Hi, well, for those of you who don't know me,
I'm Jermain.
This is now going to be my vlog about me.
None of this is scripted, nothing... all real.
Bye, see you.
WOMAN: * This is the beginning *
KELLY SIEGLER: This case is only seven years old.
I was kind of nervous
because so many people here
knew about the case and they've done
some podcasts on it.
There's been some TV shows about it,
so the case is a big deal here.
Jermain Charlo was 23 years old when she went missing.
STEVE SPIGNOLA: She had a house on the reservation
because she was tribal.
KELLY: She had two sons, and she was separated
from the father of her children.
She was very pretty, she was dating a new guy,
she seemed very independent.
Jermain was beautiful, vibrant and creative.
She liked to dress up and go out with her friends,
but she also liked to go outdoors and go hiking
and fishing and get dirty.
She loved being a mom.
She was also very excited about her potential new job
of fighting forest fires for the tribe.
But in June of 2018, she tragically went missing.
STEVE: She was an adult at the time,
so when she didn't return home,
I don't think it set off a lot of red flags right away.
It was the fact that she wasn't on social media,
nobody heard from her.
On Friday, June 15, 2018,
Jermain was hanging out with her ex-boyfriend.
A surveillance camera captured her behind a bar, walking off,
and that's the last known video of Jermain alive.
Seven years later,
investigators are still looking for her remains
and answers as to what actually happened that night.
They keep thinking, give it just a little more time
and maybe some hunter,
some scavenger will turn up some body pieces.
Sadly, indigenous women are victims of violent crime
at an alarmingly high rate,
with over 80 percent experiencing
violence in their lifetime,
and over 6,000 indigenous women
are missing nationwide.
Jermain's case has been a rallying cry
for bringing attention to the issue.
It's gone unsolved long enough.
I think it's every parent's worst nightmare.
Yeah.
* This is the beginning *
- KELLY: Hi. - I'm Guy, Baker.
- Steve Spignola... - Nice to meet you.
- Rebekah. - I'm Kelly.
- Nice to meet you. - How are you?
REBEKAH: Nice to meet you, Steve.
A lot of people know about this case.
Oh, yeah, Jermain Charlo's name is very well known.
This is one of the two cases that was at the forefront
of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People movement
that kind of started locally,
and then across the state of Montana.
It's been gaining traction over the last six, seven years,
and it's all over the United States.
Wow. Well, let's go start working.
When I got this case back in 2018,
there did seem to be some added pressure
because of the awareness around her being
a missing Native American.
Obviously, I never met Jermain, but, you know,
all the time I put into this investigation,
I feel like I know her.
So it's been very important to me
to keep Jermain Charlo relevant and not just
to be forgotten like so many other
Native American females across Montana.
Jermain is only 23.
She grew up here?
GUY: She grew up in a small community
up on the Flathead Indian Reservation,
which is about a half an hour north of Missoula...
How old were her little boys?
GUY: Two and four.
Jermain had two boys with Michael DeFrance.
They had met when he was 16 and she was 14.
They were together for several years.
They had the two children, but by the fall of 2017,
they weren't together.
They were seeing other people,
but she's also still hanging out with Michael.
So, Detective Baker,
we can tell from reading your offense report
how much you put into this case.
Where do you want to start?
On Friday night, the 15th of June 2018,
Jermain Charlo called Michael to see
if he wanted to go out.
They meet up, downtown Missoula.
They go to three or four bars.
They were documented on video surveillance
in the alley behind the Badlander bar.
She was talking to a couple guys that she knew.
After a short conversation, Michael and Jermain
are seen walking eastbound in the alley
at around midnight, they walk out of view,
and they go to another bar,
and then Michael later tells the family
that he dropped Jermain off,
and so, Jermain is unaccounted for on Saturday, Sunday,
and she has an appointment
for a wildland firefighter job on Monday.
She doesn't show up for that-- that was unlike Jermain.
She communicated with her family and friends routinely
and, you know, her boys were very important to her.
So she had no reason to become missing
on her own volition.
The family then reports her missing
to the Missoula Police Department.
There were community searches going on
and so many people were looking for Jermain in that weekend
and the week after she disappeared.
I don't know how many searches have been done
over the seven years, but it's been dozens.
We've been very diligent to follow up
each and every lead.
We've done countless searches.
KELLY: What kind of land?
GUY: Mountainous, forested, and reservation.
Hundreds of miles of mountain.
- KELLY: It looks helpless. - It's been very frustrating.
KELLY: While multiple attempts
to find Jermain's body came up empty,
the police continued to look into every lead that came up.
Jermain had recently started dating a new guy named Jacob
who was over 150 miles away that weekend visiting family,
and he was immediately cleared out as a suspect.
So, at some point, you start to get
all these other calls and tips and leads.
- GUY: Yeah. - KELLY: We can start
with rumors, unknown, theories.
GUY: The sex trafficking aspect of it
was considered early on.
Missoula County Sheriff's Department
had talked to an inmate,
and she had told of an incident
in which she and another female were over at a trap house
and a couple of males came over and talked about
purchasing a female.
We then started getting information
by these gang members out of Washington who were
distributing narcotics in the reservation area.
- KELLY: Wow. - Just a lot of rumors.
But I was open-minded to look at everything that came in
and then try to run it down,
and did not find anything
corroborating what their claims are
and could verify that they didn't happen.
STEVE: The Missoula Police Department spent
countless hours running down every lead in this case,
and none produced a viable suspect.
Well, we need to consider all possibilities.
The prime suspect continues to be
the last known person to see Jermain,
her ex-boyfriend and father of her children, Michael DeFrance.
KELLY: Michael DeFrance, is he also tribal?
His father is Native American and his mother is Caucasian.
KELLY: Okay, so then, what's going on in the world
of Michael and Jermain?
Start with the beginning of the relationship.
- It was abusive, right? - GUY: Yeah.
- How abusive? - There was an incident
documented by law enforcement of physical abuse
and he was arrested for domestic violence.
KELLY: What about temper?
I asked him if he had a temper, and I think he said he didn't.
KELLY: Okay, so, let's talk about that night.
GUY: When I talked to him, I took him in my car
and I wanted him to show me the exact route he went,
so we'd lock him into a story.
He took me from the downtown area
down to a neighborhood.
He said he dropped Jermain off.
He says that she got out
and walked into the darkness.
That was last he saw her.
You did four interviews with him.
Yeah, he was cooperative.
KELLY: This is a no body case.
The key to our investigation will be understanding
Jermain and Michael's relationship and seeing
if there are any inconsistencies in his story.
We also need to get a clear understanding
of the cell phone activity in this case.
Hopefully all that can help us determine
if Michael DeFrance is involved,
or if there is some other unknown suspect
responsible for Jermain's disappearance.
To be honest, I live in a camper,
and I do have a boyfriend.
It's who I live with,
and my family is not happy at all,
but hey, reality.
WOMAN: * When I hear our song *
* I feel my heart drop *
* Everything that I've held is gone *
* I fell in pieces when you were... *
KELLY: Jermain's mom was kind of in and out of her life
when she was younger, so Jermain was mostly raised
by her grandmother Vicki
and by her aunts, Dani and Valenda.
- GUY: Hi, Dani. - Hey, Guy, good to see you.
GUY: Yeah, good to see you, this is Kelly.
KELLY: Unfortunately, her grandmother Vicki
passed away two years ago on the fifth anniversary
of Jermain's disappearance,
but we are going to get to talk to Dani and Valenda,
and they have very much continued
this fight for justice for Jermain.
DANI: Jermain would've been 30 this year.
Her mom was a teenage mother when she had her,
so we did a lot of babysitting,
and as we got older, she'd live with us off and on.
She just was a joy to be around.
Jermain was funny and fun,
a good mother, an artist.
She had a sense of style that's unmatched.
She could wear every style of clothing and pull it off,
so she could be dressed like a cowgirl one day
and goth the next and yeah,
just, just stunning in anything she wore,
she was beautiful.
She was always so silly
and she just shared that happiness,
that love was everywhere and you could feel it.
You know, we miss her, and there's so much life
she's missed out on.
KELLY: Were you around, or what was going on when,
when she met Michael DeFrance?
DANI: Oh, gosh, Michael was
the new cute boy in the community.
They were young and they ended up getting together.
KELLY: When was the first time you noticed that things
weren't the perfect little relationship
between Jermain and Michael?
DANI: We knew the abuse was happening.
She allowed a lot of negative behavior and justified it
with that need for this picture-perfect family
that she'd always dreamt of.
Her and Michael end up, you know,
separating because Michael was seeing another female.
They ended up in a custody case, which went really bad.
The way she'd explained it to me was more or less,
he told them I was crazy because I'm on anti-anxiety meds
and depression medications, and I'm just trying
to help myself, and the judge believed him
and they gave him full custody, and she was
just shattered.
KELLY: So then, right before she goes missing,
what do you know about her relationship with Michael, then?
Oh, gosh, me and her were back and forth
on the phone a lot.
In that year and a half that they were broke up,
they were hooking up.
She's trying to be his friend for the sake of the boys,
and Michael's not letting Jermain
visit the boys, anyways, right?
Did you ever see anything where he's also
in the middle of her business with other men?
- He was so jealous. - Talk about all that.
And if she talked to another guy,
she was a whore and she just couldn't
do anything independently, even after the separation.
KELLY: Dani gave us a great
description of Jermain's relationship with Michael--
how they met, how it evolved,
how and why she lost her kids,
and how he was using those kids to manipulate her.
It sounds like Jermain was ready to move on,
but Michael was not.
We really failed her on that end when she was young
by not having that stability for her.
Like I said, I was 12 years old right, when she was born,
and so, you know, it's so young trying to give guidance.
It wasn't easy, I just always wish I could have done more,
would have been better.
She may not have been in that situation
where she felt that need to be loved
in such a way from somebody who was hurting her.
We failed her as a family, we failed her.
That's hard to live with,
that's really hard to live with.
KELLY: On cases like this where there's no body,
cops are told by prosecutors and kind of trained,
find the body and you're good,
but there comes a point where you gotta let that part go
and look at what else you had, you know?
We're investigating the 2018 disappearance of young mother,
Jermain Charlo.
Since her body has never been recovered,
the challenge here is not ever being able
to examine what could potentially be
the best forensic evidence.
So the circumstantial evidence
needs to be that much more compelling.
KELLY: Hello, hello, there.
Hello, pretty boys. Good morning.
KELLY: That means hitting the streets
and talking to witnesses.
So you got handprints?
That's the first handprint,
and then we were in year five, so I added four more,
and I'm like, well, I need to go get two more
because we're in year seven.
- You got one for every year. - Yeah.
The red handprint is a symbol of the MMIP,
the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons movement,
representing solidarity for the victim.
GUY: We just want to talk about
domestic type stuff between Jermain and Michael, so.
ZACH: Yeah, I had a very strong feeling for him.
I don't use the word "hate" a lot, but I, I hated that guy
just because of what he put Jermain through,
put those boys through.
He was very controlling, down to you know,
what the boys were wearing,
you know, what she was allowed to dress like.
He had to be in control a hundred percent.
Even when they were quote-unquote "broken up,"
you know, if somebody were to comment on a photo
on her Facebook or something like that,
he'd be right there, underneath the comment thing,
you know, "Why are you saying that?"
It was that classic,
"If I can't have you, nobody else can" mentality.
- GUY: Well, thank you, Zach. - KELLY: Thank you very much.
GUY: Do you have a temper?
Do you lose your temper sometimes?
Never, or sometimes, or hardly ever?
GUY: Okay.
There's always one or two of those cases
that hang around the back of your head, you know?
- Yeah. - Bugs the [bleep] out of you.
STEVE: I've seen all types of motives for homicides--
greed, revenge, money--
but not many bring out the extreme anger
such as jealousy and lust.
It's the most personal and clearly the most passionate.
GUY: Hi, Jocelyn.
This is my partner today, Steve.
But is that what we're dealing with in this case?
Me and Jermain have known each other
since we were like, five years old.
GUY: You and her are still friends
when Michael and her meet?
I think being just, you know,
the little, ignorant [bleep] I was,
I was just-- "You're with a white guy?"
What the hell are you doing with that guy?"
I didn't like it.
It's more than just race with that guy, it was...
What was it about it you didn't like?
He was too shadowing of Jermain.
He literally had to hear
every conversation that, you know, me and her had.
He had to be over her goddamn shoulder like,
just he would not leave her side.
There were times where I did have to run out
to get Jermain out of a situation
- that she called me for. - Yeah, tell me about that.
He was putting his hands on her.
He was like, you know, grabbing her arm,
he was pushing her and I'm like, why is this,
this man even still in the picture, Jermain?
But every time I made it out there, she was always,
"I am so sorry I wasted your time."
- Every time, every time. - Yes, yes, every time.
And it just turned into him trying to be all,
like, "If you keep this up, bitch, I will do more."
- What do you mean, "do more"? - After that.
That's when she said that she was fed up with this.
She was tired of hiding her face with makeup.
Jermain would use makeup to cover--
I assume you were inferring bruises, injury.
That was like, a little after [bleep] was born was when
he really got physical with her because, you know,
like when those kids came into play,
that's, that's when he really became
the [bleep] that he is now.
That's when Jermain was really like,
"Okay, you know what? We're done."
You think she was afraid of him?
- Oh, yeah. - Jocelyn saw signs of abuse
between Michael and Jermain.
And it sounds like the abuse was escalating.
I know how hard it is for victims of abuse
to get out of their relationship,
and it appears that Jermain was finally able to do that.
Unfortunately, Michael just wouldn't let go.
JOCELYN: He was losing control of her, so...
- How did she-- - He did everything he could
to get her back, but she wasn't having it.
We're talking to Valenda, who is Jermain's aunt.
But they were only like, nine or ten years apart,
so they were very close throughout their lives.
They were like sisters more than an aunt and a niece.
I have a very special bond with Jermain's aunt, Valenda.
She characterized our relationship as being
that small point of light in this dark event of her life,
so that's, that's quite the compliment.
What was the dynamics of you and Jermain growing up?
She...
she kind of stole my thunder when she came into the world
because I was the baby of the family,
until she came along.
So I held Jermain in my arms for the first time
and gave her her bottle and she smiled at me,
and from that moment on, and she was,
she was my baby, she was my baby sister.
She stole my thunder and then
she stole my heart, right after.
Jermain was very spunky, very spontaneous.
Jermain liked to literally just be outside
as often she could, and be out in the woods.
That's what she wanted to show her kids.
She didn't have a very good role model for a mother.
And so I know she was trying to do the best that she could
to give her boys a better life
than what she had when she was growing up.
When she went missing, I was frantic.
I tried to get in touch with Michael and find out
what happened that night, where he dropped her off at.
That explanation, right there, is what he gave you.
VALENDA: Mm-hmm.
Michael says I dropped her off by Orange Street Market.
And so I asked Michael,
did you guys get in an argument?
I'm worried about her. Her phone is off.
- And... - KELLY: How'd you know
her phone was off?
Because it went straight to voicemail.
And he says, "I kept telling her
"just to let me take her to the house,
"but she kept saying no.
"She hopped out and walked down the street
behind the market."
KELLY: Michael told Valenda that he dropped Jermain off
at the Orange Street Food Farm.
But he told the police department
that he dropped her off at a location
about eight blocks away from there,
which seems like two different stories.
So was Michael confused, was he trying to mislead
Jermain's family, or the investigators, or both?
At the time, I wasn't sure
how to feel about the situation, but...
with their past history, I was trying to play nice,
play that I-- I believed every single word that he said,
and so that way he would continue talking to me.
- You did a good job. - Thank you.
I'm not crying, you're crying.
Her missing still haunts me,
KELLY: Jermain was super pretty.
REBEKAH: She was gorgeous.
KELLY: We said before, working on all this
that being a really pretty girl is a risk factor.
REBEKAH: I know, it's sad, right?
We haven't uncovered any evidence
supporting these rumors about Jermain's disappearance,
so we're going to focus on the evidence
that we know we do have,
the varying stories that Michael gave
to Jermain's family and to the police department.
So we're gonna go into the alley
where the bars were at on the night she disappeared.
REBEKAH: People hang out in these alleys all the time
because the bars are split that way, too,
and you can go from bar to bar.
KELLY: Jermain was last seen on video
around midnight in an alley
behind the Badlander bar where she was talking
to a group of male friends and Michael,
but what happened after that
is what's still a mystery.
So this is the area,
this door leads to the back of the Badlander.
- Is that the camera? - Yep.
And so the angle that you were looking at,
Michael was standing on the steps,
Jermain was standing two steps,
and then Nick Rheault and Eddie Woodcock
were standing here and then Michael and Jermain
walk eastbound, and that video kind of shows
she looks at him and he kind of does this with her hand,
like there's some dialogue going back and forth.
STEVE: In Michael's initial interview,
he downplayed his interaction with the other two guys.
GUY: Did that cause a little drama,
that she's talking to them?
Okay.
STEVE: But does Jermain's gesture indicate
that there was some type of tension
or frustration as they walked off?
KELLY: And then, how far away are we
from the Orange Street market?
Probably not quite a mile.
Michael told Jermain's family
that Friday night, after leaving the bars,
he dropped Jermain off by the Orange Street Food Farm.
GUY: So this is, uh, Orange Street Food Farm.
But he told the police that he dropped her off
about three quarters of a mile away from there.
When I interviewed Michael and I said,
you can show me exactly where you guys went,
he didn't stop here, he went past here.
That was very early on where I thought, hmm,
there's no video here.
This is one of the places that had no video.
What's interesting is that Michael did tell the police
he dropped her off at the Orange Street Food Farm,
but that was on the night before Thursday night.
So was Michael telling the truth?
Was he confused or is he recycling his story?
He was applying what he did Thursday.
He told the family that's how Friday went.
So when he dropped her off here, for real, on Thursday,
you think she was able to scoot to Jacob so fast?
Yeah, this little alley here
leads to Jacob Love's apartment.
It's unclear if Michael knew that Jermain was dating
a new boyfriend named Jacob.
According to the reports, he told the family
that Jermain was texting a guy named Jacob all night
and asked them multiple times if they knew
who lived by Orange Street.
So it seems like Michael was still pretty concerned
about connecting those dots.
I think she told him to drop her off here
because she didn't want him to know where she was staying.
STEVE: Michael was suspicious of there being another guy
when he dropped her off Thursday night,
and I'd be willing to bet that Michael was jealous
if Jermain asked him to drop her off again Friday night.
And this just fuels his belief
that there's somebody else involved.
We'll get back in and I'll show you
where he told me he dropped her off.
Okay, let's go look at the other one.
We'll just go eight blocks west on this one-way.
STEVE: If Michael did kill Jermain,
he had the perfect alibi story to keep straight,
because it was the truth, just from the night before,
so why tell the police seemingly different stories?
He stopped right here, facing this direction
and Jermain got out of the car.
He claimed that he was concerned for her safety,
yet he let her walk off into the darkness.
GUY: Did you think that was weird,
because if she's walking that way,
why wouldn't she just have you drive her
where you picked her up before?
Do you say anything to her?
This is also where he brings up the point that a car
pulled up behind them.
STEVE: In his story to law enforcement,
Michael claimed that when he dropped Jermain off,
another car pulled up, causing him to drive off.
STEVE: Law enforcement was never able
to identify that car,
and we don't know if it ever exists.
Why did he pick here, do you think?
Here's the thing.
- Were they ever here? - Right.
They probably were never here, right?
STEVE: It's possible this whole story
about leaving Jermain at a random corner,
with a mystery car pulling up,
was just an attempt by Michael
to claim that he left Jermain in a high-risk situation
on the street corner in hopes of turning the attention
away from himself as a suspect.
I think he panicked when he was talking to you.
GUY: The guy that's going to take this case over
when I'm gone, I said, he and Brittany--
KELLY: What's he gonna need to take over?
I don't know why you think you're passing this case on.
GUY: I'm retiring six months from today, so.
When you're gone, it's going to be solved.
- GUY: Well, there you go. - Why do we need a new guy?
- Well... - You're going to be the guy.
- That's true. - The only guy.
Hopefully they filed charges, so...
KELLY: Heck, yeah.
We know Michael DeFrance had the opportunity
to kill Jermain Charlo,
but now we want to investigate his possible motive.
According to his statement, Michael was hoping
that he and Jermain were going to get back together.
KELLY: Learning more about how they got along
that night could shed more light
on Michael's mindset.
Okay, so Luke's from the Dark Horse bar.
They went to the Dark Horse bar and played pool.
Luke Kraus was working at the first bar
that Michael and Jermain went to.
LUKE: I was in there,
I was setting up for the night.
It was about eight when they came in.
They bought a Long Island Iced Tea and a Corona.
KELLY: That's pretty good.
GUY: Curious, how do you remember that?
Because he was a cheap bastard and he didn't tip me.
They didn't seem to be getting along fairly well,
like a tense situation, you know.
She kept checking her phone and looking out the window.
She seemed like she was, like, irritated,
and didn't really want to be there.
GUY: Do you remember about how long they were there?
- Probably 40 minutes? - Okay.
Just kind of talking to the people at the front of the bar
and when I came back, their empty drinks
were sitting in the end of the bar, and they were gone.
KELLY: Luke paints a picture of them
looking like they were on a bad date,
which kind of sets the scene for the rest of the night.
Hours later,
Jermain and Michael are documented on videotape
outside of a bar in an alley,
talking to some of Jermain's friends,
Nick Rheault and Eddie Woodcock.
We're going to talk to those guys,
starting with Nick.
- NICK: We met online. - GUY: Yeah.
We kicked it off pretty quick, had fun,
and then we tried the dating thing,
it wasn't very long at all.
GUY: Did she ever talk about her
baby daddy, Michael DeFrance?
- Yes. - What do you--
Knew that he had custody of the kids.
GUY: Okay.
Never really went into huge detail about it.
I just knew that she was
not fond of that whole situation.
GUY: What do you mean by that?
NICK: It sounded like a sore subject,
so really never expanded upon it.
GUY: So we'll go to the night that you saw them last,
when she was with Michael DeFrance, okay?
And that's when you first met him.
- Yeah. - Did you have an opinion on
how he felt about Jermain, talking to you?
From his body language?
I would say he probably wasn't the happiest.
- GUY: Okay, yeah. - Yeah.
GUY: Hey, Eddie, how did you and Jermain Charlo
get to know each other?
GUY: And then do you remember
who else was out there with you?
Okay.
And what was Jermain's response
when you suggested hanging out later?
Do you think Michael heard you say that to her,
that you, maybe we can hang out later?
It's pretty clear that the night
did not go according to Michael's plans.
Michael was really hoping to get Jermain back.
She did not seem to be very interested.
I mean, she's doing her thing that whole night.
From all that we've heard,
Michael DeFrance was controlling,
he was possessive, and he was abusive,
based on his personality and how the night went,
by the time they got into the pickup truck.
Michael was probably in a pretty
explosive state of mind.
Have you thought at all about
what you want to do with approaching Michael?
Ideally, I would like to confront him in person,
if we can find him, like, in the parking lot
of where he works at the end of the day,
and see if he will talk,
and if I can't find him there, at least give him
- a call on the phone. - Okay.
STEVE: Who's got the motive here?
That's Michael and his jealous obsession.
And now we need to confront him.
Now it gets interesting.
GUY: What route would you take?
Kind of blame the victim, let's see what, you know,
hey, she's fooling around with you, playing you.
Let's see what he says.
- GUY: How you doing? Good. - Good.
I'm just looking for somebody that I heard works here.
Do you know Michael DeFrance?
Well, he don't work here anymore.
Oh, do you know where Michael DeFrance is working now,
where he went to work after this?
- STEVE: Okay. - GUY: Thank you.
STEVE: We were hoping to catch Michael off guard at work,
Unfortunately, that didn't happen for us.
so now it's plan B.
[phone ringing through]
Hey, Michael?
It's Guy Baker, how you doing?
Uh, I was wondering if you were available to, uh,
meet up and talk again.
GUY: whatever works in your schedule.
I'll wait to hear from you.
I'm surprised he didn't hang up.
I wonder what his blood pressure is right now.
[chuckling]
STEVE: Right now, Michael appears to be nervous,
you could tell it in his voice.
It's falling apart,
and he knows it's falling apart.
And maybe the phone records
will give us that last piece of evidence
KELLY [joking]: Hurry up, come on.
We are waiting to hear if Michael DeFrance
calls us back for an interview.
In the meantime, we want to talk about
all the cell phone activity from that night.
Jermain's phone has never been recovered.
Initially, Michael told the police
that Jermain took her phone with her
when she last got out of his truck that night.
GUY: Okay, so you saw her grab the...
She didn't leave anything in your truck.
KELLY: But after Missoula Police Department began
digging into her records,
they spoke to Michael again,
and when pressured, this time,
he admitted that he had lied.
Aware that Jermain had been texting other guys that night,
Michael claimed he tried getting into her phone,
but he couldn't unlock it,
so he broke it and then ditched it a couple of days later
at a rest stop along his trucking route.
The police department did go try and search
the area of the rest stop,
but they couldn't find her phone and they came up empty.
This was one of the best experiences I've ever had,
I mean, I am so impressed.
The stuff you collected, amazing.
We got call detail records, the social media records
as well as the Google data itself,
so comprehensive set of records, nice job.
KELLY: We've asked Eric Devlin
to confirm what the Missoula Police Department found,
focusing on Jermain and Michael's cell phone activity
after they left the bars that night,
shortly after midnight, and we're hoping to put
all of the little pieces of this story together
in the best compelling way that we can,
to present this case to a prosecutor.
ERIC: Starts going into the location data on here.
So, this is 6-16-2018.
This is Michael DeFrance's cell phone,
and then Jermain Charlo's phone.
You're having these hits here around two o'clock, a.m.,
hitting off this tower, in this area, all around
the DeFrance residence.
What you're seeing on here,
you've got some reflection on the signal back and forth.
Oh, okay, so it doesn't mean the phone itself
is on both sides of the freeway.
No. No, no, no, no, it's an estimate.
That same arc, along the mountainside,
they were almost identical.
KELLY: So right after two in the morning
confirming that Jermain's phone is out there
on the DeFrance property
after she leaves the bar at 12:30?
- Okay. - STEVE: why did Michael
initially lie about having Jermain's phone,
and why ditch it at a rest stop?
Here's a guy who wants her back in his life,
and he throws away her cell phone.
It doesn't make any sense.
Then we have a couple of the messages
from the night of, that Michael sent to her
on Facebook Messenger.
So at 2:06 Michael writes, "Seriously again?"
Question mark, question mark, exclamation point,
which was a little bit like, more than he ever does.
"If you're not staying with another guy here in Missoula,
then why the hell did you get out and walk off?"
And then, immediately after that,
he writes, "Why couldn't you just let me bring you
to the house you're staying at?"
ERIC: But remember, in my opinion,
based upon the records we have,
he has her phone at this point.
- REBEKAH: Yeah. - So these are BS messages.
I believe he knows well and good
that she's not going to see that.
Ooh...
Based on these text messages that Michael sent,
it's pretty clear that he was doing his best
to try and distance himself from the investigation,
but really, all this did
was incriminate him even further.
So you're excited.
I'm very excited. She's very excited.
KELLY: Look what all this leads to, Eric, great.
- Great, great, great. - Yeah, thank you so much.
That's-- I mean, fantastic.
[phone ringing through]
Hello, it's Guy.
Hey, Michael, how are you?
Okay, so contact your lawyer?
Okay, well, thanks.
I appreciate you getting back to me
and letting me know that.
Well, y'all kind of called it, right?
Yeah.
KELLY: It's no shock that Michael DeFrance
decided not to speak to us today,
but that's okay, because he talked plenty back then.
Now we're going to review everything we've learned
to see who we believe is involved
in Jermain's disappearance.
So this whole dispelling all the rumors
and the alternate theories
like we started out with up here.
GUY: Those rumors were followed up on,
and there was nothing to corroborate
that they were valid.
None of them were probable to me.
It didn't make sense.
There's no sexual assault suspects working the area.
This isn't a stranger.
Everybody's good with crossing this whole
idea theory off the board, right?
KELLY: We did not uncover any evidence
supporting the rumors and theories
that have been floating around in this case for years,
and we can eliminate all those ideas completely.
That leaves us with the last known person
to see Jermain alive, Michael DeFrance.
So you obviously don't have Jermain
to talk about her relationship
and how it went down.
But you have girlfriends or relatives
who can all describe that volatile relationship, right?
Yes.
It was that classic, "If I can't have you,
nobody else can."
A little after [bleep] was born
is when he really got physical with her.
Dani also pointed out holding the kids over her head
and kind of manipulating her by that.
They were hooking up.
She's trying to be his friend for the sake of the boys,
and Michael's not letting Jermain visit the boys, anyways.
Which also explains why people were wondering,
why is she back with him? And that was the answer,
right there, because she wanted
- to see the kids. - Yeah.
And then we went and talked
to the bartender.
LUKE: She seemed like she was, like, irritated,
and didn't really want to be there.
He was hopeful that, uh,
he was going to make it work with her
when they went out on Friday,
and the evening didn't go how he hoped,
and as things start to uncoil,
there's guy after guy after guy that he's seeing
that she's got some connection to.
From his body language, I can say he probably
wasn't the happiest.
I think he knows
that she doesn't want anything to do with him,
and that little fire is burning,
you know, for the whole night, it's burning.
And the fact that when you interviewed DeFrance,
his interviews with you aren't even the same.
Remember in the first interview with him,
he had told me that Jermain exited his vehicle,
she had her wallet and her cell phone.
In that second interview,
that's when he did admit that he lied
that she left the phone in the car.
You did the forensics.
Around 2:02 is when you start to see
Jermain's phone in that same path as Michael's,
near his parents' house.
- KELLY: Huge, huge. - Yeah.
Then what else did you find
- that you like? - Messages on Facebook
where he's messaging her.
And the dumb-ass
is doing a fake text to cover his tracks
and he can't even cover his jealousy up then.
His words alone point back to him.
It clearly is like a funnel.
It comes right back, it's Michael DeFrance.
KELLY: What are you gonna ask Brittany
when y'all have your sit down to discuss all this?
Yeah, a charge of homicide against Michael DeFrance
and I can go arrest him.
You're gonna be there, Becca, what are you thinking?
- I'm gonna be there. - You gotta push this
right over the goal line here and score the touchdown.
KELLY: We've built a circumstantial case
against Michael DeFrance for the murder of Jermain,
and now it's time to run all that down
and present all that evidence to Brittany Williams
with the Missoula County Attorney's Office.
You feeling it?
Totally, yeah, absolutely, yes.
GUY: I'll tell you, my chief,
when I gave him the update last night, he said,
"Do you want to resend your retirement letter?"
You got too much more you want to get finished here,
- in a good way, in a good way. - Yeah, yeah.
Good morning, ladies.
BOTH: Good morning.
So, uh,
this whole week has been... great,
it exceeded my expectations.
We've expounded on several things
that we had already done,
but we also found some things that are new.
Talked to Brittany and, uh,
I am more hopeful about this case than I've ever been,
that we're going to have a resolution to this
that all three of us have always wanted.
Wow.
You're just kind of taken back...
[exhales sharply]
KELLY: What you've been waiting for
is finally going to happen,
- after seven years. - About [bleep] time.
I don't know how else to say that, it's...
kind of unreal.
It's great news,
but one day it's anger, frustration, tears--
it's a ball of emotions, and we've got two young boys
who not only know their mother's dead,
now they're going to learn that their father,
the guy that raised them,
is probably the one that took their mother.
We haven't been a part of their lives for seven years.
Why don't you say right now what you would say to them
if they were sitting here?
That we've never stopped thinking about them.
They've been our drive this entire time,
to help bring their mother justice.
Their mom loved them very, very much,
and I hope that they can find strength
through this process.
I'm really overwhelmed with the information
we received today.
I'm just relieved that Jermain
will finally get the justice she deserves.
I think it's going to bring some peace.
I'm looking forward to some peace.
Brittany is here today to talk to you,
and I'll tell you,
if there were more prosecutors in this country like her,
a lot more cases would be solved.
So y'all should be grateful for this man and for her.
- It was wonderful meeting you. - You, too.
You want to go talk to Brittany?
Yeah, okay.
Thank you.
To be invited to work on a case
that is this important to Missoula,
to the state of Montana, to the MMIW movement,
and to Jermain's family, it is really an honor,
and to be able to make this kind of progress,
to really get the case to move forward,
that's why we do this job.
To a certain extent, from my perspective,
I think time is of the essence
with what the next steps that we take forward.
I want to make sure that every "T" is crossed
and every "I" is dotted, but I want you to know,
I've never felt better about this.
Waiting to see those jail doors close on him.
VALENDA: It's very surreal.
seven years of
sitting by the phone,
seven years of when Guy calls you, wondering if
it's him saying that he found her,
that he found the missing piece of the puzzle,
it's been a long time coming.
And for the first time, I actually have real hope.
I could never thank Guy enough.
WOMAN: * Look how far we've come *
* I'm rising like the sun *
* This is... our place *
* It feels like home *
* With you, I know *
Bye. See you.