These murders, they affect people years later.
And so, you know, I've had someone say, why put all that time and energy into a cold case?
The guy's dead.
Who cares?
Kind of thing.
But it's rewarding to be able to tell these victims and these family members like hey, we got them because they don't have any other way to have peace.
These cases, they affect people for a long time.
And so being able to let them have peace is a big deal, like in this life.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
In the year 1956, Dwight Eisenhower was president, segregation on public buses was outlawed and Elvis Presley's song Heartbreak Hotel topped the charts.
Also during that year, in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles, an 18-year-old girl named Barbara Jean Jepsen was murdered in her home.
At the time, investigations relied mostly on the age-old methods of police work knocking on doors and examining the evidence.
Forensically, the best an investigator could hope for was fingerprints.
But those methods had not provided answers in the search for Barber's killer.
Over the course of the next 50 years.
The case passed through the hands of countless seasoned detectives, and yet it remained unsolved.
Then it landed in the lap of a rookie investigator.
The expectations that she could solve it were low, but sometimes all a case needs is a fresh perspective.
My name is Detective Rachel Evans.
I work for the Los Angeles Police Department, Operations Valley Bureau Homicide.
Rachel got her start in police work while volunteering on search and rescue missions.
I kind of got my foot wet in it a little bit and like kind of helped out and search for people if they were missing.
And I was like, no, I kind of like this.
And then they changed the parameters.
They said, if you want to be a volunteer, you now have to go through an academy.
And I'm like, well, if I have to go through an academy, I might as well get paid for this.
I just kind of got into it by like serving the community and not really realizing that this would be what my career path would be.
After working as a patrol officer for a decade, Rachel was promoted to the role of detective.
Her first few months were spent rotating through different units, from major assault crimes to theft and burglary.
One day, Rachel ran into the lieutenant of homicide investigations.
He asked if she wanted to join his unit.
He saw me one day and said, hey, you want to come to Homicide sometime?
And I'm like, oh yeah, that'd be fun.
Because I never say no.
You never know what you're going to be into.
You never know what you will enjoy.
You never know what you will sink your teeth into.
So I was always open to like, yeah, I'll do whatever.
Rachel's first placement in Homicide was in the cold case section, where she was the least experienced detective by far.
The guys that are there have like 20 years on in homicide, you know 18 in homicide and they're kind of old timers.
They're kind of like winding down their career in cold case.
And initially, she didn't exactly get a warm and fuzzy welcome.
They don't know me.
They weren't excited to have me because they didn't pick me.
The lieutenant brought me in.
I think the first two weeks they ignored me.
You know what I mean?
Like they didn't even like acknowledge my existence.
Shortly after arriving, Rachel was handed her first case, and back then it was basically a binder full of every report and piece of paper pertaining to the crime and investigation, known to insiders as the murder book.
The pages of the file she'd been given were quite literally encased in plastic, which was Rachel's first hint at how old this case actually was.
Every bit of paperwork, everything they investigated, every written statement, everything is in the book.
And so you kind of start going through this book and it's like these old typed pages you know, with mistakes and whiteout.
And it's actually really cool to go through because it's like old school reports and old serial numbers of these guys who are dead and gone, probably since this was done.
The case wasn't just one of the older ones.
They hand me this, the oldest case in San Fernando Valley, and they said, here you go.
Take a look at this one, kid.
Good luck.
You know Anastasia, knowing the mindset in a good way of what veteran detectives were likely thinking, saying to each other under their breath was yeah, good luck with that.
With a bit of friendly sarcasm.
Agreed.
And for Rachel, she spent the next weeks reading, learning and absorbing everything she could about her first cold case.
The file took her back to 1956.
An 18-year-old woman named Barbara Jean Jepson had recently married.
Her husband's name was Joseph, but many called him Joe.
The Jepsons lived in a quiet area of Los Angeles.
Joe worked as a clerk for the Air Force National Guard, and Barbara took care of their home.
She'd just gotten married like maybe six months into her marriage.
So they were a brand new newlywed couple and living in this bungalow and he's working and she was a stay-at-home lady, even though they didn't have kids yet.
But, you know, it was a different time back then.
January 31st of that year started like a regular day.
Joe kissed his wife goodbye and headed to his base.
Barbara stayed at home.
When Joe returned after work, something was off.
The front door was unlocked and there was a radio blaring inside.
So he turns down the radio and then he's looking for his wife and he goes back into his bedroom where he finds her naked and sprawled out on her back with her knees kind of hanging over the bed.
Barbara was covered in blood.
She wasn't breathing and there was a butcher knife sticking out of her chest.
There was a rag that was bloody in the sink, and several items of clothing in the bedroom closet were also streaked with blood.
When police arrived, they took black and white photos as well as detailed notes of the scene.
The detectives say a pillow was placed over her head.
Marks on the victim's mouth indicated that the suspect probably held her hands over her mouth.
The victim was found on her back with a butcher knife protruding from her breast.
Approximately three times, the knife was moved and twisted into the victim's body.
At the time of the attack, Barbara was four months pregnant.
Neither she nor the fetus survived.
Back to the present day.
Rachel poured through old files and read the police notes about the interviews done after Barbara was found.
A timeline was soon formed.
One person had seen Barbara out shopping around noon.
So around noon, Barbara went to a jewelry store and they found a receipt that she had in her house.
But she went to a jewelry store to get a ring or something.
Like, I don't know if it was like she was redoing her husband's wedding ring or whatever it was.
But she went to this jewelry store and she had a receipt from it and people had seen her walking to and from the store.
Another neighbor reported hearing yelling or something like that later that afternoon.
But she lived near a school and didn't think much of it at the time.
Around 3.20, she heard a muffled scream coming from the victim's house.
She thought maybe kids were getting out of school or something, but it was from the same area of the house.
Then you had another neighbor that heard a woman screaming at 3.15.
People get their timelines a little messed up, but 3.15, 3.20 is all kind of similar.
One conversation in particular stood out to Rachel.
It was with a neighbor who had found something in their garage.
It was a green Army jacket, which didn't belong to them, and it was stained with blood.
Joe had a jacket like that, you know, because he was in the National Guard.
Even though he was a civilian, he had stuff like that.
And it was missing out of his closet, and it had some blood on it.
After the jacket was recovered, police quickly turned their focus to Barbara's husband, Joe.
He was the person who had found Barbara deceased.
The jacket matched the one that he would have had, and those closest to a victim are unfortunately, often proven to be the ones responsible.
They come in and they want to know, what are you doing?
Because he went in there, covered her, and then went and got help.
And so I think at first there was a little bit, because he's the first responder there, first one to find her and no one else had seen her and no one else saw anything.
Then I think that he became that suspect.
Now, Joe said he'd been at work all day.
Police did head to the base to see if they can verify his account.
They went back to his work, his job site, and they went and asked every person he worked with and they got an accounting of where he was like, minute by minute.
Security at the base kept close tabs on people's coming and goings, which made investigators work much easier.
You know, it's an air base, basically, like it's a place where you have to kind of check in.
And so he would have had to check out and check back in.
And so there was no way that could have happened.
His alibi corroborated.
Joe was cleared as a suspect, at least officially, but some suspicion still lingered.
And despite intense efforts, police had yet to find any other leads.
As Rachel read the files over and over again, she could tell that a lot of work had gone into the investigation already.
I went through and read all the things that they did.
And it was a massive amount of work where they interviewed like every person that ever had a knife, because Ms
Jepson, the victim, she was killed by a butcher knife.
And so they went through and every person that ever had an account of a history of using a knife they even like, went through.
Every person in California like that.
They just did so much work.
But in the 1950s investigative resources and scientific methodology were very different than what's available today.
If you look back at some of the old detectives, you know they didn't have all the technology like DNA, and they didn't have phone records and they didn't have any of this wazoo stuff, right.
They had door knocking and talking to people, fingerprints.
They had like old stuff.
And Scott, you know it's always for me as a prosecutor, it's so interesting when I have to be thinking about this because right, we know the incredible advancements we have today.
But really, when it comes down to so many people think that well, that is the way it all is, still done.
But so much of it, as you know, really still does come down to that gumshoe knock on doors, ask questions, police work that they've always had throughout the years.
I always say, no matter how science has advanced criminal investigations, there's no substitute, as you said Anasika, for old-fashioned door knocking and face-to-face interviews.
You know, there's an old police saying, which probably hangs on plaques at many squad rooms all over the country, which reads get off your ass today and go knock on doors.
But Rachel is also totally right.
In fact, here's a little piece of history.
The first fingerprint evidence ever used in a criminal trial was in Chicago in 1910.
So I think it is a fingerprint that has always been a go-to way for proving evidence.
And during this now decades-long investigation, police had spoken to countless people and detained several people of interest.
For example, there was a man who told a friend that he knew more than police about Barbara's murder.
He was brought in and interviewed, but ultimately released for insufficient evidence.
At one point, the brother of famed pianist Liberace was detained for allegedly loitering outside a nearby house around the time of the murder.
He too was quickly released.
But each potential suspect ultimately led police nowhere.
Then, four years later, the sleepy neighborhood where Barbara had been killed witnessed another shocking crime, and it had eerie similarities to Barbara's murder.
In the year 1960, a teen's body was found in a stream in the San Fernando Valley.
It turned out to be a local 15-year-old girl named Mary Ann Pedroda.
When she disappeared, she had been visiting the barn where she kept her horse.
She was last seen by a group of children as she led two horses on a walk.
Just a few hours later, the children saw one of the horses near a stream, loose and looking confused.
When the group got closer, they saw the body of Mary Ann naked in the water.
When police arrived, they weren't exactly sure if there had been a terrible accident, something related to natural causes, or if this was murder.
They couldn't tell exactly what happened to her at first, because it had rained and she'd been there for a little bit.
There was a lot of debris from the rain, and so they weren't really sure if it was a hunting accident or what had happened to her.
Her body was taken for autopsy, where it was quickly concluded that this most definitely wasn't a hunting accident or anything natural.
Of course, they bring her into the corner.
Then they see like wow, she's got these defense wounds and she'd been stabbed nine times in her back and in her torso.
Based on the stab wounds and the way she'd been found, investigators considered the strong possibility that someone in the community was targeting young women.
They looked at basically everyone in the area with any type of record for sexual assault.
But once again, leads dried up and the case went cold.
Another four years passed.
Then, a man was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
The arrest raised eyebrows of officers involved in Mary Ann Pedroda's case.
The man was local.
His name was Monty Merz.
He was like kind of the guy that helped kids learn how to ride horses and was kind of different but was rough.
They said he was kind of a rough cowboy guy.
Shortly after his arrest, investigators learned that Merz had a significant connection to Mary Ann.
They found out that he knew about Mary Ann Pedroda and that he kept his horse in the corral next to hers.
Was it just a coincidence or was it something more?
Back in 1964, police were ultimately unable to conclusively connect him to the murder.
Fast forward to 53 years later.
In 2017, the LAPD received a phone call out of the blue.
It was from a woman who said that she knew who killed Marianne Pedroda.
She identified herself as the former stepdaughter of Monty Merz.
Her mother had been married to him at the time Marianne was killed.
In order to protect her identity, we are not going to name her.
The woman went on to provide information related to Merz from the day of the murder.
The caller gives some specific information about the two horses, about what he wore about, what she saw that day, about detectives coming to the house.
She kind of gives a full picture of who he is to detectives and enough information that it matches up with some of the things that were in Mary Ann Pedroda's murder.
Additionally, the woman said that in the weeks following the murder, MERS had forbid her from riding her horse in the area where Mary Ann was ultimately found.
This young girl at the time.
She said that she rode horse all the time, but for about two weeks she wasn't allowed to ride in that area.
He said, you're not allowed to go over there.
You go the other way or whatever, because she would go out and ride her horse.
And she knew she was restricted from that area for a couple of weeks.
So she knew something happened before the body was even found.
And she said, you never disobeyed Monty Mertz because he was very cruel.
Once her statement was corroborated, the LAPD cleared the Marianne Pedrota case.
After Rachel read that report, she wanted to speak with the caller, who remember was Merz's former stepdaughter.
Just maybe she'd know something that could help this investigation into Barbara Jean Jepsen's death.
Well, because she knew so much information and said that she was the stepdaughter of Monti, I was like well, she must know what he's about.
You know who he is.
Rachel got on a plane to Reno where the woman was living, and she had quite the story to tell.
Rachel learned that Murs was born in Utah in 1911.
There, he had married and had two children before divorcing.
He then remarried, this time to a woman in the San Fernando Valley, which brought him to live in Southern California.
But that marriage also ended in divorce.
Merz went on to marry three more times.
He was known as a womanizer and worse.
According to his stepdaughter, Merz was violent and abusive not just to her, but to animals as well, specifically her horses.
And then the lady that I went to visit in Reno said that when he got mad at her he stuck a pitchfork through her horse and her horse was never the same and had scarring from the pitchfork.
And you're like, well, he did that to his daughter.
The woman told Rachel that Murs was a sexual predator who targeted children.
She was so traumatized by him.
She said, look, I'm not trying to be rude, but she's scared to death.
She goes, I close my eyes.
I see him.
He raped her since she was like seven.
The woman said that she wasn't the only one abused by Murs.
Several of his former wives had young children.
The stepdaughter believed that Murs chose these women in order to target their daughters.
Even after Murs had separated from his wives, he maintained contact with them.
According to his former stepdaughter, that was in order to get access to their daughters.
She talked about how he never let his victims go, and he'd continue to feed them and abuse them.
Even though she no longer lived with him, he would still be around.
For whatever reason, these women would keep him around, even though he'd divorce them or leave them.
He just kind of kept all these women in his realm, like he never would let any of them go.
Even the young girls, he kind of kept them around.
The trauma from her childhood had stayed with the stepdaughter and impacted her life greatly.
The thing that was sad about her is that she wouldn't let me in the house.
She would only talk to me from inside her house and I had to be outside.
She's in her 60s.
She was so afraid to come out of the house because she was afraid of Monty Mertz.
That was the reason she had waited so long to call police and tell them what she knew.
And she said that she waited till 2017 to call Robbery Homicide Division regarding Mary Ann Pedroda case because she kind of had to wait for his family members to die so that it didn't affect her.
She was afraid to come forward because she was afraid it would affect her.
While the woman didn't know anything about Barbara or her murder, Rachel was becoming convinced that Murs was the one responsible for Barbara Jepsen's death.
When I started asking her about who he was and she was kind of giving me all the information of the abuse and the cruelty and the rough life she lived and how scared she is to come out of the house.
That's when I was like, this is the guy.
To me, it was like clear as day.
This is the guy because this lady's traumatized by him.
But there was more linking Merz to Barbara Jepsen and had been sitting in that very old file for years.
A month after Merz had been arrested for assaulting the 14-year-old, the police got a tip that he had been at Barbara Jepsen's funeral a decade prior.
So July 20th 1964 a sergeant received information about the Jepson murder that he was seen at the funeral by members of the family.
So he was seen at Barbara's funeral by multiple witnesses.
So they find that out like a month after he's arrested.
Merz was brought in for questioning, but he denied knowing Barbara.
But police were way ahead of him, and they had uncovered an even bigger link.
He not only knew Barbara, he had been her stepfather and lived with her for years.
When Barbara Jean Jepsen was 10 years old, her mother had become involved with a man named Monty Merz.
He eventually moved into their home and lived with Barbara and her mom for six years.
The revelation raised suspicion for investigators at the time, but for Rachel it solidified her belief that Merz was the man who had killed Barbara.
He got together with Barbara's mother, Fern, and Barbara was 10.
And it was right in line with all kind of the girls he would groom, which were like seven to 14.
So I just feel like this is probably what happened to her, because he was doing this to multiple people, not just one.
Back in 1964, investigators had Merz sit down for a polygraph test.
Polygraph tests work by monitoring things like a person's breathing rate and pulse, as they answer a series of questions.
Now we should note that polygraphs are an investigative tool and not considered to be scientifically reliable.
Their results are not admissible in court.
And Anastasia, we've talked about this and why you and I are not big fans of polygraph tests, except could be used as a tool in the pre-interview to get more information about an investigation that could be used in other ways.
And just for clarity, I'm not a fan in terms of agreeing that it shouldn't be admissible in court right.
Because it is not scientifically accepted.
A polygraph exam is as good as the examiner because basically, it isn't so much the results, it is what it does to the mindset of the person who is taking that exam exam because very often, if done well, it does cause people to really think before they speak.
And again, if the goal is to get to the truth.
This has been a proven technique year after year sometimes.
And when I say sometimes that's exactly why it doesn't come into court, but you still may end up with a positive result after its use.
Now I would imagine that some of our listeners may have been asked to take a polygraph before, and they would likely remember the pre-interview that occurs before.
One of the questions may have been like before I turn the machine on, is there something you want to tell us?
Because the machine is very sensitive, and it will detect if you're lying.
And that is the moment that investigators are hoping for.
Sometimes it works, and other times it falls completely flat.
During Merza's polygraph exam, they confronted him about Barbara and asked him specific information about both her and Marianne Pedroda's murder.
They did a run on the polygraph and, according to two operators that did the polygraph, the suspect registered a definite guilty knowledge about both incidents.
After the polygraph, Merz refused to speak further with police, who seemed to be closing in on him.
But before they were able to implicate him on either murder, something sidetracked the scrutiny.
Shortly after the polygraph, Merz had gotten into an argument with his now fifth wife.
She had apparently confronted him about a pair of girls' underwear she had found in his drawer.
After being questioned about the underwear, Murs chased his wife into the street and shot her to death.
He then went back into their home and took his own life.
His death put a pause in the investigation into Barbara's murder.
And with the suspect now dead, police at the time didn't have a way forward.
But 60 years later, Rachel did.
While the majority of the evidence related to Barbara's murder squarely fit into what they had in the case file, one piece remained open-ended.
It was Joe Jepson's bloodstained military jacket found in a neighbor's garage the night of Barbara's murder.
But unlike investigators in the 1960s, Rachel had DNA testing at her disposal.
DNA today is commonly put in a database to look for matches.
For example, DNA from a crime scene can help find a perpetrator whose profile has been previously uploaded to that database.
But Rachel believed that she knew who Barbara's killer was, and DNA could potentially help prove or disprove that theory.
There was just one problem.
Monty Merz had died over 50 years prior, and his DNA was not part of any database.
So Rachel looked for the next best thing.
So I had to find family members.
And because DNA is constantly progressing, I was like I'd like to get a family member's DNA to do familial DNA on what little bit of DNA that we had, because we do have some.
While Murs had been married five times, Rachel wasn't sure which children were his own, if any.
I was searching for seven hours.
I'm not kidding.
I think seven hours I was looking for someone related to him, anyone I could find.
And I was really frustrated because I was like, man, there's got to be someone related to him.
And I couldn't find anybody.
It was very frustrating.
Finally, she got a break.
Rachel was on the website Find a Grave, which is a collection of grave sites from around the world.
It was there that she found an obituary attached to the grave site of Monty Merce.
The obituary noted that he had two children a daughter who was now 85 years old, and a son who was 83.
When Rachel looked them up, she saw that the daughter had already passed.
The son, however, was still alive and living in Utah.
There was one complication.
The 83-year-old man had Alzheimer's.
Rachel knew the situation was sensitive, especially considering he was Marissa's son.
She was ultimately able to obtain the known sample.
The process for collecting his DNA was with a simple inner cheek swab, a relatively non-invasive process.
We usually swab people's cheeks, the inside of their cheeks.
And so, and usually what I do is I have people do it themselves so that it's not uncomfortable for them, you know.
But with him, he was someone who was, you know, not really all there because he had Alzheimer's.
So I just put gloves on and I take a swab and I swab a cheek, and then I take another swab and swab the other cheek.
And that way we have the DNA.
After the sample was collected, Rachel reached out to the man's family.
And then I wanted to talk to the family members about what I did, because I didn't also want to like sideline them and make them worried about what I was going to do.
I wanted to inform them about what I was doing.
So I met with his wife and four of his children and some of his grandchildren.
It was a conversation that Rachel felt prepared to have.
As a child, she had suffered her own loss.
At age 16, her older brother was killed in a car accident.
Beyond the obvious tragedy, it had also given her the unique perspective from the side of a loved one experiencing loss.
That goes as far as being mindful of how she delivers bad news, because she still remembers what that was like.
I remember a sheriff's deputy coming to my door and knocking on our family door and telling us what happened.
I remember how it feels.
You know, as a kid, I remember feeling the pain and the loss of someone that you loved and cherished.
You know I have a lot of empathy towards these people because I still remember how it feels to get that news and how hard it is, because your whole life has changed.
It has helped form the way Rachel approaches the many challenging conversations she is faced with as a detective.
I just think that I have a level of empathy that maybe others haven't experienced yet.
And it's not because people are bad or whatever.
It's just I have this experience that they have not gone through themselves.
And so I feel like I can connect to people a lot because I know that they know that I'm genuine when I'm telling them I'm so sorry.
With Merz's surviving family members.
She was very mindful of the impact that the news she was delivering may have.
So I sat down with them and we had a long conversation about what I had found out about their grandfather.
And they were pretty sad.
I mean, who wants to hear that your grandpa is a serial killer and has done these horrible things to young girls?
It's pretty awful.
And you try and be as tactful as you can, but no one wants to hear that.
The family had been told that both Merz and his wife were killed in an accident back in the 1960s.
That was the belief they lived with until the day Rachel showed up at their door.
When she told them the truth about what had actually happened, the family was devastated.
They were all told that he died in a car accident with his wife.
Here I am informing them like, no, actually he killed his wife and killed himself.
And some of the kids were crying and you're like, I'm so sorry.
Rachel returned to L.A. and submitted Merz's son's DNA for testing.
It turned out that her trip to Utah had happened in the nick of time.
Just two weeks after collecting his DNA, Merz's son passed away.
Rachel waited for results, hoping for a definitive answer that would bring the search for Barbara's killer to a close.
But when she got a phone call from the lab, it was definitely not what she expected.
The DNA lab told Rachel that they could not do the comparison with the known sample that she'd submitted from Merz's son.
That was because the blood sample recovered from the Army jacket wasn't enough to get an accurate result.
And Scott, this must have been the hugest letdown.
You know, she had gone to the lengths of finding Marissa's son, who was still alive.
She got a known sample just two weeks before this man passes away.
And now that sample is just too minute to get the answers that she was so hoping could finally bring finality to this open case a 50-year letdown.
As you know Anastasia, I've been dealing with something very similar on another cold case.
I'm currently working on for a podcast.
DNA evidence is only good as how it's collected and how it's preserved over the years.
So yes, as science gets better, you know, as an example, samples with complicated mixtures of suspects or victim and suspects will be easier to separate, identify and use in cold cases.
As the science gets better.
But unfortunately in Rachel's case you know it meant having to rely on other methods of clearing this case.
But despite this major setback, Rachel forged ahead.
After again reviewing the pieces of evidence laid out together, she was convinced that, minus a DNA result, her case was as good as it was likely ever going to get.
She then wrote out a lengthy report, something similar to a probable cause affidavit, detailing all of the research and interviews she had conducted.
And I just kind of went through everything that I learned about the case.
I did bullet points of all these things that I learned about who he was.
And then I said that she was found stabbed to death and she was also sexually assaulted by her assailant.
There was no forced entry.
She knew her attacker.
The report also detailed the descriptions that neighbors had given of the man spotted in the neighborhood the day Barbara was murdered.
Witnesses that saw a man and described him, several witnesses saw him describe Monty Mertz.
And then I also talked about.
He had very pronounced knuckles, which is what one of them said, that they saw.
And he denied knowledge of knowing the victims.
And yet he lived with Barbara and he was next to Mary Ann Pedroda's residence, like next to her horse stall.
And he had a horse right next to hers.
And so I kind of went through just all the things that I found out about him, who he was and what he was about.
When she put it all together, Rachel developed a theory about what happened to Barbara on the day she was killed.
Rachel believed that Merz had most likely victimized Barbara during the years he lived with her mom, perhaps even longer.
Similarly to what he had done to Merz's other stepdaughter who had come forward in 2017.
And that on that fateful day in 1956, Murs paid Barbara, his former stepdaughter, a visit.
When she resisted his advances, he forcefully assaulted her.
I really do think that because she was having trouble in her pregnancy, I think she told him no.
You know, whatever he was going to do or whatever he typically did, I think she kind of told him no, you can't do that, and kind of fought him.
And I think he just was like, I'm doing it anyways.
Rachel's theory of the case goes from sexual assault to murder.
And I think he went to the kitchen, grabbed the knife, turned up the radio so that no one could hear her as much.
And then I think he raped her and killed her.
Like I said, I didn't see a struggle.
And she was also really tiny.
You know, she was only 5'4", like 100 pounds.
So she was really little.
So it's not like she could fight him off.
He was 5'9", but he was kind of a tough guy.
I think that she just told him no, and he wasn't going to take that.
In 2022, the Los Angeles Police Department determined that, based on the evidence Rachel laid out in her report, they could clearly link Monty Merz to Barber's murder.
Based on all of those circumstantial evidence pieces robbery, homicide division went through it all and they agreed.
They said, yeah, we believe this is him.
So, even though there's no justice for him, or him being arrested or nothing like that, it's like it just closed.
Like we don't have to look into this anymore because we believe we found the right person.
The case was officially closed.
It's important to note that Monty Mears has never been adjudicated as guilty by any court of law.
Because of his death, the case never went to trial.
And then I think there's got to be a feeling, obviously with family members we know, about having that opportunity to face the accused, to having the opportunity to be in court and learn exactly you know, sometimes even through the evidence itself about what happened.
And yet at the same time, like this just isn't sitting on a file or people still working on it.
But you know, as Rachel decided and LAPD concurred, like this case had gotten, at least for the time being, as good as it's going to get,
But you know, even with the official closed stamp now sitting in the file, the finality that DNA could bring continues to lewd investigators.
But Rachel hasn't given up.
Law enforcement still has the blood sample recovered from the green army jacket.
Current DNA technology isn't yet at the point that it could use the minute sample to compare it to a known sample of Monty Mears, or anyone else for that matter.
But Rachel plans to keep resubmitting it, hoping that one day the answer from science will finally come.
We still have it, but unfortunately, we just don't have the technology yet.
But I can submit it like every five years.
I try, and I'm going to submit it and just see you know hey, are we there yet that we can compare this to make sure we have it?
Even though on our department we cleared it because there was a preponderance of evidence that shows like this is most likely him.
The certainty that DNA could bring is important to Rachel and, most importantly, to the case of Barbara Jean Jepsen's murder.
For me, it's just like making sure you've done every single thing possible that you can do.
Even though I believe this is who did it, I'm going to make sure by continuing on that path.
Beyond just getting justice for Barbara, closing the case was a way to finally give her family some semblance of peace for something that had been hanging over them for 60 years.
These murders, they affect people years later.
And so, you know, I had someone say, why put all that time and energy into a cold case?
The guy's dead.
Who cares kind of thing.
But you know, I just told you about several people that I came across that that were affected by this years and years later.
It's just to help them have closure because they never had it.
Another person especially affected by this case and its remaining unsolved was Barbara's then-husband, Joe Jepson.
Despite being officially cleared early on in the investigation, a cloud of suspicion had remained throughout his life.
So unfortunately, poor Joe, you know, moved on, got remarried and had kids, but that was always kind of hanging over him like who killed his wife.
Other people that didn't know Monty Mertz might have been like, ah, something's up with Joe.
Joe Jepson passed away before Barbara's case was marked closed.
But Rachel felt really good when she was able to share the news with his family.
I think the best thing ever was calling Joe Jepson's kids.
So, even though they weren't alive at the time this happened, it was really rewarding to be able to tell them that their father was a good man and that he never did anything to hurt Barbara Jepson.
Their response to Rachel's call is very telling about how important it was for them to hear that there was an answer in this case, even though it came 60 years later.
Joe's kids never had closure and telling them that hey, I know your father was innocent and he was wrong, by anyone saying that he did it.
And this is who did it.
I mean, they were so elated.
In fact, they said someday we'd like to meet you and just thank you, because here they are in their 50s.
And even though they didn't grow up with Barbara, there's residue.
There's like this emotional residue that stays with us when we don't handle the things we need to handle and fix things in life.
Rachel could sense the relief that her notifications brought.
It's rewarding to be able to tell these victims and these family members like hey, we got them because they don't have any other way to have peace.
These cases.
They affect people for a long time, and so being able to let them have peace is a big deal like in this life.
Back in the LAPD's Cold Case Division, the old-hand detectives were impressed with what Rachel had managed to achieve.
The two old guys that I worked with.
One of them said I looked at that case like how did she solve that?
And the other guy said...
I don't know, maybe she's gifted or something.
And I'm like, I'm not.
I just didn't know what I was doing, you know, so I was so open to whatever came along my way.
It's an attitude that has taken her far in her detective work and also helped her gain the approval of her more senior colleagues.
That's kind of how I do my cases now.
I'm just open because I don't know where the evidence is going to lead.
I'm just open to, yeah, I don't know what I got.
So let's see.
That mindset helped me a lot because I just didn't come with any experience.
And then it was kind of like I was accepted after that.
You know, it was like, oh, okay, she's all right.
She's all right.
Some of the skills of being a good detective is being a sharp analyst and following the leads that you have.
And the lead that Rachel followed took her all the way to her first closed homicide case.
Monty Merz was never found guilty by a judge or jury.
But one day, DNA testing may be advanced enough to bring the sort of ultimate finality that Barbara Jean Jepsen and everyone affected by this case deserves.
In the meantime, if you have any information on this case or Monty Merz, please call the tip line provided in the notes of this episode.
Even though this was Rachel Evans' first homicide case she ever worked, let's be clear her rookie days were way before she was handed this case.
In the LAPD, they used the term boot for new officers.
Rachel wore that title once, spending her years in uniform patrolling the streets of Los Angeles.
This period wasn't just a rite of passage.
It was trial by fire for forging skills and instincts that no academy could instill.
I could tell you from my own time in law enforcement that those initial years on the street can be the most formative, the most defining.
Rachel had a decade of this intense street experience, a decade of split-second decisions.
Remember, when we talk about detectives solving critical cases, we're talking about officers like Rachel, whose badges are polished not just by time but by the relentless pursuit of justice in one of the world's most dynamic cities.
We decided to title this episode with Barbara's full name, Barbara Jean Jepsen.
And we think that's the right title because for years what happened to Barbara was confined to books and maybe even boxes of a case file.
She was the 18-year-old who was brutalized and killed and whose case hadn't been solved.
When I saw that the AOM writer who helped prepare this episode, used her full name at the top of the page, including her middle name Jean, it's hard to explain, but there was a respect there that I felt as soon as I read it.
And that is how we and we know all of you, our AOM community, feel about these victims, the people we talk about weekly.
We discuss them because of their deaths, but we want to know more about them, for who they were in life.
Thank you, Rachel Evans and LAPD, for never forgetting about Barbara Jean, even as years turned to decades.
Barbara Jean Jepsen.
You are an 18-year-old young woman, wife and soon-to-be mom who should have had so many more years to live.
We remember you and honor your memory.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original.
Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Fresetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
This episode was written and produced by Tracy Levy.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Ali Sirwa and Megan Hayward.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
Meow.
