Ray Reeves
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ray Reeves’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Was there already a fire pit? Okay, so is it, is it like bricks or is it just an area? Just a little makeshift one with like garden bricks and stuff. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you put her in that? Okay, so it had already been dug out. Okay, you put
It's everything at the same time. It's relief. It's joy. It's anger. I don't know if he's telling me the truth. I got to get a team out there and a dive team out there to go find her.
So the dive team went out and they found her, or they found what they believed to be her. We got missing persons, some of our team, and also the dive team out. And they conducted a search exactly where he told us. And they located a person, or it appeared to be, because she was wrapped up in not only the comforter, the plastic, the blanket, and duct tape.
It appeared to be later on identified as Savannah at the medical examiner's office.
Then we also began the search on the vehicle. Canine alerts to decomp in the trunk of his car where he admitted to putting her. We found soil matching and soot that matched his residence. One of Savannah's shoes, blood in the backseat on paperwork that DNA tested, which was Savannah's as well.
A lot of people think, okay, well, you got your confession. That's the end of it. Well, that's certainly not the end of it. The majority of the investigation is really post-arrest if you're going to be good at the job. In homicide, we say about that part of your job is to solve it, but the bigger part is to resolve it. So I needed to set into motion things that were sustainable for trial.
There's still a reservation that this isn't my fault or I'm not completely culpable. And so I think he tries to give a... a quote, self-defense claim. And, you know, and the courts looked at that and the judge said, that's not accurate.
After he kills Savannah, he takes her home and throws her in the fire pit in his backyard. And Kelsey, this new girl, comes over that night and they have pizza and they watch movies while Savannah's body is just sitting in the backyard.
I believe that he was jealous. He wanted to be with Savannah. They had an off again, on again relationship. Eventually, she was done with him and knew what kind of person he was. And he got angry and he has an angry streak. And so in that car, he went to go confront her. He had no business being there. He wasn't at work that day.
I mean, he certainly can go in the parking lot if he wants to, but he confronted her. She was not afraid of him.
She tried to get out of that car. She's a little girl. He outweighed her and physically much stronger than she was, strangled her. And then he panicked and he didn't know what to do. Instead of calling the police and saying, hey, this is what happened, he panicked and he took her home. And then he tried to get rid of her body by burning it, which doesn't work.
Then after that, he panicked again when we came to talk to him the first time. And so he wrapped her up. And when the burning didn't work and he took her to a place that he used to live. And so he dumped her, hoping that no one would ever find her body. Because it's a dead end down there, for sure, in a swampy, nasty pond.
Mrs. Gold was battling with her own health issues at that time, and bless her heart, she was at everything. She was there at the end for years. for the plea. And this was all something that we get family buy-in, the prosecutors get buy-in from the family.
The family agreed that, you know, we'd like closure. It's been long enough. He admits it. He's willing to admit that, you know, in court, this isn't just a plea deal. This is him admitting and there's an appropriate sentence to what the second degree murder can hold in the state of Florida. And so they didn't bring Savannah back. It didn't fix all of the things.
But this chapter was finalized with that.
These are hard. We work here in Duval County. We work, I think we had close to 200 murders that year. I mean, we run a lot. We're busy. We run. And it's not a complaint. I mean, we signed up for this and we had the privilege of doing this job and With all of the death that you see, and this is a kid and it doesn't matter how old someone is, but this is a child and it just weighs on you.
All of these cases and all of the bodies that you see and all of the autopsies that you go to and all of the victims' families, those that love you and those that hate you, it's tiring and it takes a physical and mental toll on you.
My wife and I have been married for 35 years now, this summer. And she's been through two wars in the military with me. She's been through deployments. She's been through me leaving on mission trips. But this job, she'll tell you, is just, I'm just, some days when I come home, I just, I don't, I can't talk. I don't have anything to say.
There's times that you just, you have tears in your eyes and you don't know why. So unless you'd done it, you wouldn't understand. I'm glad to do it. Even today, I'm glad to be here and I'm glad for our next on call. And I hope for the privilege of working in another case where we can help families. And eventually I'll get to pass it on to the news guys coming up.
But for right now, I'm not leaving until they force me out. I'm staying. I'm not leaving.
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