Serialously with Annie Elise
212: Was it the Husband? | The Shocking Death of Karen Swift
Mon, 11 Nov 2024
44-year-old Karen Swift mysteriously vanished in the early morning hours of October 30th, 2011 after arriving home from a Halloween party in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Karen’s body was discovered about six weeks after she vanished in a cemetery about two miles away from her home. For years, the community was stunned as to what really happened to Karen Swift as the investigation went cold. But then there was an unexpected break in the case… Audible Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit https://www.audible.com/serialously Omaha Steaks Go to https://www.OmahaSteaks.com to get 50% off sitewide on unforgettable gifts and more. And use Promo Code AE at checkout for an extra $30 off. Thanks to our advertiser, Omaha Steaks! Athena Club Go to https://www.athenaclub.com with promo code AE for 30% off! SimpliSafe This week only, get 60% off any new system with a select professional monitoring plan—this is their best offer of the year! Head to https://www.SimpliSafe.com/serialously Quince Head to https://www.Quince.com/ae for free shipping and 365-day returns Shop the Merch: www.annieelise.com Follow the podcast on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@serialouslypodcast Follow the podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/serialouslypod/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/annieelise All Social Media Links: https://www.flowcode.com/page/annieelise_ SERIALously FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/SERIALouslyAnnieElise/ About Me: https://annieelise.com/ For Business Inquiries: [email protected] Sources: ABC 24 Law and Crime Court TV Action News 5 WBBJTV Audio Sources: ABC 24 Law and Crime
Chapter 1: What happened to Karen Swift?
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Hey, true crime besties. Welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly.
Hey everybody, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly with me, Annie Elise. Hope you are ready to start your week with some true crime because today's case is definitely a wild one. Some of the clips that I will be playing for you also are unnerving, bizarre, kind of... scary, I guess would be a good word to describe it.
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Chapter 2: Who were the key people in Karen's life?
But it's one of these cases that it's kind of been going pretty viral recently. I've been seeing it all over my socials. I'm sure you guys have seen it at one point or another on yours as well. But the more that I've been diving into it and researching it, I'm just left kind of being like, I need to talk to somebody about it.
I need to share my thoughts about this case and the details about this case. So why not jump on the mic and talk with all of you about it? So if you haven't guessed by now, or if you haven't seen it on your socials and you are like, Annie, I have absolutely no idea where you're going with this. What are you even talking about? It's the story of Karen Swift.
Karen was one of those people who gave to everyone around her more than she got. She was completely devoted to her four children. She was also one of those people who always wanted to make sure that everyone around her was comfortable and having a good time. She put everybody ahead of herself.
And she also loved to let loose as well, but only if she wasn't going too far and maybe crossing a boundary for somebody else. But if you were hanging out with her, Karen was the kind of person who would regularly check in with you to make sure that you were the one having a good time. Because truly, she wasn't having fun unless everybody else was.
In 2011, Karen had been married to her husband, David, for 22 years. Their relationship wasn't without its rough spots, though. In 1999, about 10 years into their marriage, they went through a temporary separation, but they ended up getting back together. By 2011, they lived in Dyersburg, Tennessee, and they had a pretty decent social circle as well.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances of Karen's disappearance?
It was kind of like your typical suburban family. They had a good group of friends, they were friendly with their neighbors, and things seemed to be going well for them. And on the night of Saturday, October 29th, Karen went out to a Halloween party.
David didn't join her, but Karen decided to invite her friends Bill and Kathy with her instead, and it was going to be a fun night out like she did so often. Now, Karen was very close to Bill and Kathy Bona. She and the Bonas had only known each other for about a year and a half since early 2010, but she hung out with them all the time.
It also wasn't unusual for her to invite them to go to a party with her. I mean, definitely not at all. Except there had been a little bit of tension between the couples. See, Bill and Kathy were apparently pretty easygoing. They liked throwing parties, they liked going to bars and concerts, really drinking, letting loose. But David, Karen's husband, didn't approve of that sort of thing.
He was worried that they were a bad influence on Karen, encouraging her to make decisions that weren't good for her in the long term. Now, as for Bill and Kathy, they saw David as pretty uptight. They knew that he didn't approve of their lifestyle, and they thought that he just needed to loosen up and leave them and Karen alone. Like, let us all go out. Let us all have a good time.
Why are you so uptight? Now, I'm going to assume that Karen was siding with Bill and Kathy on all of this, since she kept seeing them and also invited them out to that party that night. And from the sounds of things, Karen was wanting to let loose again at this party.
So much so that she fully expected not to go home, and she had already gotten permission from Bill and Kathy to sleep over at their place instead. Except things didn't go according to the plan. In fact, sometime after midnight, meaning it's now October 30th, Karen got a phone call from her daughter Ashley, who was also spending the night out with a friend. But Ashley was now feeling homesick.
She wanted her mom, Karen, to come and get her. And the thing about being a mom, I can tell you from a firsthand experience, because I'm a mom of two, it's that you don't always get guaranteed breaks, no matter what. Even if you think you're clocking out for the night, you're going out, you're having a good time with your friends, it's never guaranteed.
Something may happen, something may come up, you're always on duty. And even though Karen just wanted to go out and have fun that night, she of course couldn't tell her daughter no. She felt bad. Being a mother was her number one priority. She also hadn't had anything to drink, so she was okay to drive. So she left the party, and she went and picked up her daughter Ashley.
Karen got home with Ashley around 2 a.m. on October 30th. Now, I want to jump ahead to the next morning because her husband David woke up around 10 a.m., and when he got up, David noticed that Karen wasn't anywhere in the house. She wasn't in bed. She also wasn't with the kids. Her car was gone, but where could she have gone since 2 in the morning?
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Chapter 4: What role did David play in Karen's life?
Bill and Kathy had also already noticed that she wasn't around. When Karen had left the party the night before, she promised that she was going to text them first thing in the morning. However, they never heard from her since she had left, and she also wasn't replying when they tried calling her and texting her either, so they had called and filed a missing persons report on her as well.
So right away, the police took Karen's disappearance very seriously, and since they thought that she might have been abducted, they had their pick of suspects to choose from. especially once they realized that Karen had actually filed for a divorce from David just three weeks earlier.
Now, as if that timing wasn't suspicious enough, the circumstances around how Karen made that filing were pretty alarming on their own. She couldn't afford a lawyer to draw up the paperwork for her, So she borrowed $2,000 from her good friends. Her good friends, Bill and Kathy. This was so that she could cover the fees and filing. They also gave her a second phone.
I guess this was so that she could talk to the lawyer without her husband David realizing, maybe trying to go under the radar. And apparently after she filed, she did tell them that she was afraid to be home the day that David got the paperwork. I guess she already did see him as somebody with a lot of potential to be violent when he was angry.
So Kathy and Bill invited her on a trip out of town that day. Stay away, keep safe, don't be there when he gets the paperwork, like let him cool down after he receives it. And in fact, Karen spent a week on vacation with Bill and Kathy and with her daughters. But at the end of that week, on October 17th, she and the girls went back home.
Karen was still living with David, and she was in that house that they shared two weeks later on the night that she went missing. So basically, right off of the bat, the police knew that David had a motive to possibly hurt his wife, right? She was afraid of him.
She was going to all of these lengths to hide the fact that she was leaving until she was, you know, right then ready to file the paperwork. And he had access to her after she got back home a few hours after midnight on October 30th. It's the scenario that made the most sense, right?
We also know from cell phone pings that Karen's phone left her house at 4.38 that morning, the same day that she disappeared. Now that was two and a half hours after she and her daughter got home. It was way too late for her to be going back to that party. She wasn't going to be meeting anyone at that time, so why did she leave at 4.38 in the morning? It seemed like there were three possibilities.
One...
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Chapter 5: Did David have a motive to harm Karen?
I had to have knee surgery.
I had to have a total quadricep patella tendon rupture. It was at my daughter's soccer game. I had to be taken by ambulance and had to have surgery the next morning. About a week ago, he's been giving me a lot of problems. I haven't been able to stay here in a couple with another specialist to get a second opinion but
This is something I've talked about before. A lot of the time when someone is planning on lying during an interrogation, they will just talk and talk without stopping. And I promise that that clip that I just showed you was from the very start of the session. He hadn't been read his Miranda rights, not that he had any intention of remaining silent, obviously.
but he was just talking and talking and talking. But it kind of comes across right from the get-go like he was almost trying to take control of the questioning. You know, signal that he was the one who was going to be setting the agenda and talking about what he wanted to talk about.
In fact, before the interrogation even begun, again, still before he was ever even read his Miranda rights, David started laying the groundwork to point the finger at two of his least favorite people in the entire world, Bill and Kathy.
Right.
Any other ones that you know of?
I'd suspected because she'd been known in the past to have.
About a year and a half ago, she had one.
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Chapter 6: What were the police's suspicions about David?
He spent the entire time just rambling about what terrible people Bill and Kathy were, how Karen had been out of control lately, and basically how all of her friends were apparently just terrible influences on her life.
And she...
Her and Karen became really close friends. Our daughters went there and danced and then she was over there all the time. Karen started sneaking out of the house and she would be with Kathy and Bill. I know even this past summer, Go party and find them naked in the hot tub in the backyard. I found Karen naked in bed with Kathy one night.
And so Robin said, I'm going to go check on Karen.
We all went in there and they had to get her dressed.
Well, Robin, Alfred told me later that she prevented Bill from raping Kathy. He said he was trying to take advantage of her. He said she's the one that put the towels on her and everything. After that all happened, I tried to pull Karen out of the situation. I said, listen, it's not good to be over there. There were school teachers that were over there that was involved, Brian and Shannon Lee.
home at night and I'd say, I need to go check on your mom because there'd be times that somebody would have to drive Karen home.
Or I'd have to go get her and drive her home and they'd call me.
And so I was always concerned and worried about her. And so whenever the night that she went to the country club with Kathy and Bill, or she told me just Kathy, but I found out later that Bill went too. But she promised me she'd never go get in the hot tub again. That was a bad judgment. I even confronted Kathy about it. And Kathy said, oh, I won't go that way.
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Chapter 7: What evidence was found related to Karen's case?
I went to Bill and Kathy in their backyard and went around and I heard people in the hot tub and everything and there's Brian and Shannon Lee. It looked like they were engaged in sexual activity or they were totally naked and the deal was getting out of the hot tub. But I heard Shannon say, where did Karen go? And I thought, oh my God, you know, she promised she'd never do this again.
And so I just went and went inside the door. Bill had already gone inside. I said, Bill, we're inside this door now. I said, Bill, where's Karen? It's 1.30 in the morning. I'm worried about Karen. Oh, she's upstairs talking to Kathy. I just went on upstairs and I stood there in the doorway and I heard Karen. I could see Karen was in the bed here and Kathy was over here.
And, you know, they were talking and I heard Kathy say, well, I think that's Bill coming up here or something back and Karen said, oh, well, if he wants to go to bed, send her back in bed or something, he can kick me out or whatever. So I finally said, Karen, I said, what are you doing? I said, it's 1.30 in the morning. I'm worried about you. And she said, oh, she's going home.
I'll be there in a little bit. I said, why are you in bed with Kathy? I said, what's going on? I said, have you been in the hot tub? She said, no. And then she got upset and started cussing. And so I said, well, get up. I need to talk to you. I need to make sure you're okay. And she said, um, I said, I'll be home in a little bit. I'm tired of you always checking on me all the time.
And there's just a lot of stuff that's been going on that
What was her attitude?
Oh, no, not that way.
It was by phone.
It was just bad judgment. You didn't say anything to her that night? Oh, yeah. She wouldn't say nothing. She was just over there, but they were both drunk and drinking and that's what always happens over there is to the point of all the partying. It's probably a month and a half ago, two months, somewhere in there. Karen was sneaking out of the house again, which I'm upstairs.
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Chapter 8: What were the outcomes of David's interrogations?
And she, you know, they just shunned her.
Now that clip had some pretty intense allegations in it. And they weren't completely untrue. I'm not saying that everything that David said was credible, not at all. But there was a grain of something real there.
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I know that at least one time, possibly more than once, Karen did go over to Kathy and Bill's place, and they all decided to get into the hot tub together. And it wasn't an issue that Karen hadn't packed a swimsuit because Bill and Kathy just had the idea that they could all get in this hot tub naked together.
Now, in fairness, apparently this was something that they did with a lot of their friends. Sometimes they had people over or one or more of them didn't have anything to wear to go swimming in, so they would just kind of strip down to their bra and underwear and get in or get in completely naked, one of the two.
One friend even told the police that they were at a party once and Karen was in the hot tub in her bra and underwear. And I guess she was feeling pretty good because she ended up kind of just like whipping her bra off, sort of tossing it away while this friend watched, just going completely topless, which fine, your choice, your prerogative, do you?
And apparently this wasn't something that Bill or Kathy or any of the others saw as particularly sexual or inappropriate, but everybody has their own personal opinions on that, right? I mean, I don't know, thinking for yourself, if there's a short list of people who you would be willing to skinny dip with or if you're more you know, absolutely not, never in a million years.
I think that, for me personally, I probably would not skinny dip with somebody who was not my husband, that's just my personal preference, but again, everybody's different. Anyway, at least one time while Karen was at Bill and Kathy's place, she did suddenly start feeling dizzy and woozy.
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