Chapter 1: Who was Janet Couture and what happened to her?
Hi everyone, I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra, and every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.
From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts.
Our card this week is Janet Couture, the Jack of Diamonds from Connecticut. There is an old saying in law enforcement, a cold case is never really cold. And today's story proves that. Because just last year, there was a new development that closed this unsolved murder case from 1973, proving that it's never too late. And in some cases, the answers might have been in front of you all along.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was around 3 a.m.
Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding Janet's murder?
on Saturday, October 13th, when 21-year-old Janet Couture turned to her sleeping boyfriend on the couch and uttered something pretty terrifying.
Janet had said to him, I think somebody might be in the house.
That's Detective Christina Johnston of the East Hartford Police Department. She spent years poring over the original reports from this case, including the accounts from Janet's boyfriend, Jay Locke. According to those reports, after Janet told him what she'd heard, Jay got up and took a look around.
Now, where she lived was a single building that was comprised of four separate units. All these units were within the building but had their own separate entrances. The front door that leads into the kitchen was unlocked and open, and the window was unsecure.
unsecure and open. But Jay didn't find anyone hiding out when he went through the apartment room by room, making sure to close the open window as he did.
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Chapter 3: How did the investigation into Janet's murder unfold over the years?
The two-bedroom duplex wasn't large, and Janet's roommate was away for the weekend, so he cleared the place pretty quickly.
He said to Janet, I'm going to leave because he had to work in the morning. So she says, OK, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to go to bed because she wasn't feeling good that day. She was sick. And then she let him out. He said she locked the door. That was about approximately 3 o'clock in the morning, between 3 and 3.10.
Jay made sure the front door was locked as he left, leaving Janet to sleep in the still house in, I kid you not, Mayberry Village. But it was in these quiet moments that something happened.
Chapter 4: What new evidence emerged in the Janet Couture case in 2021?
Around 8 a.m., Janet's next door neighbor, Paul Taylor, came out to warm up his car and he noticed that one of Janet's windows was wide open and the screen had been yanked out and was leaning against the building. Unbeknownst to him, this is the same exact window that Jay had secured just hours earlier.
But still, this was concerning enough of a sight to Paul that he called out to Janet, but she didn't respond.
So when the neighbor walked into the front door, which leads into the kitchen, he observed a telephone on the wall. The receiver had been removed and put into a drawer.
Whether it was the sight of this receiver still connected to the wall mount, half peeking out of a drawer, or something else, Paul got the sense that he had to find Janet. Something was off, and he knew he was right when he finally made it into Janet's upstairs bedroom. Janet was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Paul rushed out and called the police from his place next door, and within a few hours, the place was an active crime scene, crawling with police and techs and detectives, trying to make sense of what they were looking at, starting with that phone in the drawer.
That particular drawer was where she kept all the silverware, and there were some knives in there as well.
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Chapter 5: How did DNA technology play a role in solving the case?
They proceeded into the living room, which was fairly neat. There was no signs of a struggle. They then walked upstairs to the second floor. They noticed that there was two bedrooms. One bedroom was undisturbed, and then the other bedroom, which was Janet's bedroom, they noticed her on the floor. She was lying on her side closest to the wall in a night table.
They observed that there was a knife still in her chest. She was not wearing any clothes, and her nightgown was in close proximity to her.
There was also an unraveled wire hanger on top of the dresser. And judging by all of the marks that they saw on her body, in addition to the stab wound and the bloodstains on the mattress and the wall, it seemed like Janet had been beaten with the hanger and stabbed with the knife while she was on the bed.
Chapter 6: Who is George Legere and what is his connection to the crime?
And then from there, she had somehow moved or been moved to the floor where they found her. She didn't stand much of a chance fighting back at whoever was torturing her because her face had been covered by a pillowcase, secured with ripped up pieces of her green bedsheet so she couldn't see. And then more of that bedsheet was later found in her mouth, gagging her.
Her hands were also tied behind her back with a telephone cord, though worth noting, it wasn't the cord from the phone in the drawer downstairs. But detectives quickly surmised that the knife that was used had likely come from that drawer, or if not that drawer, somewhere within Janet's own home.
Oftentimes when a killer doesn't bring their own weapon, it's an indication that the murder was not the motive. Usually you'll see them pull a weapon from the house in a case of a burglary gone wrong, where they get surprised thinking that no one was home, and then it turns into a robbery and a homicide. But that's not what they thought this was. Nothing looked ransacked.
Valuable items like money and jewelry, even a safety deposit box, were all untouched.
Chapter 7: What led to George Legere's arrest in 2025?
The motive wasn't robbery. It most likely was something else. They weren't there to steal anything of hers for monetary purposes.
That didn't necessarily mean that they didn't take anything, though. When detectives began asking questions to the growing crowd of neighbors and looky-loos gathering outside, a man named Kenneth approached them holding something in his hands, a purse that he had found outside earlier that morning.
He was returning home from work after working the midnight shift and there was a purse lying on the ground in front of his front door. He picked up the purse and brought it inside. He spoke with his wife thinking that it was one of their kids' play purses and she said, no, that is not ours.
They then opened the purse and dumped out the contents and located a birth control pack that had Janet's name on it.
What seemed to be missing from the purse was Janet's wallet.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of Janet's case for other unsolved crimes?
And upon closer inspection, they realized that wasn't in the house either. And to this day, Janet's wallet has never been recovered. So did the killer take money from her wallet? Was the wallet a trophy? Is it possible Janet herself lost her bag earlier in the day?
If so, she never mentioned it to another neighbor who told police that he'd been over hanging out with Janet and her boyfriend Jay until like 10.30 the night before. And this is when police learned that she had a boyfriend. A boyfriend who, based on everything they knew at the time, seemed like the last one to be with their victim before she was murdered.
But those suspicious high eyebrows lowered pretty quickly when they actually connected with Jay. He was instantly cooperative and took and passed a polygraph, so police believed that he was being truthful about his month-long relationship with Janet. And, most importantly, about his last night with her. How she woke him up because she heard a strange noise.
How he searched the place and closed the window, but after not finding anything, decided to go home. A decision that I am sure aided him for years to come. Now, out of all the other neighbors that they spoke to, no one else heard the noise that woke Janet up at 3 a.m. And there were no reports of odd cars or strange men lurking around the building at that time.
But what if that's because Janet's killer wasn't a stranger? Because interestingly, in the same breath that neighbors would say they didn't hear or see anything, many of them also told police about one man in particular that they were suspicious of. Someone who just so happened to be friends with Janet's neighbor.
911, where is the emergency?
It's the middle of the night in a small town on the Jersey Shore. Someone reports an abandoned car on a bridge. A search gets underway for the missing driver, 19-year-old Sarah Stern.
Is it a missing person? Is it a suicide? At this point, nobody knows.
Old friendships, buried cash, and a sinister plot that was once pitched as a movie plays out in real life. I'm Juju Chang from 2020 and ABC Audio. Listen now to Bridge of Lies, wherever you get your podcasts.
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