Jan Canty
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jan Canty’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, he's going to be home. And I dismissed it.
But nothing came of it. That day, or the next day, or the next day, or the next day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
which is the red light district of Detroit.
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.
And the fact that he didn't have a body lent itself to my argument that they had the wrong guy.
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.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 98 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →