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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We were trying to figure out what exactly went down. Since this murder happened right on the Texas-Louisiana border, we knew that this case might have involved multiple counties. So according to the affidavit, police became suspicious of April for several reasons. First of all, when they interviewed her, they did not believe she appeared to be grieving at all.
They believed she was showing signs of deception during that interview. And when they asked her if she killed her husband, she would, quote, nod yes, but say no, end quote. Police also noted that April did not show any shock or grief when she was told that the boat burning down was to cover up a homicide, not an accident.
The officer who squirted the affidavit wrote, he discovered that April had a boyfriend in Louisiana who she was in love with and intimate with. Police also discovered a potential motive. Doug kept a lot of cash on his houseboat. Police also found out that there was apparently an insurance policy on Doug.
In the affidavit, they said that there was a $100,000 policy that paid out in the event of Doug's death, and April was the sole beneficiary. Police talked to witnesses and found one who told authorities that on Sunday, December 13th, 2020, the night of the murder, they saw April leaving Doug's boat sometime between 4.30 to 5.30 p.m.
They said that it was dusk, but that they could still clearly see that it was April. They said that April left home and passed by the witness's house 15 to 20 minutes before the first fire truck arrived on scene. The witness said they were sure it was April. They had known April for a long time, since she was a little girl. They definitely recognized her. They saw her driving her blue Dodge truck.
The affidavit read, quote, the information collected in the eyewitness statement places the defendant at the crime scene while the houseboat was on fire and just before the fire truck arrived, end quote, which would have been in the minutes leading up to when the fire was called in at 528 p.m.
After April Janice was arrested and charged with murder on January 14th, things seemed to be moving toward trial. Prosecutors seemed confident in their case. A $10 million bond was set on April. But then, all of a sudden, everything changed.
First, quietly, the judge lowered the bail amount in April's case from $10 million to $200,000, which meant that she would only need to come up with about $20,000 to bond out. And that's what happened. April was released on bail. And then there was nothing. No more news stories about the case, no updates.
We were able to get a list of April's bond conditions and we learned that pretty much all of the restrictions were removed. All she had to do was surrender her passport and basically agree to not leave the country. She didn't have to report to anyone. She was free. The prosecutors apparently thought they just didn't have enough evidence to pursue the case.
That's the official story, and we know that sometimes this happens in these cases. The bar to take someone to trial and to convict someone of murder is very high, and that's a good thing. But I couldn't figure this case out. I know it's circumstantial, but there appear to be a lot of facts that could have led toward April being taken to trial.
You have a witness who apparently saw her at the crime scene around the time of the murder. You have the fact that there's a life insurance policy, of which, according to police, she's the sole beneficiary. $100,000. There was marital infidelity. She had a boyfriend in Louisiana. And according to the source we talked to, April and Doug were not living in the home together.
She was living somewhere else. So you have a separation. And then we found out something else. It turned out that Doug was not the first person close to April who died violently under mysterious circumstances. Years earlier, April's mother, Anna Thompson, was also fatally shot. We're going to get a lot more into April Janice's family history next week.
But for now, we can say April grew up in the Hemphill, Texas area with her mom, Anna, and her father, Bob Thompson, who, by the way, was a character in his own right. Bob was an Army veteran who later ran a trucking company. Bob was known around town as the one-armed biker. This was said with affection because he had had an arm amputated after an injury.
But he loved to constantly ride his motorcycle around. Like Doug, Bob was into hunting and fishing and going out on the lake. So we're gonna go down to the area where Doug Janus was murdered and see what we can find out. We've been warned this could be dangerous.
This is a part of the world where things burn to the ground, suspicious fires, flying bullets, violent weather, and alligators are not rare occurrences. But we found out several things that in my opinion are completely groundbreaking and could change everything in this case. Several things that make me question how and why this case is apparently going cold rather than being actively investigated.
One was that April Janice was not just much younger than her husband. We've heard April was a teenager when she started dating Doug. Doug's friend April actually addressed this. She said she noticed how young April looked next to Doug when she first met them.
Some of his friends seem to kind of gloss over the fact that April was so young, but they may be unaware of just how young April was when she started becoming involved with Doug. According to people who knew April and Doug well, April and Doug started dating when she was very young. She was just 13 years old. At that time, Doug would have been in his 40s.
Obviously, we're not here to blame victims, but I do think it's important to develop a complete picture of Doug Janis in order to understand why someone would have wanted to murder him execution style. And a big piece of that puzzle is understanding what his exact relationship was with April.
Bob Thompson, April's father, wrote an entire book about April's life and the night her mother, Anna, was killed. Bob passed away. We're going to be reading excerpts from his book and we're going to try to piece this story together. We're going to talk to someone very close to April and we're going to track down the witness who saw Doug's boat burned to the ground.
We're going to try to find the person who allegedly saw April leaving the scene. And we're going to try to figure out what happened in that remote lakeside area way back in the woods. We will also get into Anna Thompson's death a lot more next week. But a lot of the records in this case are sealed.
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