Sarah Kaelin (35:33)
Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com after speaking with Justin, I understand why he thinks Chuck Chance killed Jennifer. He thinks Chuck had a crush on Jennifer and that this crush led Chuck to the Judd's apartment on the fateful morning of May 11, 1992. Someone else was in the house at some point and left behind a half empty can of orange soda. Justin had bought a case of the soda when he was getting supplies for taco night, but to find A can on its side in the middle of the bedroom floor. Bright orange liquid spilling out onto the clean carpet. Jennifer would never have just left that there. It doesn't tell us a complete story, but it does tell us that a person brought it back there into the bedroom and just left it on the floor. I see how Justin thinks this could have been Chuck, but I'm not convinced. Chuck was 20 years old. His record shows a history of violence, but of a very different variety than what was inflicted on Jennifer. He blew part of his own finger off in high school while messing around with a firecracker. He joined the military and was discharged nine months later, reportedly for reasons related to the injury to his finger. When Jennifer was killed, Chuck was married with a child and had no official record of domestic violence against his then wife Tracy. Though people who knew the couple have stated they believed there was physical abuse that Tracy never reported to the police. In the years since Jennifer's murder, Chuck has been arrested on charges related to bad checks and methamphetamine. He's currently in prison for some of those. He was hit with protective orders in 2007 and 2011. Otherwise, his record reveals no signs of pattern violence. As a behaviorist, when I'm looking at a 20 year old suspect without a history of this kind of violence, I need a firm motive. Sure, Chuck had a reputation as a hothead and a history of getting into fights, but there is an enormous range in the psychology of violence. And a guy who gets into dust ups over a bad call in a softball game is not the same guy who escalates to the violent stabbing death of a childhood friend. Not without a clear motive. I don't need this for known serial predators like Jeremy Jones, but I absolutely need it for someone like Chuck Chance. After hearing that Justin believes the motive is simple, that Chuck had a crush on Jennifer, maybe a crush going back to childhood, I go in search of confirmation. In the case file, I find a letter Jennifer wrote to a classmate four years before she was murdered. It's a typewritten page with October 27, 1988 in the top right corner. Corner. This would have been her junior year of high school. My number one sis. I am so sick of school. It's pathetic. I guess it's because everyone always starts about Justin. Me and Justin are going to get married in California and live happily ever after. I just love him to death sometimes. But then again, I want to get rid of him too. She adds four exclamation points. Points. At the end of that sentence, she adds, Jennifer Loves Justin eight times, creating a huge block of text across the bottom of the page. It's a few lines in the middle of the note, though, that really jump off the copy. Chuck said last night that he hated Justin. I said, why? And he said, because he's a smart alec and thinks he's better than everyone else. But he isn't. I can't believe Chuck, though. If he thinks I like him, he's got another thing coming. Chuck just likes girls for one thing, too. Oh, well, life goes on. This note seems to contradict what I've heard from Jennifer's friends. Chris Hausch dismissed the idea that Chuck ever liked Jen. Michelle did too. Both said it's a rumor that started after Jennifer's death. In the case files, I find that investigators spoke with many more of their friends. Their friends said things like Chuck Chance had a crush on Jennifer based on the way he always wanted to be around her. Chuck would hang out at the Picture Express when Jen was working. Jennifer did go out with Chuck a few times. I think Chuck asked her out. I was told Chuck still hung around Jennifer a lot because he still liked. They hung around together a lot. In eighth grade, two statements really stand out, saying almost the exact same thing. Chuck pushed Jennifer in the upper chest with both hands. She was pushed back against the display shelves and fell to the ground. Chuck quickly left the store. These statements put a new twist on the theory that Chuck had a crush on Jennifer. More importantly, they demonstrate that his notorious temper was allegedly directed squarely at Jennifer on at least one occasion. This alone could spell motive. I think of Jennifer asking her dad to follow her home from work in the last weeks of her life. Could this be why? Maybe. But this incident allegedly took place at least four months before Jennifer's death. No one reports a second incident like this one or any altercations between them closer to the date of her murder. It's horrible that it happened. My heart hurts for her, knowing she went through that and in the end chose to keep it to herself to prevent what certainly would have been the end of Justin's friendship with Chuck or worse. But it still doesn't draw a straight line to May 11. Several friends told investigators they thought that if Chuck killed Jennifer, he wasn't motivated by a crush on Jennifer. Rather, they think Chuck might have been mad at Jennifer for taking Justin from Chuck. This doesn't completely make sense, but there have been friends who said Jennifer and Chuck argued about whether Justin would still hang out with Chuck as much after the wedding. It's all so Speculative. Even back then, it was a bunch of what ifs and maybes about Jennifer disrupting the friendship between the men. Again, it doesn't add up to a motive for the kind of scene that would ultimately be discovered by those very two men in the duplex. As I read the statements, I keep coming back to Chuck's first conversation with police on May 11, 1992. They're talking less than 90 minutes after Chuck and Justin found Jennifer's body. Nothing in the tape makes me think Chuck is covering up the fact that he just murdered someone he's known most of his life. Ultimately, I think there's really only one way we'll sort through Chuck Chance's involvement. Science. I've been counting on touch DNA. But as I dig through the case file looking for every single mention of Chuck Chance, I realize we might not need DNA testing to rule him out. According to the files, the KBI attempted to lift fingerprints from the knife blade left lodged in Jennifer's back in 1992. But it was impossible because the blade was so bloody. Latent print technology advanced over the next few years, and in 2000, using newer tech, they were able to identify fingerprints on the knife blade. They lifted three nearly perfect prints, and the prints did not match Chuck. So who do they match? I should be able to answer that question fairly easily. I should be able to enter the prints into the national system APHIS and see if they return a match. Unfortunately, I can't. The actual print is not in the case file. All I'm seeing is the report that says a print exists and that it doesn't match Chuck Chance. I'd love to know if the print matches Jeremy Jones prints, but as far as I can tell, no one ever checked. Short of finding a copy of the print. I could repeat what they did in 2000 and pull the print off the knife blade. Could. If only we had the knife blade. Naturally, it's one of the pieces of evidence that we can't seem to find. It's not in the boxes and bags that Detective Joel Taber and I sorted through at the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office. A representative at the Baxter Springs Police Department initially said they had it, but later called Joel to say they were wrong. KBI says they don't have it. Finding the knife has always been on my list of priorities. Now, knowing that it contains a full print and that the print does not match the man listed as the primary suspect, I move this to the very top of my list. Still, I'm not pinning all hope on these. I'VE had my hopes dashed in other cases and I trust try to hedge a bit more nowadays. I'll still send evidence for DNA analysis and I'm still looking at suspects after several weeks with the case files. I have a few people I want to track down, names I've seen in the files, men who catch my attention, and one in particular, a man named Alan Redden. Next time on who Killed Jennifer Judd? So they never told you that they have usable prints on the blade of the knife? Okay? Nope, they didn't.
