Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
How Jesse Crossen Transformed His Life After A 32 Years Prison Sentence
Sat, 30 Nov 2024
Jesse shares his story on how we was arrested and eventually was granted clemency and released from prison. Jesse Links https://linktr.ee/second_chancer Follow me on all socials! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrime Do you want to be a guest? Send me an email here: [email protected] Do you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrime Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8 Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438 The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402 Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1 Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel! Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here: Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69 Cashapp: $coxcon69
Chapter 1: What was Jesse Crossen's life like before prison?
He did 19 years in state prison for a shooting, and also he has a YouTube channel, which he just started, which is doing great, and TikToks and all the other stuff. So check out the video. That was pretty bad. It's pretty bad, but it's fine. Nobody expects, listen, nobody watching this thing expects me to be a professional. At this point, they're past it.
So, okay, so what, well, I don't want to say what happened. Basically, let's just kind of, where were you born?
So I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is where I live again now. Raised here, went to school here, and then basically took off a year before college. And that summer found cocaine and just, it was like a light switch. Like I went from being, you know, kind of coasting along and making bad decisions and not living my best life to just plummeting off the side of a cliff.
Within three months of finding a solid cocaine connect, I went from that kid taking a year off before college to driving down the road and shooting two people after an argument and then threatening me and committing a robbery to try to get more money for drugs and just completely losing myself. And then very quickly being arrested and finding myself in jail. Okay.
What, I mean, how, how did that, I don't understand how, how did that evolve so, so quickly? Like, well, how did you even start doing, you know, Coke? Like, I mean, if you're just kind of hanging out, taking off, what, just driving across the country or just hanging out or what's...
I was in Virginia. I was working a job.
I'd been smoking pot and selling pot, so I was kind of familiar with the scene, but I had done coke occasionally, but then I got a job that summer working construction, and the guy who drove me to work because I'd lost my license was a coke dealer, and so he hit me with the free one, and then he hit me with this, and he said, hey, I got some more if you want, and it just became a habit where...
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Chapter 2: How did Jesse's drug use lead to serious crimes?
Because I'm getting some every weekend and then I was getting some, you know, a couple of times a week. And then all of a sudden I need to get a whole bunch so I can sell it because then I can support my habit. And it just it went fast. You know, I think some people are some people kind of like slowly find their way into things. I just fell face first.
OK, how did the how did that evolve into a robbery? I mean, what what what's what happened around that?
So I my buddies and I, we basically quit working and only were selling drugs or only kind of hanging around each other in this crappy hotel. And one of the guys said, hey, you know, I know these terrible people and they only hire undocumented immigrants. They don't pay him anything and they keep all the cash and don't report it.
So, you know, if we stole from them, it wouldn't really be stealing from anybody like valuable like they're bad people. And we were so strong out at that point, and we had burned all our bridges, we couldn't find anybody to front anything else, that we were willing to believe that. We were like, okay, fine, we'll do that. Yeah, we're not bad people, we're doing something that anybody would do.
So we went to this house, and it was supposed to be a breaking and entering. We were waiting, and they left, and we were like, okay, cool, we can go in and we can try to find the money. But when we went in the back, my other co-defendant went in the front, and there was somebody there. There was a maid there.
And so he ended up sticking a gun in the maid's face, which turned into a robbery rather than breaking and entering. And we never found any money. I mean, we ransacked the house and terrorized this person and terrorized the people that lived there.
And just all in this insane... I guess my point is that people think of robberies as like Ocean's Eleven, these carefully planned out, thought out things. But for us, we were just feral animals. We didn't have any forethought. We didn't get anything out of it. All we did was just create this huge wake of harm.
Right. And how did that turn into, you know, shooting at someone?
So that was a few days after that. We had, okay, well, we had found somebody else who was foolish enough to front us drugs, despite having no good, you know, cred on the street. But there was, before that, you know, while I was strung out, I was paranoid. I thought everybody was out to get me and I wanted to get a gun.
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Chapter 3: What were the events surrounding Jesse's arrest?
and they chase me they're chasing me down the street and they're like pretending to swerve into me and as they're pulling up beside me on the road uh the passenger reaches behind him to grab something and in my mind he was grabbing a gun so i just pulled my own just unloaded and i'm just really lucky that they didn't die so did they both get hit or either or one of the two of them got hit they both got hit okay
And how did that track back to you?
So they basically told the police who it was. They went, I drove back home or back to the place we were crashing because we'd gotten kicked out of the hotel. We didn't have any more money. So we were crashing there. And then the next morning we got arrested.
We got arrested for both because when they were in the hospital, they both give a description of, you know, the person who had shot and this person and this phone number. And so it came back to me really quick.
Did you go to trial or? I pleaded guilty. Right. Then you pled guilty to what? An open plea or just the 32 years?
Well, it was it was a total of 12 charges, which was basically robbery, unlawful wounding, use of firearm, like just all the kind of like associated charges with the robbery in the shooting. And I took it as an open plea, basically because there was no like there was no win there. Like I had done this. I didn't want to put them through any more harm.
And even my lawyer was like, yeah, I wouldn't do any good anyway. So, like, let's just plead guilty. Let's just hope, you know, the court has some mercy. And he had said, he was like, look, you know, your guidelines are bad. They're eight to 13 years. Like you'll probably get 10 years. It's going to suck. But like you did some really bad shit. You're gonna have to deal with it.
My mind was like, okay, that makes sense. So the day of sentencing, one of the courtroom and the Commonwealth put in a motion to modify the guidelines. So. With that modification, instead of eight to 13 years, it became 10 to 16 years. And then when he read out the sentence, the judge read out like, you know, five years with five suspended and 20 years with five suspended.
And he went through and I did the math in my head, but nobody else did. Because at the end, my lawyer was like, your honor, what's the total? What did you sentence him to? The judge said, I don't know. I just told you. So they actually had to go back to the court reporter and get them to read back and do the math. And they sentenced me to 138 years with 106 suspended.
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Chapter 4: What kind of sentence did Jesse receive?
He was like, no, these are the sins of the father being visited on the son. And it just crushed him. I mean, it was to the point that he didn't know how to he didn't know how to deal with it. And my mom just wanted to fix things. I mean, that's what she'd always tried to do is figure out a way to fix things to really crush both. My dad ended up actually leaving the country in 2004.
He moved down to Costa Rica before he died. And I think part of that was him just like not being able to deal, just having to get away and try to start something new.
And when he, so obviously when he died, you're still in prison. Um, um, okay. So God, you, you, you, you appealed obviously with the, you know, you went in, you appealed.
Yeah. So we appealed. We did a habeas to do everything. The appellate court determined that the sentencing guidelines are not mandatory. They're basically discretionary. So the judge can sentence me to whatever he wants within the statute. And back then, robbery, half these charges carried up to life. It was like five to life for everything or 20 to life for other things.
And so it wasn't expected that somebody would get that. But the court basically ruled as long as that's what the statute said, he could have given you all these life sentences and there's nothing you can do. The habeas was the same thing, talking to an ineffective assistant, saying that my lawyer didn't raise the correct objections or didn't argue this the right way.
But basically, the court was like, yeah, the judge can do whatever he wants. There's actually on that. And this, thankfully, has changed in Virginia. But the departure from the guidelines, the judge just had to give a reason. And one of the things they jokingly said was it didn't matter what that reason was. It could literally be like, I don't like him. And that was a valid reason.
He just had to list his reasons on that form.
Law enforcement often questions him, not because he's suspected of a crime, but because they find him fascinating. He is the most interesting man in the world.
I don't typically commit crime, but when I do, it's bank fraud. Stay greedy, my friends.
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Chapter 5: How did Jesse cope with his prison sentence?
social emotional learning like literally learning how to regulate your emotions or walk away or realize what's really important or think to the future and that lack of skill in that moment has led to you know 45 shootings in 45 days and it's just insane wow um
Oh, that's just it. Yeah. Listen, I'm I'm I'm I'm glad when I was I was raised like, you know, middle class, you know, like I look at the I actually at one point, I don't know if you probably don't know anything about Tampa, but in Tampa, there's an area of Tampa called Ybor City and. Well, there's Hyde Park and there's Tampa Heights.
And I owned a ton of properties in Ybor City and Tampa Heights. And, you know, so it was an area where, you know, it was being fixed up. You know, the city was coming in and renovating houses and tearing them down and building new houses. And there were development companies coming in.
And so, you know, I came in, I bought a bunch of houses on this one street and I ended up living on the street of Amelia. And I used to go out in the morning, like on Saturday, I would go out in the morning and I would sit on the front stoop and drink coffee.
And one of my tenants would come out and then we had a buddy that they would come over and we'd kind of just sit there and drink coffee and talk about whatever we were going to do that day. Just what we had done that week because we were all basically real estate.
And I had a next door neighbor that this woman who had, she probably had three or four kids, probably took care of another couple of kids. And every once in a while, one of her kids would like, you know, they'd like escape or something. Like they'd walk out the front door and you've got a two-year-old walking around in a vacant lot in a horrible neighborhood.
And then I would just sit there and watch this little kid in this vacant lot playing for 10 minutes. And then suddenly the mother would come running out screaming and look over at me. And I just point and I go, you know, He's over there in the vacant, you know, in the lot. And then she'd run over there, grab the kid, drag him back in the house, you know, slap it.
We're talking about like a two-year-old. Pow, pow, pow. And just bring him back in there. He's screaming. Or I can remember another time I was sitting there, same kid, mom's on the phone, kid's actually digging in a garbage can that had been knocked over.
And it's funny because a buddy of mine had bought the duplex they lived in and we were just waiting for their lease to expire so we'd get rid of them. And I started yelling to the mother, hey, hey, hey. And finally she looked over and she goes, what? And I said, your kid's eating garbage.
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Chapter 6: What transformations did Jesse experience while incarcerated?
He was going home from work and he had a knife set on his belt. And so the cop said that he had covered it up with a trench coat. Well, that was not actually true. Like he hadn't covered up with a trench coat. You can prove that. But they had never challenged in court like the statute in Virginia is it has to be a dirt dagger or like weapon.
And this is a fillet knife and like a paring knife, which is not a dirt dagger. Like it's specifically if you go through the case law is not.
covered by that like it is exempt from this statute but his lawyer did not care did not look at his case never did it so when he finally went back and looked at case law he appealed and he was like hey this this literally isn't a crime i'm in prison right now for something that isn't a crime that nobody cared enough to do and we managed to get him out which was really cool to see
Yeah. That doesn't happen a lot. No, it does not. At best you're, you're lucky to be able to shave a few years off here and there at best. And that, that, and even that's remarkable. I think, I mean, I don't know what the equivalent is in Virginia, but in, in the federal system every year, 3,500, they're called, it's called the 2255. It's, it's essentially saying that, yeah, you're, you're,
Your lawyer was ineffective. So there's one person for every 2,255 that are filed, one person sees relief. It's outrageous. Yeah, but everybody keeps filing them.
Everybody has a dream. I mean, but that's how pardons were. So up until the governor that ended up letting me out. So we, I mean, pardons, it was literally like four people or six people at the end of a term. Remember, it was less than a quarter of 1% of the population. And there were thousands of pardons put in, but it was just, it wasn't going to happen. It didn't. Right.
And then in 2019, I had been a part of starting this peer support mental health program. I had finished my college degree. I'd become a journeyman electrician. I'd worked in the law library. I'd worked maintenance. I had done everything. And I'd completed more than the high point of the guidelines. The guidelines were 16 years at the high end. I had done 17 years at that point.
So I was like, hey, I'm going to put in a petition for clemency. And I didn't think it was going to work because it was one of those times where, yeah, less than a quarter of the, you know, 1% of the population does it. But for me, it was about like standing up and saying, hey, I think I've done like what I could do. I've taken a really bad situation that I created.
I've done the best with it and I'm asking for mercy. So I filled it out. I did it all basically myself, sent it home, had it sent in. And then a few weeks later, I got an email from a reporter. It was like, hey, I'd love to interview you for a story. And I was really suspicious because it just seemed hokey. Like, why would they do that?
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Chapter 7: What is Jesse's current mission after prison?
Her name's Courtney Stewart. She and I started about six months before I got out or seven months before I got out. She had this personal crisis in her life and I was just kind of there for her. And we connected, we started talking and talking and it turned into a romantic relationship.
And she used to joke about that because before that happened, she was like, how do people have relationships in prison? You can't have sex. How
do you know and i was like oh you know and i remember about a month after we started talking every day she was like oh you're right you do know like damn it um but it just it turned into this amazing opportunity and she's still somebody i really care about we broke up in november but um yeah she was one of the the most amazing people in my life and still is um it's one of the people i'm really grateful for
I, uh, I talked to another guy that met his wife in prison and I think they've been married for, I don't know what it was, 10 or 15 years now. Like they were together for a few, for several years before he eventually got out. Uh, yeah, I met my, I met my wife in the halfway house. Okay. Uh, another inmate.
I mean, she was, uh, you know, in the halfway house, you know, with me, you know, she wasn't running the halfway out. Um, Yeah. That's that's yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That didn't work out. Uh, and if she's a reporter, like that's her full-time job.
Yeah. So she's done the print, which is really her passion. She's done TV and now she does, uh, the drive time radio show and runs her podcast. Okay. If you want small town, big crime, it's a great podcast. They're getting ready to come out with a second season.
So, and you started your, so what ha what made you think to start a podcast?
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Chapter 8: How can mentorship help reduce recidivism?
So we had actually, during that six months that we were together while I was still inside, she said, you know, we need a common activity. If we don't have something in common, there's no connection. Like, there's nothing to do. So we recorded a podcast. It was really just us talking on the phone about different issues, doing a little bit of research and kind of diving into it.
And then that didn't do well. It didn't get out. But the people who heard it, especially one of her friends, who's a big marketing person, was like, hey, Jesse, you need to do something with this. People need to hear this. People need to hear this story. So I had always said that when I got out, I was going to go to the top of this mountain, which is really close to me.
I was going to get up there and I was going to eat Chinese food and I was going to laugh and cry and scream and hopefully put all the prison stuff down, all the trauma, all the armor, all the everything, and just leave it there. And so the day that I did that, she was like, Jesse, whatever you do, make sure you record that. Make a video of it.
So I went up there, I spent some time trying to process and then made this video. And by the time I got home, I remember calling Katie and being like, hey, like, how many views is normal? Is this normal? And she was like, no, no. And it blew up and it got more and more views. And all of a sudden people were asking questions and all of a sudden I had followers and I had these interactions.
And it was so meaningful because it gave me a place to vent and a place to like share my experience, but in a way to kind of process it in a healthy way. It also allowed me to connect with people. I've had victims of crime who said, hey, the person who hurt me has never been accountable. You give me hope that they will.
I've had people who are in law enforcement who say, hey, I'm tired of doing my job the way I'm doing it because I just see people cycling in. How can we do this better? I've had people who have family members locked up. I've just made these incredible connections with people.
based around having a platform and it's it's been awesome like i'm grateful for those connections i'm grateful for the opportunity to talk about it and then it turned into you know being able to go on tv and talk as an expert witness on the news and go speak at south by southwest and all these just crazy opportunities that just came out of telling stories because people want to hear stories and you know a lot of times we have those walls up not just keep people in but to keep people out um
Yeah. What do you talk about on your podcast?
So sometimes I'll do interviews when I get a chance. Like a lot of the people, we've done this kind of like, I don't even know what you call it, the prison talk connection. So we came up with this crazy idea, a bunch of us who had met on TikTok, to meet at a farm in Pennsylvania, which sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. But we found a place and we had a sponsor to do it.
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