FBI, tracking down Addis will not be easy.”
“We’re looking at a person here that was former law enforcement. He probably had some, some type of dealings with fugitive investigations, so he knew what police looked for in trying to track down an individual.”
“With the pursuit now on a national scale, the case appears on several television programs. Year after year, leads come pouring in, but none of them are solid. Addis has vanished.”
“These leads can be a mixed blessing, because there’s going to be a lot of false leads. He’s going to be seen in diners and on buses and, uh, in gyms all over the country. We received over 400 leads. Not one panned out, which just reaffirmed to us, ‘He’s not in the country.'”
“He was able to stay one step ahead of us, uh, and it, it became frustrating.”
“My name is Joanne.”
“Finally, in 2003, 8 years after Joanne Albanese disappeared, investigators get a crack in the case.”
“Detectives learned that some of Joanne Albanese’s family members had appeared years earlier on a national missing person’s television show.”
“A caller had contacted the producers and told them that John Addis was working in a gym in Guadalajara, Mexico.”
“When a member of Joanne’s family learned of the tip, she called the gym, posing as an ex-girlfriend.”
“His name is John Stone, not John Edwards.”
“The woman on the phone identifies herself as a former girlfriend of John Edwards, and she said, ‘I know John Edwards works in your gym there in Guadalajara.’ And she described him, and he said, ‘Now, look, that sounds like somebody that comes into our gym frequently. He’s not an employee, but his name is John Stone.'”
“Now, Special Agent James Bird is assigned to follow up the lead. He learns that the manager told John Stone about the call.”
“He says, ‘Hey, John.’ He said, ‘Last night, I got a call from one of your girlfriends.’ And he says, ‘She says your name is John Edwards.’ And Addis just froze.”
“He says his eyes got big. ‘It’s not my name, man. It’s not my name at all.'”
“And he said, ‘That’s not my name, that’s not my name.’ The next day, like so many times before, Addis vanished.”
“But Addis didn’t flee by himself. His girlfriend of 7 months, a 26-year-old from the gym named Laura Liliana Casillas, left as well.”
“This girl had just disappeared, she’d never come back to the gym. She left immediately, left her passport, left her money, left all of her personal belongings, left her car, and just took off with this guy.”
“Special Agent Bird knows the young woman’s life could be in danger. He interviews Casillas’s father, who is devastated that his daughter is missing.”
“She was very emotional about it and, uh, it was still a very, very raw thing for him.”
“The girl’s father shows Agent Bird a note that his daughter left before fleeing with the man she knew as John Stone.”
“The note explained that John Stone had asked her to marry him and that she was leaving with him, but that she would return and get her things. She has not been heard from since.”
“She even told me. My daughter was sharp enough to where if she had been taken against her will, she’d be able to figure out a way to escape.”
“The father, um, was pretty convinced that she was not coming back and that she had been harmed.”
“I, I have a feeling I’m never going to see her again.”
“2003. For almost a decade, law enforcement has been trying to bring John Addis, a former Alaska State Trooper, to justice for the murder of Joanne Albanese.”
“Now authorities have learned that after living for years in Guadalajara, Mexico, Addis has fled with another young woman: 26-year-old Laura Liliana Casillas.”
“Special Agent Jim Bird has been conducting interviews with people who knew Addis in Guadalajara.”
“He knows the American fugitive speaks little Spanish.”
“Frequently US fugitives that don’t speak a lot of Spanish are comfortable with Americans, so they will gravitate to Puerto Vallarta. They gravitate to, uh, the, the Lake Chapala area outside of Guadalajara, where there are 50,000 expats.”
“Special Agent Bird floods those areas with Addis’s wanted posters and alerts authorities to be on the lookout. Even so, he’s acutely aware that Addis has eluded capture for so long because he rarely makes mistakes.”
“Through his law enforcement training, he was aware of the fact that, uh, in order to be a successful fugitive, you’ve got to cut off ties with your former family and associates.”
“A lot of people fall prey to the fact that they need these people from their prior life for financial reasons or emotional reasons, and John Addis was able to completely cut off those ties.”
“Special Agent Bird stays in touch with the Casillas family, hoping that Laura Liliana will contact them, but she never does. Addis has become a ghost, and years go by without a single solid lead.”
“Then, in October 2006, investigators get the call they had hoped would never come.”
“I remember sitting at my desk in the San Diego FBI office and getting a call from Special Agent Scott Bachan. He said, ‘I just thought you might like to know because you worked on this case with me that, uh…’ and I was hoping he’d say that we arrested John Addis. And he broke this horrible news: that Laura, the girl from Guadalajara, had been found dead.”
“Addis had been living in a small two-bedroom apartment in Chiapas, Mexico, with Laura Liliana Casillas. Police were alerted when neighbors smelled a foul odor coming from the residence.”
“The police go into the house and they find this horrifying sight, a beautiful young woman dead on her bed, surrounded by needles, multiple syringes.”
“Addis had been keeping Casillas under his control by injecting her with drugs.”
“In an adjacent room, police make another gruesome discovery. In a nearby bed, they find two children dead as well.”
“You know, they’re horrified by what they found. It’s a triple fatality.”
“Addis had fathered the two children, a boy and a girl, with Casillas. The cause of death for all three victims is determined as carbon monoxide poisoning. The case is immediately ruled a homicide. Addis is nowhere to be found.”
“It had to be excruciatingly difficult for the family. You think your daughter’s dead and then to find out that she had been killed, but that she’d been alive that whole time and never called home, never talked to us, had grandkids… just a dagger blow to the, to the heart.”
“Even Addis’ neighbors are left reeling, unable to comprehend why he would kill his family.”
“By all accounts, his neighbor said that he was a doting father, uh, looked to be a caring husband and was just, uh, someone who had said that he needed to come to Chiapas to start a new life after he’d been estranged from his family in America.”
“But clearly something in Addis has snapped, and now he’s back on the run.”
“Anytime that you have a fugitive that’s able to commit other crimes while he’s in a fugitive status, it’s troubling.”
“For 3 weeks, the FBI diligently works every lead, hoping to close in on John Addis, but they never get the satisfaction of catching him.”
“In Guatemala City, a maid opens the door to a hotel room and makes a grizzly discovery.”
“Inside the hotel room, a maid finds a Caucasian male deceased lying on a bed, and nearby is a bunch of identifications for an American by the name of John Charles Stone.”
“Guatemalan authorities suspect that the IDs are fraudulent and contact the FBI.”
“It doesn’t take long for the authorities to connect the dots and realize that the individual found deceased in the hotel room is actually John Patrick Addis.”
“When Detective Hannah is told that Addis is dead, he has only one question.”
“Is it John?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he were able to come out, or be able to stage his own death, get some American similar in appearance, and, um, put his ID on that person.”
“But fingerprints confirm that the body is indeed that of John Addis. He is presumed to have died of a heart attack at the age of 56.”
“His death takes with it the possibility of learning exactly how Joanne Albanese died.”
“What the authorities surmised was that John came over to the house, there was a struggle, words were exchanged, a physical struggle, and he subdued her and somehow killed her there at the house. But, you know, a lot of the particulars of exactly how Joanne was killed remain a mystery, and they will remain a mystery.”
“For the FBI and those who worked tirelessly to catch John Addis, it is a bittersweet pill.”
“To see the family when they had waited so long in this case to see justice, um, to see a verdict of guilt and to watch the jury pronounce guilt on him, that would have been fulfilling.”
“Instead, we were left with horrific facts in this case, um, horrifying.”
“They’ll never be able to ask him, ‘Damn, you were good, how did you manage to stay ahead of us so long?’ And it’s just the wind’s out of your sails and it’s like, ‘Well, case closed, what else can you do?’ But you talk about closure? I’ll never have closure on this case.”
