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- [00:01]
A
Hi books with your besties audience. This is not our usual content here, but we have a new podcast, Reconsidered Unsolved. We would love if you gave today's episode a listen, hopped over to Reconsidered Unsolved, followed, liked and subscribed. Thank you for caring about Rachel Hansen. Today's episode is sponsored by a woman owned company that's changing the way we think about personal safety. They create safety tools that are powerful, practical and actually easy to use, including pepper sprays, training tools and their patent pending Safely Sidekick. Because safety shouldn't feel complicated and it definitely shouldn't be a luxury, being safe should be a given for everyone. Head to LiveSafely Co and use Code book club for your discount today.
- [00:51]
B
Hi, I'm Emily Ashley I'm Ashley. This is Reconsidered Unsolved where we focus on unsolved cases in the pursuit of justice.
- [01:01]
A
You are listening to season one Rachel Hansen
- [01:07]
B
on the night of June 3, 2022, 19 year old Rachel Hansen and her boyfriend Jo met Bailey spent the evening at her apartment Redstone apartment at San Tan Village. They went swimming at the apartment pool and and they were going to have a nice dinner in. Rachel's mom Kim Hansen spoke with her around dinner time. Kim was away visiting another family member and she recalls talking to Rachel about what a nice night they were having. Rachel and Jo met had been going through a rocky time in their relationship previously and they were reconnecting this evening and Rachel sounded really happy and peaceful when Kim spoke with her.
- [01:49]
A
At 2:07am Police received a 911 call from Rachel. The 911 dispatcher answered and Rachel said hi, I've been shocked. Someone broke in and shot me. She also confirmed the intruder was gone and that she was alone. Within three seconds of the call, units were dispatched to her complex. The first unit arrived within five minutes of the call. Officer Kobsiak was the first to report that he was with Rachel. He applied a chest seal while working on the entry and exit wound and began compressions. When she was in and out of consciousness, EMS arrived and attempted life saving measures. They moved to immediately transport her to Chandler Regional Hospital where she fought valiantly for three hours but succumbed to her injuries at 5.12am this case remains unsolved.
- [02:40]
B
So let's get into Ashley, who we are, why we're covering this case and what everyone can expect from this series. When we first started thinking about covering crime cases, we did so because of a path that led us there with our other podcast. So we host a podcast called Books with your besties that is based off of reading and talking about psychological thriller books. And we did this because we have a book club business. This was something that membership was looking for a way to talk about or listen about the books when they couldn't be on our zooms. And so we started hosting this, this podcast and at some point we decided let's cover a crime case for our Patreon members. And we, we did, we did some investigating and we spent a lot of time and we came up with the case of Kyron Horman, which is an unsolved missing boy case out of Portland, Oregon area. And we hosted an entire podcast episode on this for Patreon and realized and ethically we did not feel comfortable keeping an unsolved case behind a paywall. So we decided we're not gonna do that. Let's just put this out publicly on Books with your besties as a one off. You know, we've done the work here. We had really done as much investigating as we thought we could, sort of in a basic way for that episode. So let's put that out. We did. So we had a really great reception with it from both our own community, it expanded to be on that community and the newspaper, the Oregonians online podcast, picked it up as an interest piece and interviewed us about our investigation of the case as it was the 15 year anniversary.
- [04:19]
A
I think a piece of that that sticks with me is when Oregonian interviewed us and said, you know, you're not journalists, you don't have to stick to the same standards that we do. But you did. And I think going into this Rachel Hansen case, it's the same way and the same lens that we are using to report what we find here.
- [04:38]
B
Yeah, I agree. We just, we want to bring integrity to this and the, the purpose here is to bring awareness and, and a pursuit of justice. Right. To consider these cases as, as in depth as possible.
- [04:51]
A
I also think it's important to say, and I don't know if we'll leave this in, and we can leave that in when I say it, that we had a lot of behind the scenes conversations after Kyron, after we did our episodes on Delphi and after we started looking at Rachel about what is our, what's our purpose? Because we're not here to just provide true crime for entertainment or just information. And I think we both felt, I don't know if the word calling is too strong, but we both felt like, I mean, let's be honest, Em, we have cried, we have had sleepless nights. We have had days at a time where our anxiety is an all time high. But for some reason you and I together make a really good team and we feel like this is something we are needing to insert ourself in because it feels like we can help.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah, and here's the thing is we're, we're being asked by our community for this platform and we don't want to be gratuitous with it, we don't want to be exploitative with it. Like that's the thing I don't like about true crime. But the reality is then here we go. You're going to get a taste of the psychologist already because I am a, I am a psychology professor, I have a PhD in psychology with my emphasis area is psychology and law. And I'll tell you a little more about that. But we, you know, we really had these kind of considerations around is this purposeful, is this meaningful? And, and why do people listen to true crime episodes? I think people like extremes in every direction. We like to watch shows about luxury homes that only really, really wealthy people can afford and we like to know about lottery winners and we to look at the extremes and that includes the extreme depths of humanity too, as in these tragic crime cases and violence. And I think it sort of feeds us as humans. We want to know about people's strange addictions and eating habits and these kind of bizarre things. So anyway, I think it's really natural to enjoy listening to true crime and I shouldn't use the word enjoy, but to be driven toward it. And we want to do this with purpose. So we decided we're going to only cover unsolved cases. And that's kind of where we started this journey.
- [07:00]
A
I also, through doing this with you and us knowing each other for so long, think we both have a distaste, which I think most people do, but for injustice. And when you and I have looked at these different cases that we have thought, is this one worth sharing? Should we talk about this one? There have been so many pieces in this case, in the Kyron case, in the Delphi case, where to you and I it seems so absolutely, crystal clear that this needs to be a path that is looked at and it's not and it's, it just has made us hungry to share with, with more people.
- [07:35]
B
Yeah, I think, Yeah, I think too, you know, we're going in as we're not journalists and we're not crime investigators, but we have some special skills. So I do have this psychology and law lens and though my area of research is primarily around jury decisions and kind of courtroom decision making processes, my area of expertise in things I've taught on kind of span a lot of topics within psychology and the legal system. So things that we'll get into in this series include eyewitness testimony and trauma and memory, and also things about reasons for crime and theories of crime, why does crime happen, who engages in crime, and things like psychopathy, which I know we're really interested in. And Ashley has a very special skill. Ashley, tell them about what your skill is like.
- [08:22]
A
Well, before I share my skill, I want to say I. I just had this moment and I don't know how we haven't talked about this, that, you know, during college I worked at a criminal defense law firm and I got to see just the way that different populations are treated. And I think honestly, that is initially where for me this interest and curiosity in our justice system and how people are treated within it came, came to be. I just had that realization. So here we are on the podcast, having it for the first time. Um, a little bit about me. I know people joke and say we all have that friend that can find something about anyone, but I am going to pat myself on the back and say I truly am that person that can go down these rabbit holes and find these very odd connections in very weird places to locate people who they are connected to, the potential crimes they have committed, and how they fit into these intricately weaved stories.
- [09:17]
B
Ashley's skill is unparalleled, I can tell you that she has always been able to be. To find things that nobody else can find. And throughout our investigation of this case, and we will get into this investigation and why we are running on so little information, Ashley has found things that nobody else has found. They. We have details and we have information that we cannot find, has been released anywhere publicly. And we want to get into it because we think that in a case like Rachel Hansen's where there is an abundance of suspicion out there, there are a lot of different theories that people have about what could have happened. And as we troll around on social media, find pathways that we need to look at, there's very little detailed information and there's very little cohesiveness in what is out there. Justice is unlikely to be served if people do not know what they should be coming forward about. So our hope is for this case to be able to do that.
- [10:12]
A
I think I'll add to that also by saying we have found names, connections that other people haven't, to the point that we had a conversation with a private investigator about really, what can we share? What should we share? Because our goal is safety for all people. But at the same time we feel like we have information that other people don't have that's important to bring to a community who's trying to figure out what happened to Rachel.
- [10:38]
B
So we're gonna, we're gonna do our best to give you everything we can while maintaining the integrity of this case for the police department and private investigation team and keeping everybody safe who wants to be safe. So we have some sources that are anonymous, we have some sources that we can't verify. And we will always be sure to tell you what is conjecture, what we're uncertain about, what we think to be true and what we know to be true, and the distinction between those. We want you to get out of this a lot of information and some questions of the path that should be taken in this case, but not biasing you and swaying you into what we've decided. As we started down this path, we were going to go do these one off cases. So we were going to cover one case a week, one hour cases. And as we got into this case and became absolutely consumed by it, we realized that that's just not sufficient for this case. So we are going to put a spotlight on this case for a full season, a series with multiple episodes. We promise to shock you, we promise that you will be enraged at points. And we think that this should be brought to light more clearly and pressure should be on investigators to keep pushing in this case. Foreign let's get into talking about who is Rachel Hansen. So first we're going to talk about Kim and Todd, her parents. Kim and Todd Hansen had nine children. By the time they met Rachel, they had fostered over a hundred children in their home. They were very committed to helping in their community. I mean, really incredible people. And Justin Yantes, who's a private investigator who's been involved with this case, he talked about Kim and told a story about when she met Todd, that her car broke down and she had six children in car seats in the car. I mean, what an angel she is to just have given of herself so fully like that to children in need. Kim and Todd, I think thought they were done adopting kids. But when they heard about Rachel and Rachel's story, they knew that that was going to be the right fit and they were ready to take her. Rachel had grown up with a pretty traumatic childhood. Before the age of six, she was abandoned by her mother who told her she was going to the store and then never returned. Sort of a classic abandonment. And was left to be raised by a man that Rachel assumed was her father or maybe her grandfather was actually someone completely unrelated to her. And we don't know what that relationship looked like for Rachel when she was little. What we do know is that one day she came home to find that caregiver deceased. So huge amount of trauma for Rachel. Trauma that we aren't even aware of, probably or sure about. But we know at six years old, going into the foster care system with no ties to family, she was up for adoption immediately. She was went to a foster family who said they were going to adopt her. And after six months they changed their mind and they put her back in the system. So another trauma, an abandonment for Rachel. Kim and Todd heard about all of this. They took her in in February and she was adopted within a couple of months, Fully adopted into their home and they started their life with Rachel.
- [13:57]
A
When Rachel came to Kim and Todd, she obviously had had quite a traumatic childhood until then and needed therapy. I had to laugh. Not laugh, haha. But Kim and Todd thought that they were done fostering and they also thought they were done with horses. They had previously had horses. They done some horse training and thought that they were done with horses. Rachel expressed interest in horses and they got her involved with horses as part of therapy. And Rachel took to it immediately. Absolutely immediately. So they got her her own horse. It was at this point that Kim started telling us what an absolute firecracker go getter. I mean, em, I think everybody we have talked with so far who has had a personal relationship with Rachel has used words like that to say she's bold, she's a firecracker, she's a go getter. We're gonna have Kim right now tell you in her own words what firecracker looks like in terms of Rachel being this little teeny tiny girl climbing on her horse in their backyard. It sounds like before the sun was even rising.
- [14:59]
C
And then Rachel came and she would sit on the fence looking out at the pasture and say, I just wish I had a horse. So we had to, had to get back in the horse business. When she was little, she would be up early, as soon as the sun was up and pull. She learned how to pull, lead a horse over to the fencing so she could climb up the fence and throw her leg over. And so I would often wake up and come downstairs to look out and see her just laying on the back of a horse.
- [15:28]
A
As we talked with Kim about Rachel, we got to know so much more about her. Rachel was an excellent, absolutely extraordinary athlete. She played soccer in junior high school and high school. She also did cheerleading for a while, but Kim said that wasn't the best fit. We were completely unsurprised to hear that she was the only girl on the football team. Rachel reported to Kim that she was the manager of the wrestling team. But Kim went on to tell us about how Rachel would come home and she'd have these stories about the wrestling team and she would always be with the team and that maybe she was actually wrestling and not just the manager of the team because Rachel was such a go getter. She graduated early from high school and when, when we say early, she was almost 17. She actually had a scholarship to go to college. She had earned what Kim said to us was a full scholarship and seemed pretty excited to do that, but decided kind of last minute, it sounded like that she wanted to remain closer to home and kind of get started on the next phase of her life. She seemed really hungry to grow up and not in a hurried sort of way, but in a I have a lot to offer the world sort of way. And I'm kind of excited to get started. So Rachel started a horse business. She had all of this history of working with horses, training horses, being around horses, and decided to start her own business on Instagram. It was referred to as dtr. She has a business page where she was posting in 2022. Uh, sadly, her last post was in May of 2022. She was training horses for other people. And while doing this kind of, I don't want to say secretly, but kind of on the down low, she didn't tell anyone and put herself through real estate license training. Kim made sure to tell us she did this on her own. She found the program, she paid for the classes. Kim said she studied so hard for the tests and she passed. And she had her real estate license. Of course, her goal was to help people navigate buying and selling horse related propert. This should not surprise anyone. She also had her own horse. I think one of the things when Kim sent us a bunch of photos and videos of Rachel was that Rachel was an absolute animal fanatic. I'm, I'm sitting here right now, Emily, thinking, did she send us any pictures of Rachel where she's not with an animal? She was either with a dog. I think there's one with a duck. She's surrounded by horses. Rachel was completely obsessed with animals and it seemed like she had a very special relationship with her own horse, Dash and We have some pictures of Dash that we will put in our show notes for you.
- [18:07]
B
Rachel's love of horses had continued throughout all of her life, and she was a barrel racer. And I'll tell you what barrel racing is, Ashley, because I didn't know, so I went and I looked. Barrel racing is basically where in an arena, it's a speed race where you are going around these barrels and if you hit a barrel with your horse, you get a deduction in time. And literally people are going so fast in this that often, like, the winner wins by like a tenth of a second because it is just so tight. So it's these. If you look at photographs, it's like they're almost sideways on these horses going around barrels in this arena. So she was pretty amazing to be brave enough and bold enough to be a barrel racer. She also got really into training young horses. So horses around the age of one go from a foal to a yearling. And in Those early years, 1, 2, 3 years old, that is a time for trying to break or train a horse. And it's a very complex process. And Rachel was very gifted at this. So it was something that she could offer people in the horse world. So she had all these ambitions, and I love that she really stayed true to her roots. She loved horses, she loved her horse stash, and she was going to work in that industry, whether it was for others herself, and expand to something really sustainable like real estate within it.
- [19:26]
A
We also know from talking with Kim and from Rachel's own Instagram and Facebook pages and posts that she had written that she did struggle with some anxiety and some depression. In 2020, Rachel wrote an Instagram post and I'm going to read it to you. It was at the very end, I think it was December 30th or 31st of 20. She said, Everyone has had so much to say about this year, so many stories to tell, so many opinions to share. I don't. In fact, I'm at a loss for words. And as the year is coming to an end, I'm frustrated because I have no explanation. I'm anxious because I don't honestly know if the next one is going to be better than the last. On a personal level, 2020 was a good year for me. It was a year of growth. My business thrived, I met so many new people, had the opportunity to work with some amazing horses, and most importantly, I maintained health and financial stability. And for that, I am blessed. I turned 18 this year, and it was a hard first year as an adult seeing the real world, seeing people suffer, really being right there within the politics, racial division and everything else. Not just a little innocent girl on the sidelines anymore. Yes, things were well, but I have to say the world took a toll on my mental health this year. It strained my faith as I consistently find myself asking the question, why? As we speak, I'm sitting here asking myself why? As the year comes to an end, millions of lives taken, divisions still in full force, Covid still circulating, and I'm just upset and confused. I pray for a better year, but realistically, tomorrow is just the day after today. I'm starting the year off in my dream job. I'm with a boy I love. I have a family. That is my world. I'm strong and I am healthy. The next year is going to be about health for me. Healthy eating, healthy habits, healthy relationships, healthy everything. I want to thrive and I want to help others do the same. Goodbye, 2020. Hello 2021.
- [21:28]
B
So Rachel also, we know just before she died, we mentioned that she was with her boyfriend Jomet Bailey that evening and she met Jomette in October of 2021. And it was absolutely one of those fast and furious true love relationships for them though being young and with a lot of environmental factors, it had a lot of challenges and rocky points. And we're actually going to get really in depth about that relationship in a later episode. But we do know that they loved each other so much that they got engaged. And we found social media posts of their engagement in January of 2022. But by June, they had called off their engagement at one point and were working on finding their way back to
- [22:14]
A
each other through doing our research for this case. In talking with people who know Rachel, in looking at all of Rachel's social media pages, we have absolutely, I think I can say fallen in love with Rachel. And it's devastating that such a bright light was snuffed out early before she was able to reach her potential and bring to the world what she had planned. Here is Kim Hansen again, Rachel's mom. I think it's.
- [22:45]
B
You're a really good mom.
- [22:47]
A
Thank you. Thank you.
- [22:49]
B
Well, I made a promise to her that I would.
- [22:54]
C
We, we would. We will not give up.
- [22:58]
B
So, yeah, we can't wait to get into this case with you in the next episodes. You will not believe the things that were happening to Rachel, around her and in her life in the days before her death. The days and months were full of chaos from various sources. And we will tell you the stories about all of those things. Please listen. Stay tuned. Share this with everyone as we get into the details of who killed Rachel Hansen. Thanks for listening. Join us on Patreon at the Creepy Book Club to continue the conversation and for monthly bonus episodes. Also catch our other podcast, Books with your Besties where we talk all about thriller books. Thanks to our producers, editors and research team, which is just us.