Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, everybody, and welcome to 2020 The After Show. I'm Deborah Roberts, and thank you for being with us. I know so many of you are fascinated by true crime, and that's why you come to us every week on 2020 on Friday nights and here to this program. And of course, we often try to take a deeper look at certain issues that we think might be appealing to you.
And today we are going to talk to an expert who has spent her career peeling away the layers of these kinds of crimes that we cover and looking at the police investigation and how they can conclude certain things or what they may have missed or what different things say on the crime scene. You're going to find this one fascinating.
And we're going to talk to her about our most recent 2020 episode, which was the case that involved a 20-year-old aspiring artist and waitress, Amanda Plass. This was a very, very... Sad and tragic story. She was found dead in her apartment in Massachusetts. She was stabbed multiple times, found on her kitchen floor.
And what was so alarming about the case was that there was key evidence hiding right there in plain sight. The case turned completely when police began to look at some of the crime scene photos a little closer. So the big question is, what was it that finally led to the arrest to crack this case? Well, to talk about this is a woman some of you might have heard of before.
I certainly have here at 2020. We have talked to her about some of our stories. I'm going to bring in criminologist, attorney, and host of the podcast, criminal appeal, Dr. Casey Jordan, who is going to help us understand the story a little more. Dr. Jordan, great to see you.
It's my pleasure to be here, Debra.
Good to see you again. Let's talk about a criminologist. So many people are fascinated and we hear the term thrown around even on television shows. What does a criminologist do and what do you bring to an investigation that the investigators may not be able to necessarily do?
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Chapter 2: What happened to the aspiring artist Amanda Plass?
Let's talk about the case of Amanda Plass. You were not involved in the investigation of this story, but you, of course, know about it. And there are so many red flags in this story and so many twists and turns that obviously you have seen before. So let's start off with the most obvious. She's found stabbed to death brutally multiple times on her kitchen floor.
What in the beginning does that say to you?
well the fact that she was stabbed is very important because first of all everyone has knives in their home so one of the things we first look for is is this an organized or a disorganized killer did they come with the idea of murder did they bring the weapon that they used or was it a weapon of convenience something they may have found and in amanda's case she was found on her kitchen floor and of course kitchens have knives now
We have no indication that the murder weapon was left at the scene. We don't know if there was a knife he found there or he brought the knife there. But when you have a knife, first of all, it's a weapon of convenience because almost everybody can access a knife. It's not a gun. It's not like a kill kit with rope or strangulation and zip ties and things like that.
So stabbing is a very personal way of killing somebody. That's what I've always heard. As that knife is penetrating the body, you are going to have cast-off blood. It is messy. You can actually smell the copper in the air from the blood flow. So it is emotionally, you have to be really determined to stab somebody. It's very easy to just pull a trigger and close your eyes from 20 feet away.
But a knife is personal. And you have to keep doing it. You have to keep doing it. If you stab them over and over again. And in this particular case, Amanda Plass was stabbed multiple times in her sides, both right side and left side, and through her heart.
And initially, does that tell you it had to be somebody who knew her? There had to be something emotional going on here? Maybe some anger?
Yes, and well, statistically, I'm going to tell you that about 80 to 85% of women who are murdered, the culprit is going to be somebody they know and know or knew intimately. Boyfriend, husband, ex-husband, ex-partner, some kind of stalker, but somebody that they know, right? It's very rare, only about 20% of the time, that it is an absolute stranger.
So the first thing we think is this is going to be somebody in her inner circle.
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Chapter 3: What key evidence was overlooked in Amanda's case?
I mean, ultimately they cleared him, but... Yeah, when I first heard, wait, she has a boyfriend and he's a carpenter, he's a roofer, he has tools and utility knives. I've got to tell you, statistically, Seth Green is your guy.
In most cases like this, the new boyfriend, the guy she's been dating for a week that she may not have known very well, may not have vetted, he is usually going to be the killer. Even though he called police first to say that he had found her body. Well, killers do that all the time.
They think that's the ultimate what we call contraindicator, that if I'm the first one to call the police, if I'm the one to find the body, they'll never think it was me. But when police arrived... Seth had gone to her house to see her, found her dead on the kitchen floor, called police.
And when they got there, he was literally on the steps, curled up in the fetal position, you know, racked with grief and, you know, out of his mind with, how could this have happened? He was absolutely in shock. He was a new boyfriend. Is that a little strange? Absolutely. They had only been dating for one week. Hmm. Right. So we don't know that she knew him that well.
And to be so grief stricken over a dating situation that it was only a week old. They were wondering if that may be over dramatization again to throw them off. But then we see the police interrogation, let's call it an interview, with Seth Green. And he's answering their questions. And he is being very forthright, but he does admit he has knives.
But then he keeps telling the police, Deborah, I would never kill anybody. I loved her. I loved her more than anything. So it's eventually he has an alibi.
He was at work. He could not be the guy. We spoke with him and he talked about how tough that was for him and the trauma and so forth. But is it important that police cast a wide net in the very beginning or to go very close, like you just said, with family members and people who knew the person?
Well, logically, they're going to go with the most statistically likely situation. So they had to look at Seth first.
Yeah, well, so they eventually rule him out and now they have no suspects. And we talk a lot in our 2020 episodes about DNA, the importance of DNA. You've got DNA in this case, no suspect. And obviously with the blood and so forth, they've got something there to look at.
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Chapter 4: How does criminology help in understanding crime scenes?
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Welcome back to 2020 The After Show. I am speaking with the fascinating Dr. Casey Jordan, a criminologist, about the most recent story that we covered here on 2020, which involved an aspiring artist and a woman who was a waitress by the name of Amanda Plass, who was found murdered in her home. And police were stalled in their investigation for a
couple of years before they finally landed on a suspect. Amanda's mother, Michelle, was just relentless in her desire to find justice, to find this killer. And I've covered stories where the mom has been the center and the focus of an investigation, will not give up and will not let police give up. That's critical in these kinds of cases, right?
Well, if you want that case to be solved, it is so often the family members who are calling those detectives, asking them, you know, are there updates? Are there updates? And I mean, Michelle, Amanda's mother, she sponsored public events. She handed out flyers. I mean, she was like a junior profiler herself. She wanted this solved and she would not let the police let it go cold.
She constantly contacted them and told them, please keep working on it.
And I've seen that before in other stories that I have covered. They have stayed for years. Sometimes these family members have stayed on these cases and sometimes they can actually help with the investigation, right?
Sure. We see it all the time. They remember something that just, you know, in the middle of the night, something will ping in their head and then they will remember, wait, she had a friend or, oh, this happened or, you know, and that memory, we've seen memories come back a year, two years later and, that can actually help lead the investigation.
But in this particular case, I think she was just like, don't give up. And the officers decided they would keep looking over the evidence and see if anything jumped out.
And something finally did jump out. So they're looking over the evidence and it turns out Michelle actually had possession of a whiteboard, her daughter's whiteboard.
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