Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt.
Listen, you guys, if you have been with us long enough, you've probably heard me talk about The Gift of Fear. That is the title of a book by Gavin DeBecker, but the message is right there. Some call it a sixth sense. You might even call it full-body chills, depending on when it strikes you. But there is something intuitive in us that, if we trust, can tell us that we're in trouble.
Now, it's not always an alarm. Sometimes it's this quiet feeling warning you of someone's presence, telling you that you're not alone. And that is the very feeling that woke up 19-year-old Rachel Hansen from sleep one June night in 2022. The adrenaline coursing through her spiked when she opened her eyes to find someone standing over her bed, staring at her.
Rachel let out a scream and that sent the person running out of her room, then out of her apartment completely without ever uttering a word. And that should have been the worst thing that happened to Rachel in that Gilbert, Arizona apartment.
But it wasn't, because the very next night, when Rachel was asleep in bed, just after 2 a.m., a dark figure entered her bedroom again, held up a gun, and shot her in the abdomen before fleeing. Was that first break-in unrelated, or was it a warning, a bad omen of what was to come? To this day, no suspects have been named.
And if you read the heavily redacted 338-page police file that the Gilbert Police Department released in 2024, you will learn a whole lot of nothing. But to leave it at that, it's not exactly the crime junkie nature. So our team did some investigating. Join us as we unravel the mystery of who killed Rachel Hansen. When the person who shot Rachel Hansen fled her apartment around 2 a.m.
on June 4th, 2022, she was still alive. Rachel was bleeding from her abdomen and her upper back where the bullet had entered and exited, but she could still move. So she grabbed her phone and rushed to the apartment bathroom where she called 911. Rachel knows that she's in bad condition, so she wastes no time when the call connects. I've been shot, she tells them. Someone broke in and shot me.
In about five minutes, first responders are there at the scene, and they start working on her there before rushing her to the hospital. But the bullet that went through her just did too much damage. And after three hours in surgery, doctors couldn't save her. But here's the tragedy on top of the tragedy. When Rachel went to the hospital and while she was in surgery, her family had no idea.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Rachel Hansen on June 2, 2022?
No one called them when Rachel was found or when she was in surgery at the hospital, which still bothers Kim to this day, knowing that her daughter was there all alone. But that is far from the only thing that bothers her. There would be plenty more heartbreak and disappointment coming. She just didn't know it yet.
Because like so many people who never have to live the true crime story, when this all unfolded, Kim was under the impression that the criminal justice system worked, that all detectives knew how to do their jobs and that they did them well. Well, that bubble would burst in a hard way, which brings me back to the crime scene. Now, as far as scenes go, Rachel's was simple to process.
According to the police file, aside from the blood on her mattress and in her bathroom and the bullet and shell casing, nothing seemed out of place. In fact, there was barely any furniture at all in sight, just her box spring and mattress.
I mean, the only thing really notable about the state of the apartment that I can tell from the police file is the smell, because apparently it like reeks of marijuana. And as officers began canvassing neighbors, they learned that this smell had been there for like the last six months. And over that time, there were random people coming and going from the unit and loud arguments.
And those who lived around Unit 3133 assumed that drugs were being sold out of there and that the young woman who lived there clearly had a bad relationship with her boyfriend.
Which they would have gotten a front row to because when Nicole went to this apartment complex, not only are the units pretty close together, but like just walking the hallway, she could clearly hear people talking and watching TV inside their apartment. Paper thin walls. Yeah. But here's what's so strange. On the night Rachel died, they heard...
How?
I mean, even if you were sleeping... I mean, I feel like you would hear a gunshot. Like, that would totally wake you up, which... Yeah, I mean, could they have used a silencer on the gun? So that was my first thought, right? But I don't know if this killer was being mindful of noise because while there were no signs of forced entry to Rachel's front door...
We actually know from pictures of the apartment that Kim took after it was cleared by police that someone kicked the crap out of Rachel's bedroom door. And this is one of those details that just like doesn't compute for me. Even if Rachel's bedroom door was locked, you can see from the picture.
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Chapter 3: What were the events leading up to Rachel's shooting?
How did they hear nothing? Not just like the stuff I mentioned, but like no hurried footsteps, no running away. Nothing. No argument. Yeah, they didn't see anything either. And a shady person lingering, I think, would have stood out because despite whatever was going on for six months in Unit 3133, this was a nice and safe area, like a gated community, in fact. Does it have any cameras then?
Oh, it does. But kind of like the gatedness of this community... it feels like it was a little all for show. The leasing office told investigators that there were no operational cameras anywhere in the complex. And when Nicole went to the complex, now mind you, this is like three plus years post-homicide, but every time she went down to check the gate, it's just like wide open. Cool.
But building security aside, one of Rachel's neighbors did have a working ring camera. And this is the first frustrating roadblock in the highly redacted records that we got. Nearly all of what they learned from the Ring camera footage is redacted. Some of the only information that is not says that a camera caught Rachel on June 3rd, like five hours before the shooting.
So it had been like 9.15 p.m. And she was with a long-haired man walking to the east on the first floor hall. Now, she lived on the third floor, so this might have been when she like first gets there. Then a different investigator wrote in another report that at 9.33, quote, the two are seen walking away from her apartment and that Rachel is dressed in what looks like a swimsuit.
Now, when they come back, what other cameras they might have been seen on, I don't know, all redacted. But listen, we don't need to spiral and speculate too much, at least about who this long-haired man was. Because once police finally do notify Rachel's family of her death, again, five hours after she was shot, they figure that out pretty quickly.
When police knock on Rachel's parents' door, her dad Todd answers, her mom Kim was actually in Indiana visiting grandchildren. But officers figure out that the guy with long hair, that is probably Rachel's fiancé, Jomet Bailey. And they learn something else critical. Rachel had just moved back into that apartment. June 2nd was her very first night staying there.
So she's not who everyone thought was selling drugs and fighting with her boyfriend.
She hasn't been there. No, no. And that's also why the apartment was so empty. Her dad tells police that the apartment was in Rachel's name for a long time, but she had been like off the books subletting it for the last six months. To who? Dad wasn't sure in the moment. It wasn't someone that she was like super close to.
So it takes a minute to track that down, which is fine because first things first, detectives want to talk to fiancé Jomette. Now, the police report says that they bring Jomet in the next day, which would have been Sunday, June 5th. But Rachel's mom told us that that's wrong, that they brought Jomet right in after they talked to Todd. So this would have been like 8 a.m. on the 4th.
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Chapter 4: What details emerged from Rachel's apartment investigation?
Both of them tried to talk Rachel out of this arrangement, but she assured them that she and America had met. Everything would be fine. So for six months, Rachel and America had a strictly business relationship. Rachel had no idea what she was up to at the apartment. But Rachel's neighbors had their guesses, like I said before. They believed that there were drug sales happening out of the unit.
But again, Rachel knew none of this.
So it's not like she kicked America out because of everything going on or because she was afraid she was in trouble or going to get in trouble or anything.
No, she ended up kicking America out because she got fired from her job at the ranch. And so without her ranch job, she didn't have a place to live. Exactly. Which meant that she had to tell America that she needed to, like, get out of the apartment ASAP. So everything moved kind of quick. America leaving, Rachel coming back.
And this is the basis for the subletter theory, which is that Rachel was the unintended target. That whoever shot her was actually targeting America and didn't know that she had moved out two days prior.
So in this theory, are the intruder and the shooter the same person?
In this theory, that wouldn't really make sense for them to be the same person because the intruder would have realized that Rachel was in America on that first night. But I mean, we know from neighbors that like people would come and go from there. So like even if they weren't the same person, it doesn't mean that they weren't both there for America, if that makes sense.
Yeah. But don't you think if they weren't the same person that the first intruder would have come forward, though, like and said like, hey, like this happened. It wasn't me the second night.
Not necessarily. I mean, like as sad as it sounds, if that person's not the shooter, they could be afraid of being pinned as the perpetrator. Or like maybe they were there to buy drugs and they don't want to put themselves on police's radar for that.
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Chapter 5: How did Rachel's relationship with her fiancé impact the investigation?
I have to tell you about this part. So I think this encapsulates so well why Kim, Rachel's mom, has lost so much faith in the investigation and those leading it. So Kim knew about the pickle jar because after that person came into Rachel's apartment the first night.
She's like, hey, mom, this weird thing happened. And also they left pickles. Yeah.
Here's a super weird detail. Well, Kim said in the days after the shooting, when her and Todd were told by police that they could finally go get Rachel's things from the apartment, they opened the door and the pickle jar is just like sitting right there on the counter.
Police didn't collect it.
I mean, Kim and Todd at the time assumed that they must have at least like fingerprinted it or something, because like by then they told police the story of the person who came in the night before and left the pickles. Mm hmm. So they're assuming police, you know, did the bare minimum. Yeah, did their job. Right. Like fingerprinted it to see what strange person was in her place. Right.
So Kim just like took it home along with Rachel's clothing, which, by the way, was also left behind. And the jar sat in her garage for a while until she ultimately decided that it was time to throw it away. But Kim has come to regret that now because she told Nicole that in one recent conversation with police, she asked them about the pickle jar.
And they looked right at her and they said, what pickle jar? You've got to be kidding me. Nope. They said that they never saw a pickle jar.
what do you mean never saw one there was nothing else in the apartment it was literally just her bed and pickles which this started to make us feel like maybe we were losing our minds or like the whole pickle thing got conflated with something else over the years like maybe people are mistaken like we just couldn't make sense of it why would you not take the one thing that might be evidence in an apartment where you have barely anything to work literally nothing
So our amazing reporter, Nicole, combed through everything that we have from Gilbert PD. Files, blurred body cam footage, and there are no mention of pickles at all. Except, God bless this tenacious little reporter, there is one barely audible offhanded comment caught at the very end of one officer's police body cam as he's walking through Rachel's apartment. And I've got it here for you to see.
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