Jan Canty
Appearances
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Oh my God, the hours you put in. I mean, 70-hour work weeks were not unheard of. And he was very considerate about me coming home and going right up to my room and just working on my dissertation.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I felt special. I felt lucky. I felt like I had gotten the jackpot. We had a routine. We'd either have breakfast together or go out to eat. He liked to order the newspaper and read it. At night, we would have dinner at a prompt time because he often worked in the evenings in his home office. and I would be doing homework.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
We got to the point when I was finishing my doctorate, he said, you know, we really ought to furnish the living room. We've been in this house for years, and I go, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Like, I never noticed it. Alan took care of her. He took care of the bills, income taxes, etc., etc. He managed 100% of it, and I was fine with that.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I was just glad not to have one more thing on my plate, so we never argued over money. I never worried about it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
That coincidentally happened to fall on his 50th birthday. That night, I remember it was his birthday, and I felt like crap, and I had such a raging, raw, sore throat. But I set my alarm and got up and called him at 11 o'clock and thanked him, "'Happy birthday.'" And he started tearing up. I thought it was because he was worried about me and my health.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And he kept saying to me at the hospital when I was in the process of getting him hospitalized, you're pure as snow, pure as snow, pure as snow.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Throughout Alan's stay in the psych hospital... He kept repeating words, saying things like, pure as snow, I'm so bad, birthday, dawn.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And I went back there to trim the lilac bush. And this is after days of rain. And I noticed three dry cigarette butts on the ground in the mud near our kitchen window. And that set off a big red flag because they were dry, which meant they were recent.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
That evening, one of the strangest things happened. I looked in the mirror and I said out loud, he's not coming home. And I thought, my God, am I being dramatic? And I dismissed it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He came home from work, and I was livid that he had never called me. And he was patronizing. And he said, well, what do we need to do? Do we need to get you a dog? Would that make you feel better? I said, what would make me feel better is if you returned my phone call. Something is amiss. Can't you feel it? You don't find cigarette butts out there. Something is amiss.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And he just started laughing like, oh, you're so cute. Oh, that infuriated me. You don't dismiss somebody who's got genuine reasons to be worried.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
My way of handling stress is to do tasks, to get busy. And so after this incident, I decided to catalog every single thing in our house. How many towels did we own? Where was our insurance policy? And put it in a photo album so that if somebody was going to rob us, because that's what I thought was happening, I could say to the insurance company, this is what we have.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Here's proof of our belongings. Then one day... I went to go write a thank you note to somebody and I reached up in the closet shelf above my head to pull out where I thought was where we put the thank you notes and realized that photo album had been missing. And I knew for sure that's where it should be because I was the only one that dealt with it. She confronted Alan about it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And he goes, what is with you? I took it to work. I was bragging about you. You don't get it. I thought it was a great idea. And he went out to his car and he got it and brought it back in to show me. And it smelled like cigarettes.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
A couple of the first ones, I grabbed the phone, and it was always the same man. He had a Southern draw. He sounded like he was drunk. And he was always asking for some person.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I was driving along Fox Canal on a stormy, foggy night, and this car was following me. speeding up and then backing off, speeding up and then backing off. And I'm like, what the heck? And we turned the corner onto my side street. And I knew that very, very well. And I knew that there was a dip in the road where it turned.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And so when I got close by, I turned off my lights and sped up as fast as I dared do it. Drive and turn left into my driveway and left onto the grass behind the hedge. and just sat there. And sure enough, I watched them come by. They stopped at every driveway on our side street. And they even stopped at my driveway, but they didn't see me, and they drove on.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Al blew it off. You don't know that they were following you. Yeah, they were following me. He was always belittling me when it came to issues of safety because he wasn't bothered by any of that.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
It was a very stormy day. We lost power. It was hail, rain, wind. So I wasn't totally shocked. when he didn't drive promptly, although that was his pattern because of the weather, and I figured the roads were probably impassable. But by 11 o'clock that night, I get concerned, and this is before cell phones, so there was no way to check where he was. And one of the strangest things happened.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
That evening, my anxiety was escalating, and I was pacing, I walked into his home office, And it had a bathroom attached to it. And I looked in the mirror and I said out loud, he's dead. He's not coming home. And as soon as I said those words, I'm like, what the heck? It was like my voice, but not my thoughts. And I thought, my God, am I being dramatic? This is stress speaking.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Of course, he's going to be home. And I dismissed it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
But nothing came of it. That day, or the next day, or the next day, or the next day.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Crime in Detroit was at an all-time high at that point in history. The statistics were at that time that a car was stolen every 13 seconds. You heard sirens day and night. We were working in an area that was high crime. So it would not be unthinkable that he was a victim of a crime.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
On about the third day of him being gone, the media descended. And they never let up at all. They were intrusive. They were relentless. They made it a living hell for me. Nonetheless, we had to get the word out. So they did. It was on the news every time I turned around.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And then... The 10th day, I got a phone call early on a Sunday morning from a detective, Marlis Landeros. She asked me to meet her down at the police headquarters.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
We got off on floor five, which was homicide. And I was called into the office of the inspector, Gil Hill. It was a very short meeting. He said, we have reason to believe your husband's been murdered, but we don't have his body yet. And I suggest you go home and check your finances because we've been told that he's been handing out a lot of cash down on Cass Corridor.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He's got the wrong guy. No, this can't be. He doesn't know my husband. My husband is somebody who reads the newspaper every day. He's always home at a certain time when he says he's going to be home. He's not a ladies' man. He doesn't dress to kill. He doesn't do drugs. He doesn't gamble. He's got the wrong guy. There's got to be another explanation.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And the fact that he didn't have a body lent itself to my argument that they had the wrong guy.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Everywhere I looked, we were in the red. I mean, IRS, house payments, office payments. There was no savings account. There was no life insurance policy. There was nothing. It turns out when I totaled it up, in 1985 dollars, I was $30,000 in debt. And I had no income to speak of because I had just finished my training.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And they said he's been keeping company with John Carl Fry Sr. and Dawn Marie Spence on Casper Street. And they looked at me to see my reaction, and I'm like, okay. Like, it might as well have been Greek. I don't know them. That was the first I'd heard of them. Then... the police revealed, We have found his body and we need you to identify him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
On the way over there, in her very professional and caring way, she did her darndest to prepare me to see him in an altered state because he had been buried in a bog for 10 days. in three different places.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Some of his body parts were left on the freeway. I didn't have to identify those. What I had to identify was his head. My dad said, you can't do this by yourself. I'm going to go with you. And I said, Dad, this isn't your problem. This is my problem. But I could not stand. I could literally not stand. It felt like my legs were made out of silly putty.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I do remember Detective Landeros telling me, all you have to do is say yes or no. That's it. And we're out of here. And when they put his head in a table, I couldn't speak. And I closed my eyes and she was very patient. And then she asked me, yes or no. He didn't have his glasses on, but his hair looked the same and his eyelashes and his eyebrows looked the same.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I loved growing up in Detroit. It was a very historical time. I was very active in the women's movement. Even as a teenager, I was in demonstrations. I wanted to make a difference, and I did not want to grow up and be a housewife and have kids. But I lacked role models for how to do that, because everybody that I knew that was a woman stayed home and had kids.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
There was an APB for their whereabouts. And they started having their faces plastered in the news.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He said, I want you to know their faces. I don't think they're on their way to our house. But you're out and about in the community. I want you to be able to identify them if you ever see them. And your first obligation is to call 9-1-1. than me in that order. So that's the first I knew of their faces and connected them with their name.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
That doesn't make sense. I just couldn't wrap my head around it. It was so unlike him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I had so many more urgent, immediate things on my plate. I was worried about the IRS selling my house. If I had AIDS, I was going through AIDS testing. I had no time to wonder and think about what did he do? What did he say? Where did he go? That was a low priority. I was worried about my own safety.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I wasn't sleeping. I went into permanent menopause. I was physically sick. I lost a lot of my hair. I lost a lot of weight.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I was very defensive, irrationally angry. Like I would get angry at going into the grocery store that they didn't make loaves of bread for one person. I was looking for things to get angry about. Somebody opened the door for me, I'm like, what do they think, I'm weak? They got to open the door for me? I didn't maybe say anything to him, but internally I was very angry all the time.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I got handed a bill for $37,000. He owed for back rent. He'd taken out personal loans. He'd forged my name. I was so broke. I didn't know how I was going to get through the winter. I turned down the heat so much that I had frozen pipes. I started eating less. I conserved my trips to the store. I walked when I could. I sold off everything I could. His car parts, jewelry, furniture, books.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
One night, I was by myself, as usual. And it was a peaceful night. I was sitting by the fire at my house. The room was empty. There wasn't a stick of furniture in there because I'd sold it all. And I remember thinking, somehow, some way, I'm going to make this a positive thing. I don't know how. I don't know when. But I do know why. Because if I don't, it'll crumble me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Hated high school with a big passion. Hated it. Capital H. I thought it was a complete waste of time. I just saw it as babysitting. It turned me off to school, and I said I was never going to set foot in the classroom again.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I didn't want to speak with him. I didn't want anything to do with it. And I went to my attorney about it and he goes, you can't stop it. He's writing it based on public records. And in fact, there's a reason you should cooperate with them. And I go, what's that? And he said, you're going to learn things that you need to know. He's going to have the time. He's going to have the answers.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And if you don't get the answers, you'll always wonder. So I'd suggest you meet with him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Throughout our marriage, he had women on the side and every single one of them was in need financially. He had offered to put up some in their own apartments. He had offered to pay the tuition of others. He paid the medical bills of some and even visited them in the hospital. There was never a time when he was the person I thought he was.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I think instead it was a little pang of guilt, but it was short lived.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
For one thing, she discovered... He was a very good pool player, and he would challenge people playing pool, which I can't even picture him in a bar, let alone playing pool.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
So this was like a guarantee. You know, if I'm going to surround myself with people who need me financially, I have a guarantee of an audience. I have a guarantee of a partner. They're not going to leave me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He would go over there and read the paper and bring them breakfast. And they'd sit and listen with boredom to his stories.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And that doesn't include the cars he bought them, the rent he paid, the meals he paid for. He also bought them heroin. He would take them on drug runs for them. And I think that was his making sure they were going to be dependent upon him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
So I just went from one crap job to another. I didn't like any of them. Got really bored. So I kind of started out really floundering, not knowing what I wanted to do.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I mean, even among other criminals, John was feared. That's how vicious he was.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
When he ran out of money, they lost patience with him. They had no interest in him. And decided, at least John decided, the best thing to do was just to kill him and get him out of their hair.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He realized that John had been calling our house and hanging up. Things were coming to a head, and I think he decompensated.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
You're pure as snow, pure as snow, pure as snow. And I think in his mind at that point in time, he was seeing Dawn and me as very different people.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Dawn came from an abusive household and she did not have a good self-esteem. I mean, She quit school a month before she graduated high school and she was nominated valedictorian. Instead, she threw all that away, left the suburbs to go downtown and met up with John and her life took a turn for the worse after that.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
In a way, that was the old me. I mean, I had nothing when I met him. And he was saying, I'll pay your tuition, just like he said it to them.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
It explained to me his attraction to me, you know, that I was a project. I was a challenge to be fixed, to be provided for. I was a good prop. someone he could perform for with his knowledge and his money. And I sat and ate it all up. I was a willing participant.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I will always be grateful for what he gave me. I don't mean just financially, but the encouragement. He was instrumental in getting me on my path, and I don't think I would have done it without him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Once I left Detroit, and paid off the bills and got away from the media and got away from the police, I felt like I could start to reinvent my life.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
What that did was end up in conflicted grief. You have dueling emotions. There's a part of you that's like the typical grief, you know, those loss and sadness and missing a person. But the other side of it is relief.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
A homicide survivor is someone who is grieving over the homicide of a loved one. It's somebody who's left with the aftermath of murder. And the reason we don't know of that term is I don't think it's projected much in true crime. The focus is on the perpetrator and the deed, a little bit on the victim. And we're in the background and nobody cares.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
It's like they think if we get the perpetrator convicted that that's the end of the story. And I'm like, oh, if you only knew.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Now I hold that as near and dear to my heart. The people I have met, the stories I have heard, it's so healing. It was like the missing piece.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
If you think about most movies dealing with homicide, the family of the victim is either never shown or they're grieving in the corner, wringing their hands, and that's the end of them. There's not any curiosity about it. And the fact of the matter is, anybody listening could be a part of our club. Homicide cuts across all racial lines, age, economic, geographic, you name it. Nobody is immune.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
To me, there's nothing more basic than thought. They can take away your family, your health, so on, but they can't take away your thought. And that intrigued me. It still does.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And if anything's going to change, we have to put our story out there. Somebody's got to do it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
My apartment cost me $80 a month. It had rats. It had about six locks on the door. It had no kitchen. It was a hot plate, a bathroom, and a bedroom. I remember putting my mattress on the floor away from the window so the gunshots outside wouldn't pierce through the window because there was always gunfire at night. But it was home to me and it was proof that I was on my way.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
When she pulled up to the office building, I noticed they had to pay for parking. I did not have $2.50 on me to pay for parking. So I thought, I'm going to have to ask for a loan from my future employer.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
It was staggering. It had marble and bronze and three feet long chandeliers in the corridor and arches and paintings and you name it. Very, very, very elegant. And so I remember walking through the doors and instantly I felt out of place. I'm like, I don't belong here. This is fancy. I don't have any money. I'm a phony. I was so nervous. And I had on my best clothes, which I bought used.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And I remember watching people, how they got to the elevator and how they used the buttons, so I wouldn't know how to do it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
When I got off on floor eight, he must have heard the elevator gong. He stuck his head out way, way down at the end of the hall. He said, oh, I'm down here.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He had a golf shirt on. His pants were too short for his shoes. He was bashful and he was very welcoming. He laughed easily.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
On my way out, I said, oh, by the way, can you deduct $2.50 out of my paycheck?
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He pulled out of his pocket a roll of cash and peeled it off and seemed more than happy to give it to me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
My impression of him was one of respect, given his station in life. I knew I could learn a lot from him in terms of the field of psychology. Before long, he started treating her to lunch.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He was the first person to ever express belief in my goals. The idea that of course you can go to college, of course you can graduate, of course you can do that. I had never had anybody tell me that in my life. It really made a big impression on me. And I was so pleased that he saw potential in me that nobody else acknowledged or validated.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
They gave me a raise and I was so grateful for that because I was really barely paying my own tuition. And one term I had to sell my car to make tuition and I had started to walk to class in those neighborhoods, which was a challenge to get home before dark in the winter.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
The windows were boarded up, and the grass was overgrown. The only sign was a little tiny yellow and green sign that said Lely's. That's it. But as they drove around back... The aroma coming from the kitchen was beyond description. And they had a man with a violin in the parking lot.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And we talked and talked and talked until we realized we were taking up too much time. Like the waiter was kind of like, come on, guys.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I liked how he treated me with respect and he always helped me with my coat and opened my car door and never interrupted me and was always eager to hear about my day. And he'd ask follow-up questions, you know, like, what did you think of that class? And what'd you think of that book? And tell me more about your parents or why do you like that singer or whatever it might be.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I felt very lucky because a lot of my friends were floundering. You know, their idea of a date would be to go to McDonald's and ride up and down Woodward Avenue. And I was like, I'd rather go to the museums. I'd rather have an intellectual discussion.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
They'd been dating about six months, and one morning over breakfast... He's very bashful, and I decided, you know, he's never going to ask me, so I better ask him. So I had a paper calendar in my pocket, and I pulled it out, put it on the table, and I said, I think it's about time that we get married. What do you think? And he goes, okay.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And I took my calendar out and I took a pen and I stabbed a date. It was a year calendar. And it landed on a Saturday in September. And I go, there's our date.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
By the time we got married, I was finishing my bachelor's. And he encouraged me to go for my master's degree. When Jan doubted herself... He gave me the confidence to go into my master's program. And in the era, too, women did not go to graduate school at all.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I loved it so much. I did not even want to go home after class was over. I loved everything about it. I loved the old, old, old libraries. Oh, it was breathtaking.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He wanted to have us have our own house together. And I said, I have nothing to bring to the table. Nothing. I mean, you could put everything I had in my trunk.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
And we moved into the six-bedroom, six-bathroom house.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
I said, what's important to me is if I can take one of the bedrooms and turn it into a dissertation room. He got me an electric typewriter with a little exchange ball so he could change the fonts. And he got me that. He got me a bookshelf and a lamp. And he bought me a coffee mug that he found someplace.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
Where on the inside, if you look at it, down at the bottom, there's somebody looks like they're mountain climbing up the side of the cup on the inside. And he called it a struggle cup. And he goes, when you get discouraged, look in your struggle cup. And remind yourself, a day at a time, you're going to do it. You're going to finish. You have what it takes.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: EP 31 – Jan
He liked rescuing damsels in distress, which I did not understand at the time. That's his pattern.