Hell and GoneWe’re in Sabine County, Texas, investigating the area where Doug Janis was murdered. We’ve talked a lot about April and Doug’s relationship - one that went on for years - but what I wonder is, if April did kill Doug, why did she choose that moment? What was her motive?
I think that solving Doug Janis murder starts with figuring out what really happened to April’s mother, Anna, on the night she was fatally shot, September 3, 2004. That's the same night when Anna told her friend Yvonne that she found out that April was being molested by Doug Janis.
Last week, we heard from April’s father's book, which gave his version of what happened the night his wife was fatally shot. But Yvonne has a very different version of what went down that night.
School of Humans.
We're in Sabine County, Texas, walking around the area where Doug Janis was murdered. All I can think about is a passage from Bob Thompson's book, the part where he was talking about the wildlife that hide in these woods. Bob said that the Fish and Game Department released a couple thousand rattlesnakes back into the wild in Sabine County, apparently to control the rodent population. That was a while ago, but presumably they're still out there. One of Doug's neighbors lived in a house on a nearby property, but he has since passed away. The house is abandoned, and there's a porch with a really good view. The wood looks like it might be rotten, but I decide to give it a shot anyway. I climb up on a ladder and from here we have a clear view of Doug's houseboat, the one that burned to the ground. We've talked a lot about April and Doug's relationship, the one that went on for years and was very intense and complicated. But what I wonder is, if April did kill Doug, why did she choose that day? December thirteenth, twenty twenty. What was her motive? What happened? I think that solving Doug Janis's murder starts with figuring out what really happened to April's mother, Anna Thompson on the night she was fatally shot in the early morning hours of September fourth, two thousand and four, the night when April went to the races, and the night when Anna told her friend Yvonne that she had found out that April was being molested by Doug Janis. Last week we heard from April's father, Bob, who gave his version of what happened on the night his wife was fatally shot. Yvonne has a very different version of what she says went down that night.
I have, you know, conversations I had with Anna. Let me write up to the day, you know, and she was that night than wee hours of the morning. He came over and begged us to take her and watch her because he was so tired and he needed sleep, and that he was afraid to go to sleep around her. Were called over there the night she was killed, and after like that was a setup itself. You know, maybe what I should do is just tell you in the very get go here that I believe that there were several people involved in all of this, and I believe that it all had to do with April. I believe she was being I know, to being molested, and I believe she might have been being trafficked by people with prominent positions in that town, and that Anna was pretty much taken out because she was probably gonna blow the lid off of it. And I think Bob knows.
I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I have learned that there is no such thing as a small where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen Gonepod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Before we get to the night of Anna's death. We have to go way back back to when Yvonne first met Bob and Anna in April. Yvonne said she was not originally from Sabine County, but when she lived there she got to know Bob, Anna and April well. She said that Anna was around forty when Yvonne first met her. We know that Bob was much older than his wife, so by that time he would have been in his mid sixties. Yvonne said that to her, Anna seemed childlike with very little experience of the world, and that her daughter April was the same way. Yvonne said that Anna and April seemed very close.
You know that she definitely didn't get out much at all, I mean her whole life. Okay, So that's just very naive, gullible. Okay, that's the way. And I know for a fact that because of how long ago that was, and that myself I even felt like it was gullible and naive in that part of the world, in that town, in that scenario, like the things that happened there, I never would have dreamt could have happened in America, And at that date, I just it blows my mind still does. So I'm just saying that she was just naive to the way the world. I don't think she's ever had a job. I don't think she had ever I don't know how long I'm trying to remember how long they had been married. But it was almost as if he was like her father. That's the way it seemed to me, you know, the way their relationship was.
Yvonne said that from the beginning she was uncomfortable with Bob. Though he was friendly, she said he would make very sexually explicit comments in front of her and her partner at the time. She and her partner, Jay, agreed Bob was creepy and they didn't want to make a habit of socializing with him.
There was just some weird comments. My fiance and myself we both agreed not to go back. That we didn't really want to go back over there for dinner or anything, and we were going to start trying to put distance, you know, we didn't want to because of the weird conversations, like there were sexual eu windows made about a lot of different things that were unnecessary, and it made myself and him feel very uncomfortable. Although Anna would start laughing and he would start laughing, and they would also make these comments in front of their daughter, who was twelve at the time, which is April. Yeah, and so we're like, oh my gosh, what are they did. It was just strange. She's not your normal child. She just wasn't because I felt like she was just saying she was twelve years old, but she was so isolated, just like her mother, very isolated there with just Bob. And that's how I felt. And even though she went to school, they immediately started telling us how the kids are mean to her.
Yvonne seemed to pick up on the same thing that I did. Bob seemed to be playing the victim in his book, blaming everything in his life on outsiders. But Yvonne said that at the time, Bob and Anna seemed to have a solid relationship, and so did April and her mother.
They were together all the time. It was almost as if, like I said, like they were friends because I feel like they were both isolated, and so they played together. They and Anna was so April was the only kid. It's like she was out there, the old one armed geezer for a husband. It's like I think Anna was April was her only outlet, you know, of a fun and smiling and laughing and having a good time. And so I saw them do a lot of things together like that, get along really well, giggling, laughing, very childlike both of them.
But that closeness between Anna and April stopped when Doug Janis came along. Remember that Doug was married at the time to a woman named Terry, but Terry was living in Silsby. We reached out to Terry after we were talking to some people close to Doug Janie. They suggested we give her a call. And even though this involves painful memories for her, she clearly cares a lot about Doug and wants to see justice done. This is Terry telling me how she met Doug.
I met Doug somewhere in the late seventies or early eighties in Silsby, Pardon County, which is about ninety miles from Houston. I had gone into the local Farm Bureau insurance office to get car insurance and he was the person that I talked with first, and he became my insurance agent. Back in those days, he was a very popular insurance agent, had lots of customers all over Hardin County. People liked him, they respected him, He was outgoing and friendly. He just kind of always had a smile, was upbeat and positive. He was my insurance agent actually for several years, and the only time, but the only time I really saw him was when I needed to paint something on the policy or I had a claim to file, which was not often, and when those occasions arose, if I went to the local Farm Bureau office. He was always polite and professional, very personable, well groomed. And I was married to somebody and he was married to someone else, So we were both married to other people at the time, and we had no personal relationship, but that was initially how I met him.
Terry said that she took a teaching job in Galveston, so she moved away from the area. But a few years later, in nineteen ninety three, after she moved back to Sillsby to help take care of her grandmother, Terry ran into Doug again by chance at the local post office. By now they were both divorced, and that's when they started a relationship.
He reached out to shake my hands, same as he always did when he was my farm Bureau agent, but this time he just kind of held my hand a little bit longer, you know, and so within the next few weeks he began to drop by my grandmother's house.
Terry said she noticed the same thing that everyone else seemed to notice about Doug. He was kind and charming.
She said.
She and Doug fell in love and got married, and for a long time things were good, but eventually Doug and Terry grew apart. What happened is that Doug started spending a lot more time in the Toledo Bend Lake area, where he had bought his property in himple at the end of a dirty cove. At the same time, Terry said, their lives were taking them in different directions. Though they were around the same age, both in their mid forties, they had different life goals. Terry was an educator who wanted to continue teaching at a higher level and progress her career, while Doug was much more interested in heading into retirement, slowing down and spending time on the lake and on his houseboat, the same boat he later died on. But there was another reason why Doug was spending more and more time away from Terry April Janis, who he met in two thousand and three. Looking back, Terry said there were signs that her husband's relationship with April might not have been appropriate, but she said that at the time she could not believe that Doug would get involved with a teenager.
Doug had begun to go to their house occasionally. They were playing dominoes or playing cards, and on the weekend said I was coming up. He wouldn't go over there, since I was only their limited time. He was trying to safeguard our privacy, so he wouldn't go. But I did notice though, that the mobile home park that they lived in weren't well kept up. At first, he would honk at them as he drove by. He would wave, you know, just honking away and keep going. Well, I noticed that on the weekends that I was up there, that all of a sudden he stopped doing that. And one time I honked when I was driving, he says, don't fool with those people. Leave those people alone.
So it's like he began to not want me to have contact with them. It took a while for me to catch on.
Terry wasn't the only one. Yvonne and others were noticing that Doug appeared to be a little too interested in April. Yvonne said that while she was uncomfortable with April's father, Bob's comments and generally tried to steer clear of him, she felt sorry for Anna. She felt like she was Anna's only girlfriend. Yvonne remembers when Anna first told her about her concerns about her daughter, April and Doug Janis.
So her and I we did talk. She did bring it up and ask me. She said, do you think Doug pays April too much attention when he's around? Because there'd been a couple of times when we've been over there and he would be there, or he'd pull up and just join in. And I told her, yes, I do. I said, but you're her mother. I said, you know you need to be the one to watch and see. I said that. Then she told me a couple of things she had said to April, and she said, do you think that that's normal for a man of his age to say that to a twelve year old girl? Because I'm telling you, Anna had no nothing to base anything on. So she was asking me, because she was so protected, does that make sense? Because she was ungworldly, she didn't even know. I guess too, because in a way I was trying to make her stand up for herself a little bit, like to educate her, like, hey, you don't have to put up with this, Like, hey, can you have a voice? You know, not realizing though, she didn't like, He's not at all that I just because I didn't realize the severity of what was going on.
Yvonne said that her boyfriend Jay told her about something that concerned him. He was down at the lake talking with a friend of his when he saw April and Doug and Bob.
He said, you know, today I'll walk down. He had walked down to the lake and he was going to talk to Jimmerson, but he said he saw Doug and Bob pulling up in a boat and that April was sitting in the back of the boat with Doug all snuggled up and Bob at the front of the boat. So, you know, he's like, you can't tell me this man. You know, That's what Jay's tell me. He's like, you can't tell me this man doesn't know that guy's doing something with his daughter. He's like, what idiot would not know.
Yvonne said that she was growing increasingly concerned about April's relateationship with Doug, but then something happened something that changed everything they thought they knew about Doug Janis. In April, one day, Yvonne and Jay were walking in the woods and they saw a Doug in the woods. He was with a woman, but not with April. Doug was with her mother Anna. Yvonne said that she and her boyfriend Jay were walking deep in the woods one day when they saw Anna and Doug Janie and that they were together.
Who is that? And because this was pretty much like part of our property, you know, so we're like, what's going on? Because Anna did not live close enough to walk there, like she would have had to have driven or somebody brought her there or something. And so we're just standing there listening and it's Doug and Anna. And by the conversation that we heard, I mean, I can't pay the details. At this point, Jay and myself both knew that Doug was messing with Anna, that they were having an affair. So we're both in shock. We both just back out of there as quiet as we can and get back to our house.
After that, Yvaughn said that she and Jay thought maybe they had gotten it wrong, maybe Doug was being nice to April because he was sexually involved with her mother.
Then like I said, you know, this is so foreign to us. Okay, so we're talking. We're like, well, that blows that theory. Apparently he's not messing with April, it's Anna. So that's what we're thinking at this point. Never, never in a million years, did it dawn on me. He's messing with both of them.
So now this brings us to the night of September third, two thousand and four, the night Anna was shot. Anna and Bob had allowed April to go to the stock car races with a family friend, a prominent man in the community named Chester Cox. By the way, when Bob Thompson talks about the Butts family in his book, he's referring to the Cox family. These were the powerful friends of Doug Janis's who he was concerned about.
So Anna called Von and I said, what's going on? And she said, I found a letter between Doug and April and he's messing with my daughter. And I was like, are you serious And she said yes, and she said and that is it. She said, I told him, don't you ever come over here again. You will never And this is exactly what she told me. Her words, she said, I told him over my dead body, will you ever see her again? She said, he will not be back over here. And I said, Anna, are you talking? Have you talked to Bob? She said, he pap won't even listen to me. She said, I don't know what's wrong with him. And I'm thinking, well, I do, because he knows about it, you know. I mean said, I can't really say that to her, you know, I'm just trying to calm her down. And I'm just like, well, Anna, you need to talk to Bob. Y'all need to be on the same page. Y'all need to make sure she stays away, and you need to talk to Bob. And see, what are you gonna do. You're gonna call the police? I mean, you've got to tell you you have to report this. You can't just not say anything, you know. And I said, I was trying to kind of educate her, say come and tell her. You know, Anna, if you don't say anything, I mean, if she goes and tells somebody else about anything, you could be in trouble. Like you need to say something, right, And she was like, okay, I am, I am, I'm gonna talk to Bob whatever. So we get off fun. That's the last conversation I had with her.
On the night when Anna was fatally shot. She told Yvonne that she was going to talk to her husband about April's relationship with Doug. We know from Bob's description of what happened that night that when April came home, Anna started screaming at her and all hell broke loose. Yvonne said that later, after three am, Bob called their house and asked her and Jay to come over. She will never forget what happened when she got to that house and found Anna covered in blood on the couch. In the book, Bob wrote that April had told him there was an intruder at the house, but Yvonne insists that's not what Bob told her that night. Yvonne said that when she and her boyfriend got to the house, Bob told her that Anna had accidentally shot herself while trying to shoot a raccoon or maybe a possum that had been coming up to the door.
He said that April told him it was an intruguer. That's a lie. That's that is not what he told us. He said she was trying to shoot a raccoing her possum, that they had been they had been coming up to that door for a while, and that she was probably trying to shoot when she tripped over that cord, shot herself and went got on the couch. Yeah, exactly what he told me. I mean, I believe you that is just not what he and you've read his book, so you know, but yeah, that's a lie.
See.
Here's something that I've thought about is I don't think he had time to think up a story. I think he was sleeping when it happened. I don't think he had time to think up a story, because that's not a story Bob would have thought of. Both a smart Bob was not stupid. He was sharp, and so I think he would have thought up something better than what he said. You see what, well, he obviously did. He thought of a different one for the book, and he thought of a different one apparently that he told other people, because that's not the story he told me. And I of course, I'm like freaking out, and I'm just like, have you lost your mind? I mean, because I'm still not registering that he did this to her, you know, or that somebody in that house did. I'm like, are you crazy. I said, she didn't go anywhere. I said, you think she shot herself and walked back to that couch if you lost your freaking mind. I'm just like, there is no way. And at that point he said me why, I don't know. I had to h and he's Sam Will and I'm like, where is April? And then April comes walking out of her bedroom and she's just kind of walking around like a scared mouth and a cold sweat.
Yvonne began to sense that something was not right at that crime scent, that things were being staged, that she may have been invited over as some kind of, in her words, set up. She noticed something else that was very odd, something about April that she said she will never forget.
But the one thing I did notice is she was fresh and clean from a shower. Her hair was wet. She smelled like soap. And the reason why that sticks out in my mind is because most of the time April was dirty.
While April was being held in Lufkin and questioned in connection with her mother's death, Bob said that he drove down to Texas to find Doug's a strange wife Terry. Terry confirmed part of this story She said she remembered when Bob reached out to her that she'll never forget Bob's trip to find her after April's arrest, because when he visited her, he told Terry that Doug was involved with his daughter.
What tipped it off, what absolutely tipped it off, was that and I had even I had even visited the houseboat and seen a child's drawings on the refrigerator door, you know, like you put kids drawings up on your refrigerator with a magnet. Well, there were all these kid drawings up there. Most of them were horses, but there were lots and lots of pictures all over the houseboat, you know, like on the refrigerator, hanging on the walls. And I said, I asked him, I said, where all these pictures come from? And he said, oh, they're from They're from the April had gave them to me when I was over at their house. So I still didn't put two and two together.
I didn't think that, Okay, there's something really creepy about this. I just thought, Okay, it's a kid, the kid drawing pictures and giving them to somebody. What's creepy about that?
Right? You know?
So and you know, I knew that he went down there when her parents were there, and you know, Bob and Anna they were they were.
Present, and so that didn't seem, you know, anything.
Out of the ordinary. But what did.
Happen was that, uh, And I wish I knew the time that this had happened, of the timeline on it. But Bob Thompson drove from him Hill to Silsby and he went into the newspaper office where I used to work, and he asked for me.
He remembered that I used to work for the newspaper there. I had been a reporter. Nobody believed anything, he says. Initially, like all women who are confronted with information like this, well, I didn't want to believe it, and in fact I didn't believe it. Initially I thought because it sounded plausible. I've seen where these people live, I knew kind of a little bit about him.
I thought, yeah, maybe that's that's plausible. But little by little things kept surfacing to confirm that it was true. Initially I just held on to the unbelief about it. No, this is not really this is somebody's mixed up on what they're thinking. Nobody would want a person that they love and that they are have loved to be.
Capable of such things, you don't want them to be, and you just you don't want to even admit that it's a possibility, that it's true, and you're hoping to God it's not.
Terry and Doug divorced in two thousand and six. About a year later, she moved out of Texas to Colorado, but Terry said even after that she and Doug were close. The last time that Terry talked to Doug was a few days before he married April.
I thought, okay, I'll use my I'll use my best educator skills and talk to this little girl and you know, help her to see some reality here. Well, he wouldn't let me talk to her. He wouldn't allow me to talk to her. He no, no, you don't talk to her. So they hung up, that she calls right back again, and so that's when I began to suspect there's something really going on here. There's something really happening, and there's something really going on. The realization really began to hit me.
But he would not. He always denied that there was anything going on that shouldn't have been going on, you know, and this was I'd say right up until December of two thousand and.
Eight that you know, here.
They run off together to go get married after her birthday.
Doug in April married in December of two thousand and eight, on or right after April's eighteenth birthday. Terry said that this move blindsided her, that she was shocked.
I really couldn't believe that he married her. He and I had been either talking by phone or emailing, and.
He gave no indication that he was about to get married.
I had to wonder if he did it on the spur of the moment, if it was poor planning or no planning, or if it was something that had been in the works. I couldn't imagine why he would marry a girl who was eighteen, because that's a lot of responsibility for a man that's heading into retirement. I thought, Okay, she's gonna end up wanting children, you know. And I didn't think that that was something that he wanted. That he wouldn't have wanted that responsibility. He wouldn't have wanted to raise another family.
After Anna's death, Bob claimed that he reported April and Doug's relationship to police, but he says that he was shut down. This is a theme that comes up over and over a lot of times we hear about conspiracy theories and how scared people are to report things to local law enforcement. And sometimes people do have overactive imaginations. But on the other hand, paranoid people are not always wrong. Don't get me wrong. I still think that, given everything we know about Bob and about Doug Janie, that Bob, in my opinion, did not do enough to protect his daughter. But I also wonder if both things could have been true, if Bob could have been willfully clueless, but also if there were people in power, specifically men in power who knew that April Janis was being abused and did nothing about it. A lot of people were wondering the same thing after Doug Janis was murdered. They wondered if men in power in Sabine County knew April was being abused and did nothing about it. April was arrested, charged, given a ten million dollar bond, and then released. Why was she released? Maybe it was because there wasn't enough evidence, but a lot of people close to the case wonder could it have been something else. We talked to someone who grew up with April, someone who said that people in power will never charge April with Doug's murder. This person believes it's because April, in their words, knows too much, and that the police department in Sabine County have a law under themselves so much so they say that the county is broke after dealing with sexual assault claims. We took a look into court records and I want to take a minute to talk about a case Tyson versus Sabine County because it is shocking and it makes me understand why people there, especially women, could be terrified to report anything. It started back on September eighteenth, twenty eighteen, when a man named Wade Tyson called the Sheriff's department in Sabine County to request a welfare check on his wife, Melissa. Wade said he was out of town, his wife was home alone and distressed. Deputy David Boyd called Waite and told him he would go over to their home and do a welfare check. So Deputy Boyd went to their house. Melissa was home alone. She answered the door and he introduced himself as a sheriff and quote told her that he handled welfare checks because he was a preacher.
End quote.
That day, Deputy Boyd told other officers not to respond to Wade's request. He said that he would be handling that call personally. Deputy Boyd left the house after the welfare check, but the next morning he showed up again alone at the Tyson home. Again, Melissa was home alone. This time, Deputy Boyd wasn't in a police cruiser, just a plain vehicle, but he was wearing a shirt identifying himself as a sheriff. Melissa reached out to shake his hand, but Deputy Boyd hugged her and asked if there was a place where they could talk privately, so they went out to a side porch. During this time, Deputy Boyd asked if she had security cameras or neighbors. She said no, no can and her neighbors were usually not home. Then he made a comment about her being lonely because her husband was gone and because she lived all the way out there on that dead end road. Melissa said she wasn't lonely, she was fine. She later testified she thought that Deputy Boyd's behavior was strange, but she said she gave him the benefit of the doubt because she believed that he was there to help her. Deputy Boyd then told Melissa he and some other officers had recently seen her at a restaurant. He repeated sexual comments the officers made about her body, saying they talked about quote what they would like to do to her if they could. He talked about her breasts and how they compared to his wife's breast and asked her if her and her husband would consider a threesome and whether her husband would allow someone to watch them having sex end quote. Deputy Boyd then allegedly sexually assaulted Melissa. He forced her to masturbate in front of him. He then masturbated in front of her and left. Melissa said she was horrified afterwards. Then it got worse because Deputy Boyd started texting her. She reached out to a friend, telling the friend she was scared that he was going to hurt her. According to court documents, quote, she began frequently seeing a psychotherapist and a hypnotherapist. Her intimacy with her husband significantly decreased. She gained thirty pounds, She started carrying a gun, She put cameras up, and she generally stopped leaving her home. In short, the incident changed her whole life and she isn't who she used to be end quote. Melissa testified she felt forced to submit to Deputy Boyd's assault because she was isolated and alone, She was intimidated by his authority, and she was frightened that the sexual harassment would escalate if she did not comply. Basically, she was terrified, and she was also terrified to report the sexual assault to local law enforcement because, of course, she remembered the comments Deputy Boyd had made about talking to the other officers about what they all wanted to do her. This must have been terrifying for Melissa, but she did something that, in my opinion, is extremely brave. She called the Texas Rangers and later she found out that this was not the first complaint that had been made against Deputy Boyd. There were other victims out there. At least three other complaints had been made against him. In April twenty nineteen, Deputy boy was indicted by the State of Texas. He was charged with sexual assault in decent exposure and official oppression. Melissa Tyson sued Sabine County, the sheriff and Deputy Boyd. Initially, the district court ruled against her. It's a bit complicated, but we talked before about how hard it is to sue police officers because they have something called qualified immunity. It's meant to be there, so people can't sue police officers for things they do during the course of duty. But Melissa Tyson won on appeal. The Court of Appeals found even though Deputy boy did not use physical force, he used mental coercion to sexually assag Melissa. They ruled that it was psychological abuse and that he was not entitled to any kind of qualified immunity after forcing her to masturbate in front of him. This case shocked me. Imagine a scenario where people are literally more afraid of the police than the bad guys. That's what Melissa Tyson experienced, and I am sure many other women in Sabine County have experienced the same thing. April's records are sealed, so we don't know exactly what happened during the jury trial in order for them to find her not guilty of her mother's murder. So I wonder what the judge or jury knew. Did they ever know that Doug was having an affair with April's mother, and that Anna had just found out about Doug and April's relationship on the night she was killed. After Anna's death, Yvonne said that Bob's attitude toward his wife seemed to change. He went from talking about her really lovingly to being kind of cold. He didn't visit much at the hospital, and then after she died, he would talk about her in kind of a disparaging way, A complete one eighty from his attitude toward his wife before. Yvonne wondered why. She wondered, did Bob know about Anna's involvement with Doug or could there be something else going on?
I feel bad rehashing this comes. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I didn't just like call somebody, but I said, who are you gonna call? I mean, anyway, this town is so weird.
Yvonne said that April came over to her house and that while she was there that April told Yvonn that she had shot her mother, and Yvonne said April told her why she did it. April said that she and Doug were in love, that they were having sex, and that her mother, Anna would not let them be together, so Yvonn went to the police to tell them what she knew. But she also explained that April told her that her father had said April had to confess because she was young and if he was involved, he would go away for a long time, which led Evonne to wonder was this true. Did April do this alone or could Bob have been involved and pressured April into taking the fall due to her age.
That night having sex. He has a place over in Manny, which I didn't know he had another residence. Doug had another residence on the other side of the bridge, because it was right there at the cut off, you know, at the Louisiana line, And that her mother would not allow her to see him, and that, yeah, that her mother was so mean and wouldn't let her be with Doug, and that that's why she shot her. But she never would say that Bob hadn't even know she did. That's what she said, Bob. Well, she didn't say Bob did it. She was just saying that Bob said she needed to confess to it because he would go to because that they would think he did it. Basically, you see what I'm getting that like, you never said he did it, but he did say that. He was telling her she needs to say she did it because he'll never get out of jail.
I Vonn said that she told the police about Doug molesting Anna. That's when things took a turn for the bizarre. Yvonne claims the police officer she talked to was not surprised when she told them about Doug and aples relationship.
He said, is he from Philsey?
And I said yeah. He said, yep, yep, he sure is. He said, you know why he's here on Filido Bend. I said, no, I don't. He said, well, because he got caught messing with some little girls and Philsney too. He said yep, he said, and mommy and daddy you know, paid them off or whatever he said. And of course he ran down and got hisself married a little quick to Terry. He said, they don't live together. I said, no, they don't. So how does this guy know all this? It's the sheriff. I never talked to him again, and they wouldn't. I looked for him and couldn't even find it. I'm telling you the truth.
Yvonne said that when she tried to follow up. The officer she spoke to wasn't there anymore. Not only that, she was told there was no record of him working there.
Like, I don't know where he went, how he went, I don't know. It's so bizarre. I told him his name and everything, and they were like, ma'am, he does. We don't have anybody here it works by here but a name, and I'm just like, oh my gosh, I mean, I am the hell out of here. I am like, let people at that. What I can't remember. I have to realize I didn't write any of this down at the time. It wasn't like I was planning on ever talking about it again. Honestly, I don't remember his name. I just know he was a white sheriff. I don't know, but I felt like, y'all are lying. He probably said stuff he wasn't supposed to say, and either y'all fired him or I don't know what she did with him.
Yvonne said that I've or that weird incident with a disappearing sheriff. She decided to get out of town. Right before she left, she had another disturbing running with Bob, and he said this to her.
Be a shame. You're after fishing in that fishing out there in the boat and a bullet flies out of the National Force and hits you in the head. You know what happens around here quite a bit. Yeah, I mean you know. And so Jason Jay just come on, we're leaving, and I get about halfway into the truck and I just just so pissed off. I just turned around and I said, yeah, but there's one big difference between me and Anna. You want to know if that is Bob, I said, I got Stanley. That gives a shit, I said, And they will be back up here so fast they'll make your head spin, and they will turn everything here upside down to find out exactly where I am and exactly who did it to me.
Yvonne left the area but never forgot about what happened. Her story has never been told publicly until.
Now because periodically I always think about it, you know, And I thought, whatever happened to those people? And so I google the name and it pops up, and I about fell out when I saw that Doug died in a fire on that houseboat, and that when they recovered the body, there was two bullet holds in his head. I'm like, well, there you go, there is your karma.
You taught her how.
To do it, she did it to you. That's really what I think. So no, I don't feel good for the man. Sorry, I don't. I feel like karma, perfect karma. But I think it's just that small town in hell. Yeah it is. Yeah, it's very weird. So I will love her somehow Anna to have justice. I know that no one's ever gonna everybody's dead now, So I'm gonna tell you because I really feel like that the only two victims out of all of it was April and her mother. I think they both are victims. But yeah, that's what I believe.
Even though Doug Janis may have been imperfect, it's important to remember he's still left behind children and grandchildren, a family who loved him, and he deserves justice just like any other victim. Was April involved in Doug's murder and if so, did she do it alone or was someone else involved? Was there really ten thousand dollars on the boat or could there have been a lot more money? And what are the connections between Doug Janis and people in positions of power in Sabine County? Are there still people there getting away with murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts and Miranda Hawkins. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance. This episode was sound design and mixed by Noah Cameron. Our theme song is by Ben Sale, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L. C. Crowley. Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in seeing documents and materials from this case, you can follow the show on Instagram at Helen Gonepod. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five.
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