Chris Connelly (4:34)

Thank you. I'm grateful to the Disney Corporation for allowing me to work for ESPN and for the ABC News people. And so, you know, I like getting the chance to tell all these different kinds of stories. And stories in this space, as you well know, are incredibly powerful. You meet amazing people, and you're also given the time to tell these stories in some depth. And you speak to an audience, as you do, that's knowledgeable and that knows their way around these stories. And I always like it when you get to talk to elite audiences. And so I'm grateful for the opportunity.

Maggie Freeling (5:09)

So, Chris, going back to the beginning, where did your career start?

Chris Connelly (5:14)

I actually began at MTV as their movie person.

Maggie Freeling (5:18)

Yes.

Chris Connelly (5:18)

I had a show called the Big Picture, and I interviewed movie people and folks like that. And then I was made part of the news department. And so that's when I interviewed bands and told stories all through the 90s. So 90s was a very active time in music in lots of different ways. Tragically, among those ways were true crime stories that we had to tell. People my age like to talk about how Jimmy and Janice and Jim Morrison died, you know, during the 1960s. And, you know, early said what the tragedy that was. And people forget that three of the biggest hitmakers of the 1990s died in the 90s by gunfire. Kurt Cobain, Biggie Smalls, and Tupac Shakur. And so covering music in that era meant covering the same kinds of things that we talk about now. In a strange and unfortunate way. That was the kind of training that I guess I sort of got that put me in some sort of shape to tell these stories now.

Maggie Freeling (6:19)

Well, you know what? It was like, you mentioned it was informational. It wasn't just this, like. And I don't. I haven't put on MTV in forever, but I do remember the evolution. By the time I got to college, it was less informational, less news, and more of just music videos of what was going on today. So it really was that era that we learned things and we learned about the music, and it was just really. It felt wholesome, maybe, is the word. It felt wholesome.

Chris Connelly (6:43)

I guess the thing that I noticed was that nobody was covering what we were covering. Like, we had to feel to ourselves, if we were covering youth culture, mainstream culture just wasn't touching it. Even though I wasn't of the age, we certainly represented for a demographic that was underrepresented elsewhere.

Maggie Freeling (7:01)

Yeah, it was great.

Chris Connelly (7:02)

And Gen Xers everywhere, I think, seem to remember that MTV was their network when nobody else was.

Maggie Freeling (7:08)

I have a question for you, and you may or may not be able to answer, but your music career, your true crime career, is Kurt Cobain's death an unsolved murder?

Chris Connelly (7:18)

I don't believe that it is, no.

Maggie Freeling (7:20)

Did you cover that case intimately?

Chris Connelly (7:22)

I was still doing movies most of the time when that happened. I was more involved with the Tupac case and with Biggie a little bit Tupac, mostly because he was Tupac. I went to Vegas. I think I might be the only guy to have interviewed his doctor on camera while he was in the hospital. So that was kind of a big one for. For us. Yeah, certainly. But I think the case is closed on. On Kurt Cobain's passing.

Maggie Freeling (7:49)

2001 is when you stopped at MTV, I believe.

Chris Connelly (7:53)

Yes.

Maggie Freeling (7:53)

So 2001, I was in middle school, so I was very into Tupac and Biggie, and, like, I was just growing up on those things when you, I guess, were reporting on them. It's very interesting.

Chris Connelly (8:04)

Yeah, it is hard to kind of put your mind back to what that period of time was like. You know, it was very strange at the time, but in retrospect, you just think of everything that you lost. You know, I always thought that Tupac's life was like the autobiography of Malcolm X if you had ripped the last 200 pages out. I mean, there was just no telling what that human being might have gone on to become. He might be our Senator now, you know, he might have gone on to any number of. He was so brilliant and so one of a kind, that his future could have gone in any number of directions. And I think people still think about that.

Maggie Freeling (8:41)

That's really incredible to hear. How does a music career transition to 2020 and true crime connect that for.

Chris Connelly (8:51)

Me, I grew up in the 1960s in New York. I was six years old when the crime of the century happened, and that was the Kennedy assassination. And so I think for anyone in my generation who read the newspaper and sort of kept up, that was the crime that horrified and fascinated, you know, all of us as people attempted to investigate it and did all the kinds of things that we do now when we tell these true crime stories. At the end of the day, it was a crime, it was a murder. And the different ways that people tried to solve it, you know, were certainly compelling. And then, because I was in New York, I was around for the Kitty Genovese murder, which was the legendary 40 people who heard her cries and didn't do anything about it. Or I remember Richard Speck and the Chicago Nurses. You know, I remember F. Lee Bailey representing Dr. Sam Shepard, who was the basis for the fugitive character, and Carl Coppolino and getting acquittals for them both. And then, of course, I was in New York for Son of Sam in the 1970s. So true crime was sort of part of your life if you kept up with the news. And then inevitably, it touched music as well. Even MTV did a half hour on Mia Zapata from the Gits, who disappeared without explanation in Washington State. And it was an effort to try to get people to come forward and to see if the crime could be solved and that eventually it was solved through DNA, years after we did our stories. So telling these kind of narratives, you know, even in the pop culture or sports space, is very much part of, you know, of what we kind of do for a living.

Maggie Freeling (10:27)

Did these kinds of stories always interest you?

Chris Connelly (10:30)

Oh, sure, yeah. My parents were both lawyers. I used to go to trials, you know, in the background as a kid. I mean, they didn't do criminal law. And then, weirdly enough, this is a strange thing to confess. In January of 1975, I worked as an intern for the Southern District of New York.

Maggie Freeling (10:47)

Wow.

Chris Connelly (10:48)

You know, wore my dad's suits and helped out a guy who went on to become the Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey. As. As he prosecuted a Small Business Administration crime. I helped get the handwriting analyst that proved that one of the defendants was lying when he said that he had not signed a particular document. You know, in a lot of ways, I guess I thought I would be the lawyer. I grew up to be the lawyer who knew who had played bass on a particular record or who had starred in a particular movie. And at some point in college, I realized you might actually be able to make a living just knowing who played bass on a record or who starred in a particular movie. And this was a light bulb. Hence I never became a lawyer.

Maggie Freeling (11:28)

We'll be right back after a quick break. And we're back. We have you here today to talk about Cold Blooded, your new podcast with 2020. What attracted you to this case of Dr. Eric Garcia? When did you get involved? Tell me the inception of Cold Blooded.

Chris Connelly (11:50)

Well, the nice people of 2020 asked me if I'd be willing to go up to Alaska to spend some time talking to the people who knew Dr. Garcia and some of the people who had investigated the crime, as well as going to Washington State and continuing those conversations afterwards with some law enforcement and some people who knew other folks connected to the crime. And so I said yes. I think it's the advantage of being on the west coast is that they think of you for these things. Ketchikan is one of the most beautiful places you'll ever go to. I mean, everywhere you look there are the most amazing vistas. And you know, I realize Alaska is not an unknown place to our listeners here, but it was just so stunning and the people were the nicest people.

Maggie Freeling (12:33)

Was that your first time?

Chris Connelly (12:35)

No. I had done a story with a producer named Sharon Matthews for ESPN on a runner named Marco Cessetto. And Sharon Matthews is such a good producer that we won a Murrow Award for that. And she went on to be involved with an Oscar winning short. So I was a barnacle on her in a speedboat. But that was a great story long. And the short of it is as many people I guess know, Alaska is a place of amazing stories. And it's also a place of amazing human beings. And not all of those amazing human beings are people who grew up there. Some people wind up there and they're amazing too. And that was what Everybody told me. Dr. Eric Garcia was like. He had been brought up in Puerto Rico. He'd worked in Chicago and worked on the border with Mexico in Texas at a hospital. But when he came to Ketchikan, he might have seemed like an outsider, but he was welcomed into this community immediately. And people really had great fondness and appreciation for him in a way that was really striking. His brother Saul, who I talked to, said I went to visit him in Ketchikan and we went to the grocery store and we almost couldn't get out of the grocery store for people stopping my brother and thanking him for how he had treated their sister, their aunt, themselves. And Dr. Garcia knew who those people were and talked about them. Sometimes, you know, you think about a surgeon as being like a technician, right? And there's also that expression, you know, if the surgeon cries, the patient dies. Like they're supposed to be unemotional. That wasn't Dr. Garcia. He was both a wonderful surgeon and he was a person who cared about his patients. He was a great diagnostician. And so he was really taken to the heart of Ketchikan. And when I went up there, people were going out of their way, his co workers, his friends, people who had done business with him to tell me what a special man Eric Garcia was.

Maggie Freeling (14:30)

Yeah, you can see that in the ABC special, the 2020 special, you guys did. So many friends. I mean, even just the police footage outside his house for the welfare check, so many friends around. So maybe that answers my next question, but what stood out to you about this case?

Chris Connelly (14:48)

You know, you mentioned that that welfare check moment that begins the story. So many stories in crime fiction, you know, end with a moment like that. There is Hercule Poirot in the room at the end with all the people involved and the crime is solved. Or there's, you know, a dramatic moment like that. And this is our dramatic moment. And it comes right at the beginning, the moment when, at the behest of an out of towner named Jordan Joplin, police enter the home of Dr. Eric Garcia to discover if he's there. They don't think that he will be. They think it will be an empty house when he goes there, because they've checked before. And so they are shocked to find that he's there. And so the way that the people outside react to the news of his death really kind of sets the stage for what you've heard is this remarkable mystery and this investigation that takes place on two fronts. Both to figure out what happened to Dr. Garcia's, you know, valuables, tens of thousands of dollars of them. And what happened to his life? Why is he no longer with us? Has he died of natural causes? As many people in their late 50s sometimes do in Alaska? Cops told us that that's not an unfrequent occurrence. Has he taken his own life? Well, his friends certainly don't think that had happened. But they have to check that possibility out. Or is something much more tragic happened or much more sordid, let's put it that way. And it all begins with that, you know, welfare check. The discovery of his body, and then the people who are gathered at that house to hear the news and how they react tells you so much about how the rest of this story will go. It's fascinating.

Maggie Freeling (16:32)

Do you think if his valuables. And it was quite impressive. You can see in the. In the show, the police body camera goes into where his valuables are kept and it's completely looted. Like we were told by his friend, there's gold, all these things in there. Do you think that if that wasn't found emptied, perhaps we wouldn't have had an arrest, that it would have been perhaps a suicide?

Chris Connelly (16:57)

We give you a lot more of the body camera conversation than we were able to on tv, and it's really evocative. And just that exact moment you're talking about, you get to hear exactly how it happened. When those goods are revealed and they're gone, when the place where they're supposed to be is gone. You know, as we look back, I certainly think it's the. It's the belief of at least the people who knew Dr. Garcia, it is their belief that Jordan Joplin was hoping that this would present as a suicide, that this was, you know, there was an empty pill bottle. There was maybe a suggestion that there was a, you know, an attempt to use the charcoal grill as a way to raise the level of carbon monoxide in a manner that would look like you were taking your own life. I think it admits to two possible scenarios. One is the murderer is trying everything they can to cause the murder because the murderer doesn't know, like, you know, if any of this stuff's gonna work. So the murderer's gonna try everything. Because the murderer's, you know, hope is to commit the crime. And the other is as a fake out. The other is to make it look like it was the equivalent of being in your garage and turning on the exhaust and dying that way? I think the hope was that it would be an open and shut situation, the absence of those valuables. But more importantly, I think the presence of Bob Jackson on the site, that everyone is in mourning, you know, devastated. Don Hink is telling the cops, well, he did have a really bad heart. You know, he had a triple bypass. He absolutely could have, you know, I mean, there was a moment when he was literally in the operating room and he had to go to emergency to get Treated at Ketchikan, going from the OR to the er.

Maggie Freeling (18:42)

Wow.

Chris Connelly (18:43)

So they're investigating every possibility, you know, But Bob Jackson arrives aflame with the idea that there are thousands of dollars of valuables inside the house. And while everyone is understandably, like, wrapped up in their own emotions, Bob Jackson is buttonholing these cops and saying, you have got to check the valuables. You have got the. And so he creates such an energy as he feels this. And Bob Jackson is a great guy. Like, he's Mr. Ketchikan. Like you could talk to him about anything. You know, he is just a wonderful human being, but he is aflame. And so he really drives them towards looking for these valuables. And then when the valuables are gone and we are talking tens of thousands of dollars of hard goods, it's a shocking moment.

Maggie Freeling (19:30)

It's incredible footage. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Connelly (19:33)

And you can hear the reactions and stuff. And what it means is they don't have to wait for toxicology to get this investigation going. Like, okay, we're gonna have to wait and see what it is that the cause of Death is for Dr. Garcia. But there's stuff missing here. Now, Dr. Garcia is the kind of guy who gave away a lot of his valuable stuff and did it in a kind of profligate way or like it came from a good place. With Dr. Garcia, he just wanted to make people happy here. Have a nice. Have an expensive watch, have a 20 year old, you know, single malt whiskey. But even people who knew him and liked him said, you know, Eric, you might want to ease off the gas a little bit. Pump the brakes on all the giving away you're doing. Will Hink, who was Don Hink's husband, said, you know, you got that piece of gold out there so the pizza delivery guy could run off with it. You know, they wanted him to be a little more careful about that stuff. So everybody knew he had lots of valuables, I think, in town. So the fact that it was gone gave them something immediately to investigate. And so they got some breaks there in a hurry. And like you say, that turbocharged the.

Maggie Freeling (20:41)

Investigation back after a short break.

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Tenderfoot TV Announcer (21:17)

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Maggie Freeling (21:52)

Can you talk more about the relationship between Dr. Garcia and Jordan Joplin? Because I know it is central to this case.

Chris Connelly (22:00)

Dr. Garcia, you know, in the words of his friends and in the words of his brother Saul, was not very experienced in manners of the human heart. He had dated a little bit, but it hadn't been a big part of his life. And so his private life, if he had one, was held very close to the vest. Some people in Ketchikan had seen Jordan Joplin on a number of occasions, and they made for an unusual couple. This, you know, ripped young man and this doctor in his late 50s. He obviously seemed to convey that he didn't really want to talk about their relationship with them. Nobody we talked to specifically felt that there would have been backlash from people had they known about this relationship.

Maggie Freeling (22:45)

Like, it wouldn't have been in, like, a hate crime or something.

Chris Connelly (22:48)

But a couple of people did say that, like, they knew people who might have reacted in negative ways. And isn't that always the way? It's like, you know, no, I'll be fine with it, but I know other people who, who might be. And that might very well be true, you know, in an accurate reading. But it seems like that's always the thing that. That holds you back. It's never someone in front of you. It's always like, but what about the outside world? You know, what about something else? It's the thing that he may have wondered about or it's the thing that, you know, might have been on his mind. In whatever event, he did not feel comfortable in terms of sharing the details of his relationship with Jordan Joplin. And for someone who displayed such great judgment every time he set foot inside an operating room and who saved lives when he did that, you wonder, did he put his own life at risk with his judgment?

Maggie Freeling (23:38)

Outside the operating room, there is a smoking gun. And I'm so curious about the person who's arrested. Had a video of Dr. Garcia's, like, last breaths. Did they film it, like, in a sadistic way? Like, what was up with that?

Chris Connelly (23:54)

Well, it's such a fascinating question. And just as you say, it's like an eight or nine second video and it is so disturbing. I mean, it's Dr. Garcia, where he was found obviously having enormous difficulty breathing, you know, filmed on, I guess, an iPhone or something like that, and saved to, you know, to the murderer's phone. And so it's really compelling. So you can speculate Jordan Joplin testified at his own trial and had his own explanation for what it was, but it definitely looked like what was going on here. Why wasn't it followed by a 911 call? Why wasn't it followed by I need to get help? You know, I think we can only speculate on what the motives might have been, but it is, it really shakes you up. And like you say, you know, if there was a smoking gun, that's. That's very much it.

Maggie Freeling (24:47)

Yeah, it's pretty incredulous. There was an arrest pretty quickly within I think a month or two. Very quickly. But you guys are now covering this years later. Why continue to cover a case that is, quote, seemingly solved?

Chris Connelly (25:03)

You know, there's always a lot of speculation as to what sort of stories people like to listen to and like to and like to hear. Podcasts like yours, you know, cover all kinds of stories. People who are missing and who have not been found, murders that have not been solved. You know, I think that our audience likes the satisfaction that justice has been done. You know, I think we like to present them with a story that has a beginning, middle and end. You know, where the justice system has done its job, where law enforcement has done its job. And although this arrest took place, you know, relatively early on, it was years before this case went to trial.

Maggie Freeling (25:40)

Chris Connolly, we very much appreciate you being here to talk about Cold Blooded, your latest podcast with 2020. Thank you so much.

Chris Connelly (25:48)

Thank you for everything. Really appreciate it.

Maggie Freeling (25:55)

For me as a journalist, Chris Connelly is truly an inspiration. He cares so much about the work he does. He is passionate and it was a pleasure to speak with him. I appreciate his coverage of Dr. Garcia and shedding light on this senseless murder. And I have to say, it was really exciting to talk about old MTV days. Coldblooded is available now and you can check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Y', all, thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of up and Vanish Weekly. Be sure to tune in next week as we dig into another new case. Until next time.

Payne Lindsey (26:51)

Up and Vanish Weekly is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Your hosts are Maggie Freeling and myself, Payne Lindsey. The show is written by Maggie Freeling, myself and John Street. Executive producers are Donald Albright and myself. Lead producer is John Street. Additional production by Meredith Steadman and Mike Rooney Research for the series by Jamie Albright, Celicia Stanton and Carolyn Tallmadge Edit and mix by Dylan Harrington and Sean Nurney Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan artwork by Byron McCoy. Original music by Makeup and Vanity set. Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at uta, Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. For more podcasts like up and Vanish Weekly, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us@Tenderfoot TV. Thanks for listening.