Catherine Townsend
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Catherine Townsend’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You've got families who've lived there for generations, also a lot of retired people, and people who come there to fish on weekends. This area, the Toledo Bend Reservoir, by the way, is huge. It has an area of 185,000 acres. It's about 80 miles long. It's the largest man-made body of water in the South and the fifth largest in the entire United States.
The lake is well known as being amazing for fishing, especially for catfish, Doug's favorite. But the water is murky. Some people claim that although there is swimming there, it's not necessarily recommended in some areas due to alligators. When I see the trees that are sticking out of the water, it does look like a beautiful nature spot.
I also can't help thinking about what could be floating in that lake, like alligators or dead bodies. And according to some Facebook postings by residents, the area is very remote. The nearest hospital is 15 miles away and takes 25 minutes to drive to. Even the fire department is several miles away across the bridge. The area looks a lot like the Ozarks, especially on the Texas side.
According to the obituary for Douglas Michael Janus, he was born August 8, 1956, in Lake Jackson. He grew up with his mother, Wanda, and his stepfather, Bill, who adopted him. Doug was the oldest of four siblings. His obituary read, quote, Doug will be remembered as one who never minded a hard day's work and never shied away from a challenge.
There was not a lazy bone in his body, and he was not afraid of hard work. He was energetic, always hustling, and never looked for a handout. Those who knew him best and loved him most never knew him not to be working." End quote. Doug lived most of his life in Silsby. He worked as an insurance sales representative for Farm Bureau. He had apparently won awards for his work, Doug was busy.
He did a lot of different jobs during his lifetime, most involving manual labor, including offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. At one point, he installed satellite dishes in Austin, Texas. Doug was an entrepreneur. He ran several small businesses himself, including a fish market. As we said, he always had a fascination with the Toledo Bend Lake area because of the lake.
He was obsessed with fishing, and eventually he moved there and worked as a commercial fisherman supplying local restaurants. Doug apparently made a lot of money at his craft. He was super industrious. And even though he lived on the Texas side of the border, there was a 75 fish limit per day there. So Doug liked to fish on the Louisiana side where he could catch an unlimited amount of fish.
Doug apparently made a lot of money and kept a lot of money on his boat. We'll get back to that later. Back to the obituary. The obituary continued, quote, Because Doug was obsessed with fishing, especially catfishing, he loved cooking for friends, hanging out and throwing barbecues for friends and family.
And according to his obituary, he became kind of a local celebrity because of this self-made houseboat. The obituary closes with, quote, in his final moments, he was at home in the place he loved and enjoyed most, end quote. I think it's important to quote these things exactly because this was crafted by Doug's family, the people closest to him.
They obviously loved him a lot, and this was the side of him that they saw. But like everyone, Doug Janis had another side to him. After Doug was cremated, his remains were given back to his family. The obituary states Doug's ashes were scattered in the same water where he used to feed alligators marshmallows. Meanwhile, police were trying to piece together Doug's personal life.
And we tried to do the same because it turned out it was complicated. Doug Janis' obituary leaves out a few pretty crucial things. And there were also things about the crime scene that even on first impression do not seem to make sense. First of all, Doug had recently had a hernia operation. Because of that, he would normally sleep in his recliner in the living room.
And yet, he was found with two gunshots in the head on his bed. And the fire trucks came at 5.28 p.m. So why was he in the bedroom in the middle of the afternoon? Especially since he wasn't sleeping there, apparently, in general. We also need to find out the layout of that boat.
Something else I noticed, because I'm always looking not just for the information obituaries provide, but for the information they leave out. As we know, everyone has their own version of the victim. The obituary mentions who Doug is survived by.
It mentions his daughter, who we have spoken to, but she's a private person and obviously this has been traumatic for her, so I'm not mentioning her name here, as well as his son-in-law and grandchildren, his brother and sister and other family members. The obituary even mentions the many grateful fish who eluded his capture, etc. But the obituary does not mention Doug's estranged wife, April.
In fact, Doug's obituary doesn't mention any of Doug's former wives. For me, the omission of the wife in the obituary was a potential clue. I wanted to understand their romantic history, and how April and Doug got together was a little bit of a mystery. It was not solved either, as we said, by reading Doug's obituary or by the YouTube tribute memorial video that was made by the funeral home.
I watched that video several times. We learned from Doug's daughter that he was married a total of five times, twice to the same woman. So he had four wives in total. I noticed there were several shots in the memorial video of Doug's former wives and of him with his children when they were young. But there was only one quick flash near the end, one single shot of April.
And in that photo, Doug is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He's very tanned. He's got silver hair. He's older, but still obviously a very fit man with a huge smile on his face. April is standing next to him with what I can best describe a completely blank expression. As I looked at April, I couldn't get any sense of her and Doug's relationship. I wanted to know more.
Since April was nowhere to be seen in the obituary, it seemed that Doug's family was suspicious of April, but they were not the only ones. Police were suspicious of April too, and on January 14th, 2021, April Mae Janice was arrested and charged with Doug's murder.
On January 14th, 2021, almost exactly a month after Doug Janis was fatally shot on his houseboat, his estranged wife, April Mae Janis, was charged with his murder. We learned from friends of Doug's that at the time of his death, April and Doug were not living together. Doug was living on his houseboat, while April had been staying on a mobile trailer elsewhere on the property.
This is a big property that spans quite a few acres. Doug owned more than one piece of property. He also owned a second residence in Louisiana on the other side of the border. We learned that April had been living there. She relocated to that property a while back. My research assistant Amy and I talked about this case a lot.
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