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, concern 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 prized 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 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 Joanne I was telling you about.”
“What’s going on, ladies?”
“Hi, how are you?”
The couple met shortly after John moved to Vegas.
“Sophia has told me a little bit about you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“She didn’t tell me you were so fit.”
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 alarm starts 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.”
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 heart.”
Even Addis’s neighbors are left reeling, unable to comprehend why he would kill his family.
“By all accounts, his neighbors 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, more dangerous than ever.”
“Anytime that you have a fugitive that’s able to commit other crimes while he’s in a fugitive status, it’s troubling.”
For three 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.”
“I’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.”
