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I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Charlie Kirk Conspiracy Theories? Homicide Detective Speaks Out
00:48:24
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- [00:03]
A
About 30 hours after Charlie was murdered, I arrived back in Phoenix and my wife picked us up at the airport. And she said there was some kind of crazy conspiracy theory out there, that a guy in a white hat was signaling the shooter. Well, the guy in the white hat was me. And that conspiracy theory still lives on in some people's minds, but there are other conspiracy theories going on. Was there a second shooter? Or is the shooter the Tyler Robinson suspect? Maybe he's, he's a patsy. Maybe he didn't pull the trigger at all. Maybe somebody closer shot Charlie. Maybe, who knows? There's all sorts of different conspiracies out there. What was the trajectory of the shot? Where did it come from? We're going to investigate all that today. And there's nobody better to investigate that than a cold case homicide detective. My friend J. Warner Wallace, you know, he's been on this program several times before, coldcasechristianity.com he solved many cold case murders himself. He's been at many homicide scenes. He knows how investigations are done, when information is released, when it's not released. He knows a lot about this kind of investigation. So Jim has researched some of these conspiracy theories. In fact, I asked him to do it because I, I just can't watch the video. And Jim has. So, Jim, thanks for doing all that. Why don't we start with the main conspiracy theory out there about the shooters and let's just take it from there. Was there a second shooter? What does the evidence show?
- [01:53]
B
Well, this is a. I mean, I know for you personally this is a tough, a tough thing to talk about. And so I did watch all the videos. I'm about a day behind, so there's probably some videos that came out yesterday when I was flying that I wasn't able to watch. But I think I pretty much got the idea of what is being said and the number of different kinds of claims that are being made. I think we should start, though, honestly. This is how we start with all investigations. You start with what is the affirmative evidence. Right. Because we can always speculate about what evidence we might someday get, or we don't quite have yet, but we tell jurors all the time you're not allowed to speculate in jury deliberation about what might be. You have to speculate. You can't even speculate at all. It's actually a term we use in criminal trials. Instead, you have to base your inferences simply on the evidence you have before you, not what you think could be out there. So this is the standard Jury instruction. We should also embrace it when we're looking at this even on a cultural way, like on YouTube channels. Okay, what we have so far is, is strong evidence that this Tyler Robinson is the one who's involved, based on not only the video we have of his escape route, his own statements to people before and after the shooting. We have no evidence right now of a secondary shooter. But I can understand we're going to talk about why these people are making these claims. But I think what we have right now, I'm looking at my notes, is you've got great DNA evidence that traces his path. We're eventually going to have ballistic, and we'll talk about all that. So right now, the evidence they have points to one suspect. Now, I think what has added to this conspiratorial kind of ethos we're in is that the FBI has made several posts saying, hey, we're going to investigate the possibility of a second shooter. Not because they think there's a second shooter. They're hearing the same noise that all of us are hearing, and they're going to have to knock down each one of these theories before they go to trial. Just let me say one thing, frankly. When we get done investigating a case and we have a suspect in custody that we believe is our guy, and it's sufficiently supported by the evidence that a district attorney will even file the case, and trust me, DAs don't want to file cases they are going to lose, so that the level has to be pretty high before they'll even file the case. Well, once we've done that, now we're thinking clearly about the trial and protecting the trial. So a lot of what we're going to do, those decisions we're going to make, are going to be about protecting the trial. Now, what I'm seeing online are a couple of things. A number of kind of simpler ones are the ones where people are looking at the crowd and they're looking at the background. Who's standing behind Charlie, who's in the crowd off to the side of Charlie. And they are playing the video back frame by frame by frame from the point of the shot. And they're looking for little movements, little things that seem out of the ordinary. Now, this is just a. Not a good way to do investigations because you can find someone's going to scratch their ear at the time of the shooting, and suddenly it becomes something they think means something. And I've seen a number of these from both sides in the crowd, people in the crowd where people are speculating well, did that person in the crowd actually do the shooting? Did he have a palm gun? Did he have a gun that was shot from a cell phone? Because they're just seeing. This is why this is silly, to just click back frame by frame and look for any twitch. Because if you were to actually do this at any point before the shooting or after the sound of the shot, you will find all kinds of twitchy movements. This is just the nature of humans that exist and get filmed on video. I think this is a poor way to start a conspiracy theory, but you do see it a lot. And I've seen at least three or four videos now where someone's claiming that that little movement from that guy is not necessarily you, it's somebody else in the crowd. And so, of course, this is. This is the kind of stuff that we're going to have to eventually knock down. And of course, the bigger one. The bigger ones, Frank, are the ones that deal with this secondary shooter, not just like there's two shooters involved. And maybe the round came from an entirely different angle.
- [05:48]
A
Right? Yeah. The crazy thing about the. I'm the signaling the shooter. First of all, if somebody wants to kill Charlie Kirk, they know who Charlie Kirk is. They don't need somebody on the stage to say, hey, that's Charlie Kirk over there. Secondly, if he's looking through a scope from 100 or 200 yards away, he can't see me when I'm 25ft to Charlie's. Right. And there's no motive anyway to actually signal anyone. I don't. It's crazy how this stuff arises. I'm still seeing people in my YouTube feed saying, oh, yeah, you. You were making signals. And. And let me tell you, you just said something that. That turned out to be true. You didn't know this was the case already. But as soon as we got to the hospital and handed Charlie off, the FBI was there and started interviewing each of us individually. And then a few days later, I get a phone call from the FBI wanting to ask me about the, you know, the signal gate thing.
- [06:50]
B
Right.
- [06:51]
A
And so now.
- [06:52]
B
So here's the question, Frank, they're not calling you. Trust me, I've done this myself. They are not calling you because they think, oh, maybe Frank's involved. No, they're calling you because they know a trial is coming. And in the trial, every one of these issues is going to be a distraction to the jury. So what they do is they thoroughly investigate each one of these distractions, not because they think it's credible, but because they know that a defense attorney may someday try to make it sound credible. So don't you. So you can't take the fact you were interviewed as any consensus amongst the investigators. They think this is true. That's never the case. Now, I think you mentioned something here, like, the motive seems to be a lot of this. Like, why do people create these kinds of conspiracy theories? Well, sometimes it's because they want to attribute ill will to some side of the political spectrum. And, you know, it's not really that side, it's the other side. Sometimes it's because they simply want to have, like, we are in a Look at me, look at me, look at me. Social media world. And the way you get those kinds of clicks. And I can tell you, I went through all these videos, those are the most popular videos on those channels because they're mentioning Charlie Kirk's death. And this is one of the reasons why, I think a lot of us have kind of resisted the temptation to leverage something this terrible just for social media clicks. But these folks don't care about that. These folks are actually. It's a motivation now to suggest a theory. Now, let me just say something about the way this is being done, because we have enough time in this first segment to talk about this. Look, in the end, all of these theories always emerge early, long before the trial begins. Why? Because it turns out the investigators are holding on to a ton of evidence that they have not shared publicly. And while they're holding on to this, something as simple as the autopsy report, they're holding on to this for a reason. Right. They want to make sure they've investigated every potential accusation, every potential theory that's out there. And they don't want to release information to the public that later on might jeopardize the investigation. Here's what I mean. Often we'll be interviewing somebody and they'll tell us something that either they have to know from firsthand knowledge, which would implicate them in some way, or they might have heard it online. Well, we don't want them to hear it online. So when they do mention this little weird detail to us will go, whoa, that's not been publicized anywhere. This is why often it's not as though agencies lie. And that's one, by the way. That's one of the biggest first assumptions on all these channels. You can't trust anything that law enforcement agency is telling you. Well, I can tell you this. We don't lie. And here's why we don't lie. Because it turns out our Credibility is going to come into question on the stand during the trial. Here's what we do, though. We don't tell you everything, that's a big difference.
- [09:34]
A
You release information incrementally when it makes sense to do so. So that's a great point, Jim. If they were to release information, then other witnesses might be tainted by that information when they're interviewed. So they can't release it all. Now there's much more with the great J. Warner Wallace coming up. Cold case homicide detective. We're going to analyze. He's going to analyze these conspiracy theories, so don't go anywhere. We're back right after the break. You're listening to I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Can you trust what the FBI has said about the Charlie Kirk murder? How much information does the FBI release? When do they release it? What is the proper way to release information? Might they be withholding information for a reason? Well, my friend Jay Warner Wallace, cold case homicide detective, will say yes, and he's going to unpack it further. Jim, why not just give. Why not just hold a press conference and tell us everything we know?
- [10:37]
B
Well, you know, it's why there is a certain distrust, I'll just be honest, between investigators and law enforcement often, and the press. And the reason why is not because we think the press are just innately bad. It's because they have a different set of priorities, a different set of goals. They want, of course, to capture the biggest story possible because they want read. Totally understand that. I get it. Our job, though, once we have somebody in sights and we're making this case and we have enough evidence to actually file a case with the district attorney, is to, like I said before, protect the trial. The trial is coming. You might have the right guy, but if you can't convict him, shame on us. So there's always kind of this sense that if I release this little piece to the press, well, then they chase it and they chase it. Then they make a statement that's not quite true. And then they talk to other people who make additional statements. And now I have a fire. I started up. I'm the reason why I have this fire. If I hadn't released that little piece, there'd be no fire. In the end, it's always safer to say less than to say more. Here's who we have in custody. And by the way, all of this will be part of the criminal trial. It's not as though you're not going to know what happened, you're just not going to know what happened today. And we do that on purpose. Two things. One, like I said, if we're interviewing somebody we think might be involved, we want every piece of information to come to us and we'll realize, hey, you couldn't have known that. Only the killer or the killer's accomplice could know that, because we've never talked about that publicly. We never talked about the details of the injury. We didn't talk about that publicly. So if he knows, oh, this must mean something. So we want to protect our investigation of future suspects, but also we eventually have a jury pool that we're going to have to assemble to do a trial. And the more the community and the public knows, especially the more famous the incident, the harder it is. And you've seen this in the last five years with all kinds of criminal trials where you had a jury that was really hard to select. And often, to be honest, I always tell people, right where do you win your criminal trials? In jury selection, you don't win them in the opening statements, you don't win them in the closing arguments, you don't win them in rebuttal, you win them in jury selection. If you don't pick a jury that's impartial, you're done. So it's really going to be hard to protect that if there's a lot of information out there. Now, I think in the end, what I'm looking for is enough oversight. So I'll give you an example. Do we make mistakes in investigations all the time? All the time, or humans? But what I've always seen is that the less number of law enforcement eyes that are on the investigation, the more likely you are to make a mistake. When you have more eyes on it, you get more people saying, but why are you doing that? Hold on, what if we do this? And so when I have got multi jurisdictional, a lot of eyes, you know, state, local, federal eyes are on this and all those supervisors. This is why, for example, I always wanted a sergeant who had previously been a homicide detective, because that guy knows what happens in homicide investigations and he becomes a source of wisdom for me. So when I see this investigation and there are so many eyes on it now, can that also mess things up? Frank yes, it can. I have if there's a sense of pride and I don't want to share information with you, agencies don't work well together. I have not seen that, though, yet on this investigation. So I just wanted, if you don't mind, I just want to talk about a couple of these Alternatives, you know, kind of claims that are being made.
- [13:57]
A
What we're going to do, friends, is we'll put a couple of these in the show. Notes, like videos, if you want to watch them. I can't watch them. I, you know, I just don't want to see him. But Jim has watched them and I know essentially what they're saying. But Jim, pick one and explain what the conspiracy is and then we'll comment on it. Go ahead.
- [14:17]
B
A guy named Range Day bro did a YouTube video that was kind of referenced very frequently after he posted it by David Pakman, the PD P PBD podcast, Heavy Duty country, headshot 87. A ton of these folks and I, I watched all these. Now some of them, you're right, if you're going to watch them, they are going to replay in slow motion, frame by frame stuff that you probably don't want to see again. And I don't either. I didn't find really any of them to be all that compelling, to be honest with you. For a couple of things. Here's the claim. The claim is that Charlie was shot instead of shot from the front on the left side and that's where the injury appears on his neck, that he's actually shot from behind on the right. And the bullet enters his body in a way that it emerges, it's an exit wound we're seeing. Basically there's their claim on the left side of his neck rather than an entry wound. So they're arguing there's an entirely different shooter at a slightly, at a different angle. So in other words, I always describe it like a piece of pizza where you have a slice of pizza and the point is where Charlie is sitting. Instead of the shot being fired down one edge of the pizza slice, they're claiming it's fired down the other edge. And so this is the idea. Now what are they basing this on? A lot of it is based on this close up evidence, they say, from the video. We've got a couple other videos now that have emerged and I'm watching these as well and I'm thinking, okay, for example, at the point of the entry wound or the impact, let's put it that way, they see something on the right side of Charlie's head that they either claim is some evidence of the bullet itself or is perhaps blood or is perhaps. There's no way, Frank, to tell from the videos. Here's my problem with all that. The video is two dimensional, doesn't even show you any depth. I have no idea how far back from Charlie, any of that small, small little movement, you can't really tell if it's an artifact of the video. There's just not enough evidence for this. And here's my whole point with all of it. So that's the major claim I'm seeing on the secondary shooter, that the bullet comes in from the. From the right side and then it exits from the left side. And I think the point here is they're trying to say, hey, this, this guy they've got, Robinson's a patsy. He doesn't. He didn't even pull the trigger. In essence, they're saying the round came from an entirely different direction. On the basis of what evidence? Now, here's what I would say. In the end, you know, what's going to determine where the bullet came from? The autopsy.
- [16:44]
A
And you know, there are people saying, jim, there was no autopsy.
- [16:47]
B
Yeah, that's, that's not true. As a matter of fact, this autopsy was a couple of things. First of all, let me just explain to people how the autopsy thing works. Every homicide or suspicious death, you'll have to have by state law, and this is true in Utah as well, an autopsy done. And the reason why we do the autopsy is that nothing is clear. What we are trying to do is document what seems to be obvious. Now, that's the point of autopsies, to document what seems to be obvious. Here's what happens. And by the way, homicide investigators, I have to attend every autopsy of anyone who I'm assigned to as the case agent. If I'm going to get the case, I'm going to have to be present at the autopsy. In California at least, we have a provision that allows the coroner not to go to the prelim. I'm going to have to go and testify at the prelim for the coroner. So I have to be there during the autopsy. Here's how this works. As gruesome as it may sound. What happens is we take the body and they bring it into a room. And the heart's been. Not been beating for a while, so there's no more blood being pushed out. They wash the body so it's completely clean. It's naked and clean. Then they put the body into an X ray machine. They're looking, especially in a shooting, they're looking for the round. I can't tell you. You might think that rounds are simple. They're not. When they enter the body, they do all kinds of weird things. Some will fragment and you'll have to trace their fragments. By the way, I will stay as the investigating officer, until that coroner collects every fragment, every piece of metal and gives it to me. It's evidential, it may be used in lab work later on. And we're going to remove every fragment from the body. So they're going to do the same thing with Charlie. And that's going to tell us a couple of things right away. Because one of the claims is that the round should have gone through him. It just should have gone through the kind of round. There's a 30 06, it should have gone through him. Yet they're claiming that the round was in him. By the way, Frank, not unusual. What determines whether the bullet will pass is trajectory, distance and what part of the body it hits. That's it, those three things. And this is coming from a pretty far. By the time it gets to Charlie, it's not moving nearly as fast as it was coming straight out of the barrel. And so it's not moving as fast as you might like if you're like trying to assume it's going to go through the body. And number two, we don't know what it hits. And, and if it hits the spine, if it hits something. Oh, I have seen, I can't even tell you. You'll see. Think the round's going to go in straight and then it hits something and it travels up, down. It could come in at the high torso and leave at the low torso. And you think, how does that happen? Because it's a, it's a trajectory that's really hard to predict. So to me it's not beyond reason that this would be in the body as they said it was. But here's the point. If you're going to suggest it entered another way, well then we're going to have an entry wound on the side that they say it entered on. That's as simple as that. This is why I know one of the things I'll always use is the statement of Kash Patel, the FBI director. At some point he said that he was investigating the potential of a secondary shooter. This is not because the FBI thinks there's a secondary shooter. They're just hearing the same noise that everybody else is claiming. So what they're going to do is knock down every potential far fetched conspiracy that a defense attorney can raise. They're going to knock all those down. Not because they're the source of the concern, because the public is talking about it and they want to knock it down.
- [20:11]
A
Well, I can tell you that there was only one shot because I was right there. I didn't hear a second shot. There were probably five or six, 6,000 other people there. If this guy up on the roof did take a shot, that was the shot, right?
- [20:29]
B
Well, they're claiming is that he didn't take a shot, he's a patsy, a fall guy for the real killer. This is what's so ridiculous. So here's what I was. This is why I said, what motive.
- [20:37]
A
Is there for that?
- [20:38]
B
Exactly. Well, this is it, right? I think, as I said before, there's only one of two motives. One, you're trying to attribute this killing to a group you don't like, or two, you know, this is a great way to get attention online. Those are the motive. That's enough motive right now, in this age in which we live, to drive a lot of people.
- [20:55]
A
So, so, Jim, if, if, if they're saying that it came from Charlie's right back, I was standing in that area, just a little bit more beam of him. So if I was at his 3 o', clock, they're trying to say that that shot came from 4 o' clock and behind me pretty much was a wall. There weren't many people back there. And if the shot was taken within 10 or 20ft of me, it would have been a lot louder than it was.
- [21:31]
B
Right. And I think part of it too, Frank, is that this is. And this is what we can do. We can spend a lot of time kind of theorizing like that. But here's the great part about it. The autopsy will settle it two ways. One, it's going to provide for us all of the trajectory angles. They're either going to be consistent with Robinson or they're not. If there's another entry wound, it'll show us. But here's the better part. It turns out we recovered a round. That round is either going to have the metallurgy and ballistics that match Robinson or it's not. It's as simple as that. And so in the end, this is part of the comprehensive case you put together. And this is also why, as we said before, you can really only make these kinds of outrageous kinds of claims. Now look at. I always say, is it possible? Anything is possible, but it's not reasonable. And I suspect that no one's getting all excited about this because the investigative team already knows the result of the autopsy. And they know that the ballistics, metallurgy, the entry points, all of this probably are confirming of what they already know about Robinson. But here's why. Now is the time the conspiracies emerge. They don't have that information publicly yet.
- [22:39]
A
Got it. Well, there's a lot more we're going to talk about right after the break with cold case homicide detective J. Warner Wallace. What's the truth about the murder of our friend Charlie Kirk? We're going to try and get to it. We won't have all the answers until the investigation is complete, but we can at least point out that some of the speculation is just that, speculation that's going to be corrected by evidence later. Back right after the break, who killed our friend Charlie Kirk? Was it Tyler Robinson from the roof or was it someone else closer to Charlie? And Robinson is just a patsy. Conspiracy theories are everywhere on the Internet. And we know, of course, if it's on the Internet, it has to be true, ladies and gentlemen. Right, yeah. Crazy Jim, we do know that they have recovered the round. Why is that important even if we don't know at this point what they discovered about the round?
- [23:42]
B
Yeah, so. So what's some of the claims you're seeing online is why have they not released the autopsy or the claim that there was no autopsy at all? Now, we already have from several independent sources, even skeptical sources that acknowledge that the autops was performed. So we know it's been performed. And that's something that Turning Point has even broadcast that there was an autopsy done. There was certainly enough time to do it. And when you do this kind of thing, even you might think, well, how do I prepare? We don't know what the private memorial service was for the family, but we have some pictures. Now. You might think, well, if an autopsy was done, could you still have an open casket? Yeah, that's very common.
- [24:22]
A
Well, you saw Jim, Erica released his picture. Yes, I was in the room. It was an open casket for the family, but I'm not at liberty to say what else happened. But yeah, you saw him. It was an open casket.
- [24:40]
B
Yes. And you might think, well, how can you do an extensive autopsy, especially on this kind of an injury, and then leave the body in condition that you can have an open casket? Well, I'm not going to get into the details of this, but they have a way of doing it, a way of entering the. They can do all of it, including doing an examination of the condition of someone's brain, all of this, and then return the body to a position where it could be in an open, open casket. So, so there's so much that can be done in the autopsy. It does not preclude. Nothing is precluded from the fact they did an autopsy. And that autopsy is important for several things. Number one, what are we looking at? What we're looking at with all the wound trajectory stuff, we're going to be able to tell from that. And apparently, according to several now news reports and even to what TPUSA has released, the round was recovered from his body. So. And it was very close to the actual entry point, which probably means that it hit something hard. And you can kind of see from. There's a couple of reasons why you might see the reaction that Charlie immediately experienced. But one of those might be that it either it hit the brain stem, it hit something that would have changed the trajectory of the round, all kinds of things. So. So from my perspective, there's nothing unusual about what we're going to see. But here's what's great. We are going to recover a round that we can now compare to the rounds we have at the actual rifle. So we've got enough data, both from metallurgy and from ballistics from the rifle and what kind of condition that leaves the round in when it leaves the barrel. There are some things we can look at and they'll be pretty close. But here's the most important thing. Even though this might not be a hundred percent, a way to. To confirm every detail of Robinson as the killer, what it will do is dispel all of these alleged theories that involve an entirely different trajectory, because that trajectory will be really clear from the autopsy. So I think a lot of this is us again watching people speculate. And what really is making the speculation possible is the missing autopsy. It's not in the public domain now. You might say, well, why don't just release it then? Because then all this. Because this speculation is not really hurting the investigation going forward. As long as they do what they did with you. They're going to interview everyone and knock all these things down, and then when they go to trial, all of this is going to come out. There will not. I think in the end, there are people who feel like, hey, is this going to end up another one of these unsolved conspiracy theories, like jfk, like all. Like we're in a different age. We have so much video information that we didn't have 40 years ago. It's going to be very different in this age. I think I'm feeling very comfortable as an investigator that. And I almost feel like we shouldn't even give credence to these conspiracy theories, given that the evidence for this is pretty robust and you can tell even from his escape route. I mean, do we really think he had another person involved. You know, I don't. This seems like he's exactly what he looks to be. And by the way, remember we talked. One of the things they're saying online, Frank, even if they're talking about, well, why is he hitting the neck the way he was? Is it even possible to. To hit someone with that level of accuracy? And was. And were. And were you using these hand signals to somehow help him? Okay, stop. So here's what I would say. If you've ever hunted, you know, when you've got an animal in your sights, that you are focused on your sight and you're focused on your telescope, your. Your telescopic, whatever you're using on your rifle. And you're waiting. You're waiting for the shot. Charlie had a habit of talking with his microphone and then leaning forward and putting the microphone down and listening. He didn't always hold the microphone the entire time somebody else was talking, he would put it down, then he would lean forward and pick it back up again. And if I'm scoping just on his head, there's going to be times when he's going to be out of frame and back in frame. And that's why I'm going to have to be stay. My eye has to stay in the scope because I'm looking for the shot. When he comes back into the scope, as gruesome as that sounds, that's the way anyone hunts. And that's what would have happened here. And I think it's because of his rocking back and forth when he answers questions that it took a little while for the killer to get the rhythm of that. So when he came back up a third time, he knew he could pull the trigger. Now, how accurate is this kid from that distance? Well, I don't think he's aiming at his neck. He's either aiming at his chest, at the heart, or he's aiming at the brain. Because that's what we do, right, in these failure drills when we know we want to really stop somebody. Those are the shots that actually put people down. Now, if he was aiming for his chest, he's off by a foot. If he's aiming for his head, he's off by 8 to 9 inches. But he happened to be accurate enough to make the hit.
- [29:22]
A
Ironically, the reason Charlie would put the mic down was to prevent him from interrupting somebody. Yeah, that's why he did it.
- [29:30]
B
Right?
- [29:31]
A
Because he wanted to hear them and he wanted them to speak freely because he loved them and he wanted to reach them. And yet people on the left call Charlie Kirk a Nazi or a fascist. I mean, how many fascists do you know who say, if you disagree with me, come to the front of the line. I'll give you the mic and I won't interrupt. Tell me your story. Tell me your case. It's absolutely ridiculous, the lies that have been told about this man.
- [30:00]
B
Well, in that movement that is caused by his desire, I think a couple things happen. You're right. Number one is it takes away. Also, I always, when I used to watch him do this, I used to always think, oh, I like that, because it almost takes away like this. I'm the celebrity and you're just a guy.
- [30:18]
A
Right.
- [30:18]
B
Because he would put down the microphone and he would become human again. But that movement back and forth is why I think the shot didn't even occur earlier. I think it took a while for him to see what that to expect. Okay, he's going to come back. Okay, he's going to come back. And you're absolutely right. There is no way. There's no need. I can't. I've never heard. Look, snipers also do this on SWAT teams. Like, snipers will look through that scope and they will keep their eye. They don't look around. They stay in the scope because the scope is what they're. They're aiming at. And the same thing is here. I'm sure he was staying in that scope and he was looking for that pattern.
- [30:53]
A
And let me say one other thing about that, too, Jim. And this. Yeah, of course, is going to all come out in the autopsy.
- [30:59]
B
Right.
- [31:01]
A
I'm looking down at Charlie and we're trying to stop the blood coming from his neck. I don't believe there was an exit wound on the other side. Otherwise that would have been bleeding, too. And we weren't trying to stop bleeding on the back of his neck. We were trying to stop it on the front. So now could there have been a possible. But I'm looking. I mean, I'm. I'm right there. You know, he's. He's a foot away and sometimes doing cpr, you know, I'm right on. And I don't. I do not think there was an exit wound in the back of the neck. Maybe there was, but it would seem like we would have to be stopping blood from that angle, too, if that were the case.
- [31:47]
B
Yeah. And again, this is what's so, so powerful about the autopsy. The, that we often think that, you know, they're all. They're looking for the collection of the, of the weapon rounds. They're looking to also cause of death. Now you might think, well, what, duh, what's the cause of death? They're going to tell you though, in the autopsy exactly what artery was severed. There's going to be some explanatory power. It's going to be important to know just for sake of. You might think, well, why do we need to know that? Well, if there was no alternative theory, you probably wouldn't need to know some of these details. But when the alternative theories come up and they're saying, oh yeah, he was shot from behind and it affected his brain in a certain way, then knowing exactly the mechanism of death will help us to at least dispel the alternative theories. And again, that's where this is all coming from, is a desire to be thorough. Can you imagine? And I have worked with some of the best district attorneys in Los Angeles county. And when we do these big high profile cases where Dateline is in the room with you while you're doing the trial, I just know whether they say it or not, the pressure on the prosecutorial team is strangles you. Can you imagine the pressure on this? The slightest mistake? So that's why every T is going to be crossed, every I is going to be dotted and silence is now taken by these online YouTubers as evidence of something nefarious. No, silence is just prudence.
- [33:11]
A
That's a key point, ladies and gentlemen. Listen to that. That is a key point that you need to know. Jim's been on the inside and done these investigations himself. He knows what he's talking about. You don't reveal information before you have to.
- [33:23]
B
No, no, no. And I'll tell you something. Every time when I get upset, when I watch sometimes a federal administration do an investigation like this, because I know they're bo. They have press releases, they have press conferences. I'm always like, ah, don't do that. I have no problem having them mad at me. But in. But having no information because it turns out no information to the public helps you when you finally get to trial. I get it, you can't can you have no information. It's just going to create all of this conspiratorial thinking. Okay, I understand all that, but from an investigative perspective, everyone being dumb and not knowing what's going on is going to help us. It's going to help us pick a jury because there's nothing out there that really could taint the jury. It's going to help us, once we actually get in front of the jury, to roll out the Evidence. The other thing I don't want is a jury to think that it knows half the information you get in the public is false. They think we have. If we start giving out information, they think we have more than we really do. So I want them to see what we have and not have some false expectation because they heard it on a YouTube channel. Oh, there's going to be this infrared kind of, you know, technology that was used. Okay. That isn't. That technology doesn't even exist. Okay. So. So we want the jury is to have a reasonable expectation as we build our case. I just think in the end, you're far better off saying less than you are saying more to the, to the press. And that's why you're seeing silence right now about this. Now, I almost think you could take odds. Will at some point the claims of conspiracies be so loud that the, the investigative team is going to want to release something, just something small to knock him down maybe. I still wouldn't do it. I. I think you just have to ignore that stuff and then knock it down when you get to trial. That's always the better way to go.
- [35:13]
A
Well, the one thing Erica did want everyone to know, because, look, she talked to the surgeon directly that Charlie died instantly. And the details of that will come out in the investigation. It is true we got a heartbeat when we got to the operating room, when we got to the hospital, but that was just because Charlie was a healthy guy. His vertebrae. Well, I'll let the report come out. We'll see. It'll all come out. Ladies and gentlemen, these conspiracy theories are just that. They don't have evidence behind them. They have a lot of speculation. Evidence will lead us to the truth. And it's being gathered right now. We're just gonna have to be patient. We have another segment with Cold case Homicide Detective Jay warner wallace coldcase christianity.com coldcasechristianity.com back right after the break. Conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk. That's what we're talking about today. We have a expert. J. Warner Wallace, cold case homicide detective, has investigated many homicides, knows how the investigations go. And so we're talking about the different theories that are out there. There was a second shooter from another angle. All this or Robinson didn't really pull the trigger. And Jim, there's been some skepticism that Robinson is the killer because apparently the nature of what he said on Discord to his boyfriend wasn't convincing to people or what. What's the issue there? What's going on There.
- [36:47]
B
Yeah. Some of the statements that were made even to friends, other people, especially to his live in mate, was like, okay, so does it sound like a normal conversation? It sounds kind of stiff, almost as though he's trying to say it in a very formal way that will get the boyfriend off. In other words, make sure that he'll never be prosecuted for this. Well, okay. The only way you can examine that forensically. And I've seen, look, I've used a lot of forensic statement analysis in criminal trials where I'm showing a jury that this statement the suspect made is odd. And it's a tip, it's a tell that he's, he's being disingenuous. Okay, I'd have to have. And I usually will show that. Okay, so let me show you. When typically discussing this these other 15 times, look at how he behaves. Look at how he behaves now, look on the 16th, how he responds differently. In other words, in order to say that this conversation between him and any of his friends is forced, I'd have to have a huge sample size. And I don't think we have that. So when somebody online gets a YouTube channel and says, oh, yeah, he couldn't have been, he's clearly staging this to make it possible for his friends to be off the hook. Well, we don't have enough sample size. And listen, there may be enough sample size. It may also be one of those things that the investigators are not releasing. But I certainly don't see enough sample size. And here's what I mean. You'd have to say, well, every time he talks about the shooting, he says it this way. Well, how many times do we have recorded him talking about the shooting? Not only that, whatever he's talking about, I'd have to have it in a certain context. Does he change the way he talks to him as opposed to others? Do you see why you need a huge sample size? One last thing about that forensic statement analysis is not a science, it's an art. And there are times when I have said, okay, this is important right here. But I'm not quite sure why it's important. I just know that there's something going on here. Now, I can infer it one way and the defense might infer it a different way, but I think we have to be really careful about the extent to which language alone can tell us much. And I don't think we have a big enough sample size. And anyone who's online saying, hey, this is the reason why we know he's not alone, I Don't think you can make that kind of claim until I have a larger sample size to see how people are communicating and.
- [38:59]
A
Jim, is it. Yeah, no, I was going to say. I think you've said this before. Every case you've ever worked has had loose ends or details you couldn't explain. Is that true?
- [39:10]
B
Oh, absolutely. So this is something we should talk about right now, because Charlie wasn't just a guy. He was a guy who was a Christ follower. And he had a lot of exposure to you. And we've all talked. You and I have talked. I'm sure you talked with him as well about the nature of eyewitness testimony. So much online right now, skepticism about who's the killer is because you might have one person who saw the entire thing that reported it this way. Another person who was there also who saw the whole thing reports it a slightly different way, and then suddenly the YouTuber is skeptical. Oh, this is either a lie. There's. That's not. Something's not. Listen, I've had multiple eyewitnesses on many of my cases. They never agree entirely. And sometimes it drives you crazy because you know the defense attorney is going to go after this. They're going to say, see this difference? You can't trust this guy. He says it's slightly different. No, no. Everyone comes in with their own set of priorities, their own things. They love. They love guns or they love a certain kind of clothing. They can tell you more about those things that they're interested in. And they sometimes won't even pay attention to things they're not interested in. And the accounts have to be puzzled together. Charlie knew the Gospels were exactly like this. He knew because you talked to him about it. You and I have been talking about this forever. Eyewitnesses don't agree. And the investigator's job is to put those two together so they lock in, and you have the fullest, most robust picture of what happened. And Charlie knew that was true of the Gospel authors that each one says sometimes describes the exact same event, yet the difference is tangible. You're like going, how can they say it so differently? That's what eyewitnesses always do. When I first opened the Bible at the age of 35, what intrigued me were the differences. So when I'm reading through these Gospels, I'm going, wow, this has got a flavor, a texture of disagreement, or at least of kind of like you have to stitch these things together to make sense of it. That is very common in true eyewitness accounts. And so this is why when Charlie would talk about trusting Christ as savior, he wasn't talking about, oh, just pick anything about God is close enough. No, no, he actually knew that we could trust what the gospels were saying about Jesus. That he lived, worked miracles, taught a crazy, upside down backwards ethic that most of us shaped all of Western civilization. And then he rose from the grave to demonstrate where his authority came from. This is what I think we have to kind of focus on going forward. Right. That very confidence that we have that there is a truth about anything starts with confidence in the truth about the resurrection. And when you have that kind of confidence, it changes things. And you're seeing that people now are looking to say, well, wow, what gave him that kind of confidence? What gave him that kind of boldness? Could it be that it wasn't just a passion for politics? Could it be that it was a passion for a savior that was he knew, not based on his own feelings or his own experiences, but he just knew. Now, here's what will happen. If you'll start reading the scriptures and look at the gospel accounts to see what they say about Jesus, you will get to believe that belief that Jesus rose from the grave. But if you'll read the New Testament to see what it says about you, you'll suddenly embrace the values that Charlie embraced. When you know that you're a sinner in need of a savior, when you recognize that in your best day you're not even close to a holy God, when you recognize you might have good days, but you've never had a morally perfect day. And I'm sure Charlie would admit that for himself as well. Then you know that that Savior you've already identified on the pages of the Gospels because you tested them as eyewitness accounts, is also the Savior that can solve your problem and start a life that changes everything. You see? Now thousands of people are willing to consider, what was it that formed the confidence for this man?
- [43:16]
A
You know, Jim, in the last walk Charlie and I had two days before he died, Monday night, we're walking through the streets of Phoenix with a bodyguard, and we're just talking about what are the questions? He's like, what are the questions am I going to get at this college? And the two major issues that came up that he wanted to get better at defending. Whereas the evidence for the resurrection, how can I persuade people? Because I know it happened, how can I persuade people? It's true. And then how can I convince young people about the beauty of the family to get married? And I know that's big between you and Susie. I mean, you guys are doing marriage. You're putting marriages back together through Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Organization. You're doing that work right now. Those were two things on his heart. And this coming week, the next podcast, we're going to have Mikey McCoy, Charlie's chief of staff, and his father, Rob McCoy. And Mikey just texted me. He said, you know, that Charlie died at the peak of his faith. He died at the peak, and that's powerful.
- [44:16]
B
You know what I actually think, Frank? And you tell me if I'm wrong. You know why he died at the peak of his faith? Because his faith was still ascending. And the tragedy is that we just saw the peak where it was. I often wonder, like, where would it have been? Where would it. He was on an ascent. Yeah, it would have been even.
- [44:34]
A
That's.
- [44:34]
B
That's the tragedy of all of this.
- [44:36]
A
Right, Right. But God could bring good from it. He can ripple forward good. I think he's bringing forth a tsunami of good. As I said at the memorial service, it doesn't take our pain away right now, but it does help us realize that we're here for eternity, that eternity is on our hearts. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, we have to keep our eyes on eternity. It could be. I don't know if this is true, Jim, or not. It could be that Charlie's impact might be greater given what has happened than if he had lived. It could be. I don't know, but it. Well, I'm getting emails from Sweden, from Denmark, from London, from Australia. People are saying they're Christians because of Charlie Kirk.
- [45:19]
B
Yeah, well, and this is why Charlie knew the connection between the resurrection and his interest in marriage. So if you're thinking, well, hey, I'd love to have a marriage like that, well, it's tied to the. The vision that the connection that Christ had loves the church as the bride. That connection transfers over into Charlie's life in his own marriage. These are not disconnected. Christianity is not just true, it is beautiful. This combination of being true and beautiful can change everyone's life. By the way, nothing really could be beautiful, though, if it's not true to begin with. These are connected. It's beautiful because it's true, but it happens to be beautiful, and you can see it and how it affects people's lives, how it affects their marriages. And we saw that with Charlie.
- [46:05]
A
By the way, friends, Jim wrote an absolutely astonishing book called Person of Interest. If there's just one book you want to get about Jesus. It would be that one. You'll be shocked to learn the impact how this itinerant preacher from a remote part of The Roman Empire 2000 years ago has had on the world. It's really hard to explain if Jesus did not rise from the dead. So Person of Interest is a book you definitely want to get if you don't have it. And then if you want more of the evidence of the manuscripts and that sort of evidence, you want to get Cold Case Christianity, the new edition, which came out. The updated edition came out a few years ago. Tell them about your website, Jim, and where.
- [46:53]
B
Well, look, I mean, like all of us, we all want to make a case for the God that we love. And so we did that at cold case Christianity. Coldcasechristianity.com but before you go into any of that, just scripture. It's all in the scripture. Bible seals are through the roof. If you're listening to us right now and you've never read, go get a Bible and read the Gospel of John. Once you fall in love with Jesus, everything else is downstream. Every other view you've held about anything is downstream of whether or not Jesus is who he said he was.
- [47:27]
A
That's right.
- [47:28]
B
Start with the Gospel of John. You will be changed.
- [47:30]
A
By the way, we don't have time to get into this, but if you get coldcasechristianity.com or you get the book, Jim, you talk about how hard it is to really pull off a conspiracy, right?
- [47:40]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And we didn't even go into that. But you're absolutely right because the claim is always that these disciples were conspiring. But we know how difficult that is. That's one of the reasons why when I hear someone online talk about Charlie, I know it can't be as easy as they say it is.
- [47:54]
A
That's right, Jim. Thank you for this work, brother. You've helped a lot of people. The great J. Warner Wallace, ladies and gentlemen. Coldcasechristianity.com I'm telling you, get those two books at least. Cold Case Christianity get Person of Interest. They are blessings. And read the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John. When you see who Jesus is, you can't not know he's the Savior. All right, Lord willing, we'll see you with Mikey and Rob McCoy next time. God bless.