Sunflower | Chapter 2
2024-06-21 00:33:57
In the early morning hours of November 2, 2007, Justin Gaines walked out of a popular nightclub on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia and was never seen again. The investigation into Gaines' disappearance quickly went cold and remained so until 2015, when a man confessed to taking part in his murder. Though this detailed confession described what happened to Justin Gaines, who was involved, and where his body was placed, no arrest has ever been made. Host Sean Kipe digs into this story to find out what really happened to Justin Gaines and tries to make sense of the still ongoing investigation. But as Sean gets deeper, he finds himself in an underworld of drugs, money, and murder.
This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
My name is Bob Pruldough, and I was a private investigator. I'm now retired. That day I met with the Wilsons was November the 11th.
Justin had been missing since the night of November 1, so I was 11 days into this incident before I knew anything about it. They told me that Justin was not the type child of their one. of seven children. they had to go without making contact with him, frequently by telephone or in person. The Wilsons were not financially well off, and I thought I could find Justin within a week.
He seemed to be very, very popular from what they were telling me. Had a lot of, quote, friends. And I have found young people like that, particularly teenagers who have run away from home, and I would find them at other teenagers' home, hiding out or whatever, you know, for whatever reason. This could have well been another one of those. So I took the case pro bono.
Bob Pruldough decided to take on Justin Gaines's case 16 years ago. He thought that Justin would turn up within a week and he'd move on to the next case, as it happened many times before, with teenagers running away from home. But that was before Bob knew how twisted this case would become, how deep he would have to go to find answers, or how dangerous his investigation could be. The case of Justin Gaines would torment him for nearly two decades. To this day, he's never charged Erica or Stephen Wilson a penny, all because he made a promise to them to never give up.
From Waveland, I'm Sean Kite, and this is Drowning Creek.
I grew up in Ohio, outside of the Cleveland area.
Met my current husband in 1994.
. We each had three boys. So when we got married, our boys were one, one, two, three, four, and six. It was definitely an experience. But in a big family, it makes Christmas fun, holidays, fun, vacation, fun.
We decided to pack up our children from there and move to Georgia for better schools and nicer weather and to get away from ex-husband.
Erica Wilson had left her first husband and the biological father to her three sons, Justin, Joseph, and Jordan.
Justin's father, yeah, he was really abusive and a drinker. Just leaving that behind and, you know, not having to worry about that stress and focus on the kids, their education. Actually, moving to Georgia was probably a blessing.
Justin was five years old when Erica and Stephen Wilson married, and the large, blended family soon left the cold Ohio winters behind and relocated to Georgia. With their six boys and a daughter soon to follow, they didn't have a lot of money left over, but they always made it work and made the best of it.
Camping was great. with a big family. We usually would go out to Myrtle Beach. They have these like resort campgrounds. So when the kids got older, it was nice to go there, because, you know, it was a huge thing.
They can meet other people.
Erica encouraged Justin to meet new people because when he was younger, he was a bit introverted.
He was a really good kid. I mean, he was a boy, but I mean, he was good. He was honest. He was, you know, helpful. If he did make a mistake, he would own up to it.
When he was young, he was a totally different kid. I mean, kids made fun of him. Up until sixth grade, he was very heavy set. Every year he'd go to play football. This one kid would be like, hey, Justin gains more pounds.
And I mean, he used to come home and cry and be like, Mom, no one wanted to be my partner again.
Her husband, Steven, gave advice that seemed to be life changing for young Justin.
My husband said, you know what, Justin, you got to love you. If you want people, you got to love yourself first. When you love yourself, you know, it's going to all click. And I don't know if he took it to heart, because by seventh grade, he was totally different. Most outgoing person, never shy.
It was just a total change. He never worried about people, you know, making fun of him. He started truly loving himself fully.
He also started working out like crazy. Lifting weights was the beginning of phase two of Justin's life. The good phase.
So he lost all this weight. He went from being the kid that was poor me, no one wants to be my partner to everyone wants to be my partner. Lifting weights, eating tuna out of the can and eating all my peanut butter off the spoon and leaving the spoons all over to get his protein in.
Justin bulked up to nearly 230 pounds of muscle by the time he turned 18.
. His friends used to joke with him that he looked like Vin Diesel, with his new physique and a buzzed haircut. The once portly introverted kid that got pushed around in middle school hallways was now good looking, popular and certainly able to defend himself if needed. As close friend Katie Coon tells me, he was well liked and always fun to be around.
He was always the character at the party. Like he was the guy putting on a show or or just being the life of the party.
Katie was very close to Justin. They hung out all the time. Justin's friends initially thought he must be with her when they couldn't reach him on the phone after he went missing.
I get a call, a three-way call asking, have I seen Justin?
And I was like, no, what do you mean? And they're like, no, no, no, seriously.
And they said, well, we've called around to everybody who he might be with and nobody has seen him.
This wasn't like him. And Katie, being so close to Justin and his family, offered to make the dreadful call to his mother expressing their concern.
And I said, well, I will call Erica. I didn't want to put that on them. I said, I'll call her. So I called Erica. And that was an extremely tough phone call to make.
I'd say I probably blacked out because I don't remember the actual conversation, but the emotions were so strong, so much crying, so much realization that she has to file a missing persons report for her son. I sat there on the stairs at my grandmother's house, which is where I was at the time, just bawling my eyes out. I couldn't believe that we were having to start this process of having a friend who was missing.
Volunteers pulled and poked through debris during day two of searching for 18-year-old Justin Gaines. After talking with his family and friends, they learned Gaines had a drinking problem. That's why they believe he may have died of alcohol poisoning. The first day of searching for Justin was, as one would expect, a very difficult one. Extremely difficult for all involved.
Most of the searchers were just out of high school and had never experienced anything like this before. Everyone was filled with a wide range of emotions.
We start trying to piece everything together, like it's a puzzle, talking to all of our friends. Where is he? What was he doing? Who was he with? Was it foul play?
Were we looking for a person that was still alive? Were we looking for a person that wasn't alive? It was a terrible day.
That feeling of having to walk through the woods in a line of people looking for what could possibly be your deceased friend is a feeling I never want anybody to feel.
I've heard similar statements, like those that Katie Kuhn shared from pretty much everyone I've talked to so far, regarding how Justin was just a good guy, who was liked by everyone. The life of the party. They chose to focus only on the good qualities he possessed, because that's how they wanted to remember him. But if that's true, then who would want to hurt Justin and why? Could this have been a completely random act of violence?
And if so, why was Justin, of all people, targeted? There just has to be more to the story.
As my investigation unfolds, I'm digging deeper into Justin Gaines's background, trying to find any reason someone would have to hurt or kill him. I already knew that he was arrested for underage drinking, but that's not connected to his disappearance. That's what investigators told me. I did find something interesting while talking to his close group of high school friends. Here's Katie again.
He was definitely a little bit of a bad guy. A little bit of a troublemaker, but not, I would say, not getting in trouble. He just kind of pushed the boundaries a little bit on sneaking out and partying and stuff like that.
He pushed the boundaries. This rung a bell as soon as Katie said it, because I'd heard it before. Mike and Patrick Heiser both told me on separate occasions that Justin always seemed to want to push things a step further, and that usually alcohol was involved. Somewhere along the way, between graduating high school and starting college, it had gone from fun times, just hanging out and partying to not fun at all.
Whenever we're being rambunctious, he was always the one that wanted to take it to whatever the next level was, and the drinking progressively got more and more extreme.
Justin worked at Quick Trip. Quick Trip has these big 44-ounce cups and basically fill it up with straight vodka and drink straight from that, just straight vodka. And I was like, dude, I don't think you need to get that drunk. Like, that's to another level.
He wasn't the same person that I knew who was this very balanced, focused man, but I hadn't seen him like that before. to that level. He just didn't feel like Justin.
I think he was losing it because he was at a point where he was so independent, because he's living out on his own. He's got nobody telling him what to do, what not to do. He was just doing whatever he wanted.
Some of Justin's friends had started pulling away from him, not because they didn't like him anymore, but because, around the time he started college, he began to change and was hanging out with new people, some of whom they didn't really care for.
I remember just like the feeling, like. I couldn't tell you what any of them looked like, or names or anything like that, but I do remember the feeling of there's some people that he was hanging out with, that were unsavory characters that didn't have his best interest at heart and was putting him in situations that maybe we didn't care for. And I do remember us like telling him like, hey, we aren't a big fan of these people.
But he was just like, I mean, he saw. also. he saw everybody as just a good person. And like, if they're fun to hang out with, then they must be fine. Right.
And he was all about the fun, whether it was good or bad.
Bob Bulnow heard the same thing from several of Justin's friends early in his investigation.
They said that he had really changed recently, that his personality had changed, that he had befriended some people that they didn't like, that were into drugs. They didn't run with that crowd, so they would stop associating with and hadn't stopped associating with Justin other than just call him on the phone or how you doing.
Justin began engaging in vandalism and petty theft, too, as Mike Heiser tells me.
Oh, car hopping. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was. Yeah, there's, there's legitimacy to that story.
Car hopping, of course, is walking from car to car and checking the door handle to see if it's unlocked. If it's locked, you move on to the next. If it's not, you see what's worth taking inside and sell it later.
I saw a bunch of the stuff that he gained, I heard stories, there was one in particular, where he had gone into a unlocked police car that was in the same neighborhood that I lived in. And within that police car, there was a bulletproof vest and a pistol. And he actually, you know, the story that I heard, I never validated it or anything like that, but the story that I heard is he took the pistol and he went and threw it down a sewer drain. I was like, that's getting a little crazy, man. Um, probably settle down a bit.
Justin was never caught or arrested for it. And this didn't come out until after he went missing. Patrick Heiser tells me it even went further than car hopping, though.
I know of things that they did that I would never do in a million years. I know of things that, you know, Justin got into, like throwing rocks through people's window to two o'clock in the morning, like jumping cars. like, you know, those things. The more you get to know, it chisels away at your moral foundation. Car hopping suddenly makes that jump where there's a reality behind that.
Like, OK, well, I've already broken the law once. Nothing's happened and it was fun and I need money. That's a huge driver like that makes a lot of sense to me. If he really did want to live up to the life that he was, that he wanted to live, he really wanted to live up to the like, OK, I have this prestige that I have. At school, I have this prestige of how I look.
I need money to go along with it.
A lot of the information I just shared about Justin was collected over the first couple of months or so after his disappearance. Initially, Erica Wilson said that police seemed to not really take this case very seriously and would share very little information they had learned with her. Or Bob Polno.
The Gwinnett County Police Department would not give me, I mean,
they wouldn't give me anything for the longest time.
They wouldn't even work with our private investigator. They were just very guarded and they didn't want to tell you anything. I mean, I found out that Justin's original file, the first detective they put it with, was a pregnant woman who was just having a baby. So she went and had a baby and his whole file's missing. Well, they finally find it and, you know, a desk, you know, I mean, so things aren't getting worked on.
There's no national protocol for law enforcement to search for missing adults. Okay, bottom line. And I understand that. There are so many people missing every year. Many of them are found alive.
Law enforcement can't tap their resources on all of these missing adult cases and they would just be overwhelmed with it. Now, they search for missing children actively and for obvious reasons, but not adults. And Justin was an adult at age 18.. So Gwinnett County Police, who this missing person report was filed with initially, did not actively, at least at that point, search. A detective was assigned to it, but had not, to my knowledge, worked it.
Justin was seemingly just eight months too old to be considered important enough to search for initially by police. And while I do understand high caseloads, limited resources and other obstacles they face in cases like these, try telling that to his parents.
So I had the Wilsons asking me questions, which Gwinnett Police obviously knew the answer to, but they wouldn't or couldn't communicate what they had to the Wilsons. Even the generalization of the cases. So I began receiving phone calls by the scores once it hit the news media.
Bob suddenly found himself at the center of the investigation. He quickly became the person to go to if you had information about Justin Gaines, not the police department. And many of the people he was speaking to had one discouraging trait in common. No one was listening to them.
Started to get these calls, that they had called 10 days, two weeks, three weeks, what before, and to the police department, and nobody would call them back. And they had information about the case. And so I began working those leads. I wound up calling the detective and he would not communicate any of this to me, because now I know he wasn't working the case.
I'm not an officer of the law, so they can't reveal their confidential information. And I understand that. But at the same time, we're working the same issue. I think it's important to give them information. And at times I need the feedback in order to give more information that I'm learning, that parallels what they're doing.
And that wasn't happening.
Bob makes a good point. Typically, police aren't going to share information on an open, active case with a private citizen, even a private detective. That's just common sense. But I can't help feeling that mistakes were made early in the investigation. And though Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway eventually did convince all entities to work together, I want to know why this case wasn't investigated more seriously from the start.
Why the owner of every number Justin called and texted that night wasn't questioned. And why these phone numbers weren't subpoenaed to see if any of those people were in the vicinity of Wild Bill's around the time he went missing. And why Bob Polno, a private citizen working for free, was able to find witnesses and get what is potentially the most important lead in this entire case, Justin seen with the blonde woman in the black car. One piece of information investigators did obtain from Justin's phone, however, was its location data. The last location ping from his phone was approximately four miles away from Wild Bill's, in the opposite direction of Justin's house.
After this ping, the phone went dark and all calls to his phone from that point went straight to voicemail.
Using eyewitness accounts of Justin at the club and his phone data, Bob Polno and the Gwinnett County police, who were eventually working together and sharing information, tried to reconstruct Justin's movements that night up to the point at which he vanished. Erica told me that Justin spent about an hour and a half at home before his friend and college roommate Chris and his girlfriend Amanda picked him up to make their way to Wild Bill's. He had grabbed some cash and one of his fake cash was in his car. but left his wallet behind in his old bedroom. They left sometime between 630 and 7 p.m.
Then the three headed to Quick Trip to get chasers for their vodka. At least that's what was initially heard from Chris when he was interviewed. But Bob dug deeper into this statement himself and found that it wasn't the case at all.
The videotapes that I secured from the management at Quick Trip. don't show them going there.
An employee that worked there during that time tells me that they never came in.
And he would have known, because Justin worked there previously, correct?
Correct. They knew him. But he didn't come in that day.
Justin used to work at that Quick Trip near his parents' house and visited frequently. He knew pretty much everyone that worked there, including the person on the register the night of November 1st. The fact that no one saw Justin, Chris, or Amanda that night, and that they weren't seen on surveillance footage, appears to punch a hole in that part of the story. So why would Chris say that they went there? Were they somehow just not seen by anyone, or is someone lying?
Then Chris tells me that they went from there to the pool room, which is a walking distance from Wild Bill's. And they don't have a surveillance camera outside the pool hall. I don't even know if it's still there. But they sat outside in Amanda's sister's car, with Chris and Justin in the backseat and drank. A friend of Justin met them over there, and his name is Clint, and drank a little while before they all went to the club.
And this is the group pre-gaming, as I talked about previously. But when Erica told me this, she didn't mention, or didn't know, about Justin meeting up with a person named Clint, or anyone else for that matter. It feels like something's missing here.
Now, we know that Justin didn't get in that club until 20 minutes till midnight. The security camera video shows an earlier time, but it was one hour off. 11.30 at night, 11.40, when he arrives, what happened between 6.30, we'll say, 7 o'clock, okay, and three or four hours later? What happened in there?
What really transpired in the four-plus hours between the time Justin left his parents' house and the time he arrived at Wild Bill's? Did they really drink in the pool hall parking lot for that long? If so, it's unlikely they would have even made it to the club. Or could they have left the pool hall and gone somewhere else before going to Wild Bill's? Investigators learned Justin had an altercation with someone on the dance floor.
I also know he was drinking and exited the club around 1 a.
m. and started calling for a ride after asking several people inside if they could take him home. Then, he's seen around 2 a.m. by eyewitness James Irving. Irving said Justin was getting into a car with a blonde woman in a black dress.
Irving said he spoke to Justin briefly but didn't actually see them leave. Irving did, however, give a pretty detailed description of his encounter with Justin. He was decidedly credible because he was also able to give a description of several other occupants in the car, and he knew Justin. Irving also stated he had recognized the blonde woman from inside the club earlier that night. Unfortunately, I'm unable to speak with him because he passed away some time ago.
But fortunately, he wasn't the only one who saw the woman in the black dress.
To me, one of the most important aspects of this investigation so far is the identity of the blonde woman in the black dress. She's been mentioned a lot, and that's because she's one of the last people to have been witnessed with Justin. shortly before he disappeared. Justin was seen inside the club and getting into a car later that night with her and two other people who've yet to be identified. This woman, whoever she is, may hold the key to the black dress.
Knowing what happened to Justin.
Bob met a woman who claimed she was seated at a table next to Justin. Having no knowledge of James Irving's statements, the woman gave Bob information about what she remembered seeing, including the woman in black.
I managed to track down this woman named Susan and see if she even remembered making these statements at all.
Surprisingly, Susan remembered quite a bit about her short encounter with Justin that night.
Susan recounted everything she could remember about who was sitting at the table with Justin.
Bob had actually mentioned an Asian guy to me as well. when we spoke. He told me the man escorted the mystery blonde woman into the club but seemed to not know much more about him.
I have not identified the Asian male that escorted the blonde girl into the club. I don't know how he fits into this other than the girl paid for him and there's no personal relationship. He may have been someone, I guess, just to look after her, but he was not with her. apparently there to party. He followed her into the club and he went with her.
I asked Susan if anything seemed to be off with Justin that night, other than him being under the influence of alcohol.
Everything seemed fine. They were going over to Barnacles. It was right across the street almost.
I know he was drinking and he was underage. I told him, I said, you shouldn't be drinking and being underage. Who are you with? He goes, I'm going to be with some friends. I said, well, you need to be safe.
He goes, well, my mom brought me up here. At least I think that's what he said. He said, my mom brought me up here and I'll be getting a ride home. And I said, well, be safe. And that's the last time I talked to him.
Bob learned another critical piece of information, thanks to the surveillance video from the club.
I was able to find a video of this blonde girl by watching the entire video many times and deleting, in my mind, the blonde females who were present in the club that didn't match the description. And I do know that the blonde girl has now been identified by a witness who's known her all her life. as Heather. I'll keep her last name confidential.
until I speak with her, that is, if she'll talk. But now the woman in the black dress has a name, Heather. She has a fairly defining trait. I'm told that on both shoulders, she has a tattoo of what appears to be a single sunflower. Could Heather know what happened to Justin Gaines that night?
When I started out in this case, Bob Pulno, who probably knows more information about Justin's disappearance than anyone else, was initially hesitant to speak with me. I can't say I blame him. He had no idea who I was. But at the urging of the lead investigator on the case and Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman, he did, of course, begin to share information with me, as you've heard. As he got more comfortable with me and we began to develop a sense of trust with each other, he began to tell me more.
Things I couldn't learn any other way, because they were kept out of the media. Until now. I knew that an anonymous caller gave a tip shortly after Justin's disappearance, but I had no idea what the information given was or its relevance. Police have desperately tried to find out who the caller was for years, even going to the media to ask the person to reach back out to law enforcement. Bob Pulno shared this lead with me, and, if true, it changes everything.
in the search for Justin. This anonymous phone call came in to Texas AccuSearch. They had set up an anonymous tip line, published them on billboards around Atlanta, and it was all over the news. This caller, I believe, was very important. I tried my best to identify this lady, even allured to her call in what ways that I could, and that were permissible by Gwinnett Police at the time, to release to the Gwinnett Daily Post newspaper front page, please come forward.
We want to talk with you again, and never did call.
What you're about to hear has never been shared publicly before now.
Good afternoon, Texas AccuSearch. This is Sheila. Hi, yes. Is this the anonymous line? I can give you some information?
Yes, ma'am.
Um, okay, this is just all I know. I'm letting somebody know, because this could be life or death for this boy.
Justin owed a guy named Chino a lot of money.
He owed a good bit of different people the money about drugs.
Drowning Creek is an original production of Waveland. I wrote and created the series and the original score. Executive producer is Jason Hoke. Associate producer is Leo Culp. Sound engineering by Shane Freeman.
Special thanks to Erica Wilson and her family. If you have any leads on this case, please contact me at info at seankype.com. And if you love the series, please leave a review and tell your friends. Follow Waveland on Instagram, at Waveland Media, for more on this series and upcoming new shows. And you can also find me on social media at seankypeofficial or at seankype.com.
As always, thanks for listening.
you.
v1.0.0.241122-8_os