He said, I don't care.
I'm not arresting nobody.
I'm not doing this.
I'm not doing that.
If the Pope himself came down, came here and told me to arrest him, I wouldn't.
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 Murph.
Life-threatening danger does not always come with warning signs.
But when it strikes as a result of an accident or the ill will of a bad actor, we hope the people closest to us will not hesitate to come to our aid.
But there are times when the very folks we expect to show up don't.
Maybe clues were there that weren't recognized or perhaps ignored.
And in those moments, we realize that help isn't always as certain as we thought.
Today's story is about a suspicious death and the uncertainty about who, if anyone, is to blame.
But it is also about the strength and determination of a family and a community who refused to give up on the fight for justice and the fight to hold responsible anyone who stood in the way of the truth.
My name is Tricia Cahoon, and I grew up in a little town called Kilkenny, North Carolina.
It's about an hour outside of where I actually currently live now.
Trisha Cahoon was born and raised in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which is probably best known for its wide, pristine beaches, laid-back lifestyle and large numbers of seasonal tourists.
You have the beaches, and people are running around barefoot without shirts on.
Everybody's on beach time.
Here, it's not like a city life.
It's like this is the place that you come to get away from that life.
You know, you can walk the beach.
It's supposed to be safe.
And you just feel like you can leave your doors unlocked, your cars unlocked.
You don't have to worry about the crime.
It's very low crime here.
It's also a tight-knit community of locals, many of whom, like Tricia's large family, have been here for generations, working as teachers nurses, contractors and bartenders, serving the throngs of thirsty tourists that descend on the Outer Banks every summer for a taste of fun and sun.
People go to the same churches.
They go to the same schools.
They play the ball games and the kids cheer together.
They have dance together.
Even though there's like over 250000 people here at a given point in the summer, everybody still knows everybody.
Trish's cousin, Leanne Fletcher, grew up not too far away in Kitty Hawk.
And from the time they were kids playing at their grandmother's house to their teenage years running around the beach.
Leanne and Trish were thick as thieves.
Leanne was born in 81.
I was born in 77.
So we were four years apart.
But as we got older, like in high school and like right directly out of high school, it was more of like a bond, like a sisterly bond.
We did a lot more things together, had a lot of the same friend group.
And so we were always with each other, always.
Growing up, Leanne worked at her grandparents' service station and between them, she and Tricia felt like they knew just about everyone and everything that went on in the Outer Banks.
To hear Tricia describe it, Leanne was just a real salt-of-the-earth beach person.
Fun, outgoing, and most of all, full of love for her hometown and the people of her community.
She was like really outgoing.
She definitely, you know, was one that didn't take any excuse my French, but she would give the shirt off of her back.
Like she would do anything in the world for you and help you in any way possible.
She was one of those people that if you had as a friend, like she was like a sister to you, but the bond was like inseparable and she would do anything for you.
If she had a fault, it was that Leanne could sometimes be over generous.
She was someone who loved deeply and without judgment.
She was always trying to help, like someone that maybe had like a disease of like addiction, or someone that maybe you know, lost their job and needed extra cash and needed to find a job.
She would help with that.
So it was like, in all aspects, she was.
You know if like, there was someone that didn't have a lot of money and their child had a birthday coming up, she would literally buy birthday presents, wrap them and give them anonymously.
So like she didn't want the credit for it.
So she wasn't one to take the credit. for things like that.
That's just the type of person she was.
But as you will hear later in today's episode, that kindness would be taken advantage of.
But before we get there, let's get to know a bit more about Leanne.
Leanne graduated high school and married her high school sweetheart.
They lived in a little house over in Kitty Hog.
Leanne's husband Justin, was a local contractor and Leanne, as we said, worked at her family service station.
Then she baked cakes on the side for like weddings and birthday parties and things like that.
She went hunting with Justin and fishing, and Justin was her true love of her life.
But early in their marriage the couple suffered a terrible tragedy the devastating loss of a son late in Leanne's pregnancy.
That really took a major toll.
He died in her arms, basically.
So that was really devastating for Justin and Leanne.
After that, there was like a strain that was like a bond that was like broken.
Something just wasn't there.
There was like a wall between them.
Years later, the couple would welcome another child, a daughter, but their once perfect marriage couldn't seem to get back on track, a fate all too common among couples who experience the trauma of losing a child.
I don't know like Justin and Leanne grew apart and it put a really bad strain on their relationship.
Leanne and Justin eventually separated, but any hopes that they might reconcile were dashed when Leanne later became pregnant.
I think that it really, really hurt Justin that she ended up pregnant with another man's child because in his eyes, at the end of the day, at some point they would be back together.
And I really believe Leanne felt the same way.
Ultimately, the fighting with Justin, coupled with the dispute over custody of her new son, started to take its toll on the 38-year-old mom.
It really took Leanne down like a dark road because she was very motherly.
She was all about her children.
I mean, she just was that kind of mom making sure that they had the right vegetables and fruits on their plate and they ate the right foods.
They had the right clothes.
They were dressed right for the season.
There was always controversy.
There was always hollering, yelling, tug of war with their son.
Leanne started drinking wine.
It was a real struggle for her.
She just started hanging out with like just people that she wouldn't normally hang out with or bring into her home.
And one of those people was a man named John Tolson who went by the nickname Jay.
Their friendship started harmlessly enough over a few beers at an island bar.
He was crying the blues that him and his girl had broke up, you know, and she kind of like again being the nurturing person that she is and caring person that she is, you know.
She started talking to him about, you know like, her problems and what she was going through.
And conversation kind of started.
And he was saying that he didn't have a place to live, that his girlfriend had kicked him out.
And you know she was like well, you know, if you need a place to stay, I have a three bedroom, two bathroom house.
And it's in Kitty Hawk.
But, you know, you're more than welcome to stay until you can find another place to stay.
With her children now away for the summer.
Leanne had the space and, being the kind person she was, she invited Tolson into her home.
And Tolson didn't hesitate to take her up on her hospitality, showing up at her front door with a duffel bag of his belongings.
Leanne explained it to him like, you know, hey, this is just a temporary thing, right?
But their friendship eventually turned romantic.
Nothing more than a nice summer romance for two adults seeking a little companionship.
But that innocent summer romance quickly hit a snag as Leanne started to realize that Jay wasn't all he was cracked up to be.
She started realizing that he wasn't a completely honest person.
Like he told her that he was like the head chef of a restaurant and come to find out he was like the dishwasher there.
And then you know, he told her that he owned a construction company and he didn't own a construction company.
He was actually working for another individual that owned the construction company.
What was worse, Leanne suspected he was hiding something else too.
Leanne had the sixth sense that he was seeing someone else.
And so she actually put on her Facebook that she was in a relationship with John Tolson, you know, Jay Tolson.
So when she did that, it was like it publicized it.
Everybody could see her social media.
So it was like if he was doing something with another girl that was not aware of Leanne, then it would all come out.
That's when the problems really started.
Leanne was never one to put up with the nonsense, so when she learned he was stepping out, she sent him a clear message he was not welcome back at her home by depositing his stuff on her front porch.
She knew what was going on and she told him.
She said you're going to get your stuff and you're going to get out of my house.
That was the afternoon of July 21st, 2020.
Leanne made a couple of posts on Facebook, and then it was like silence.
Complete silence.
Nobody ever heard anything else from her after that.
Then, at approximately 930 am on the morning of July 22nd, a 911 call was made from inside Leanne's home.
The caller, Jay Tolson.
911, what's the address of your emergency?
990 West Kitty Hall Road.
What's your name?
Jay.
Jay told the dispatcher that he had just found Leanne undressed and unresponsive in the bathtub.
Firefighters were the first to respond, and they found the scene pretty much as Jay described it.
Leanne was unresponsive in the bathtub.
She wasn't wearing anything and bleeding from her nose and mouth.
She was still breathing, but barely.
The firefighters go in first and the firefighters find her leaned up against the side of the tub and she's dry.
She's not wet.
Her hair's a little damp, but she's basically completely dry.
So they drag her out of the bathtub to get her flat on the floor to be able to start breathing, helping her with her respirations.
And then the paramedics get there after the firefighters.
As soon as they pull her out of the tub, then the paramedics go in.
But immediately the paramedics realized that Leanne's injuries were much more severe than what they might have expected from just an accidental fall in the tub.
They said that this is more than a fall.
Like, there's something not right here.
She was very jaundiced.
Her head was extremely swollen, but there was no visible blood or trauma.
There was like a few like bruises and like some scratches, but her head was the main thing.
They just, her head was huge.
And they were like, this is not good.
This is not good.
So they immediately called MedFlight.
Leanne was airlifted to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Virginia and admitted to the ICU, where she was placed on a ventilator.
A shunt was inserted in her skull to relieve the dangerous pressure from the swelling of her brain.
They contact her mother.
Her mother, in return, contacted me.
And I get this call that, hey, Leanne's in the hospital and she's on a ventilator.
And I'm like, what?
She's on a ventilator.
My first thoughts are like COVID.
She got COVID because it's COVID.
So I call Marianne.
I'm like, what in the world's going on?
And then she proceeds to tell me that Leanne was found at the house, supposedly found at the house, by Jay.
And he called 911 and said that she fell and that she was drunk.
And I was like, where did she fall from?
The roof?
How is she has this severe of a head injury?
And she fell in the bathtub.
She said, I don't know Trisha, something's fishy.
I don't know.
Leanne's family rushed to her bedside, hoping for the best, but fearing the worst.
She didn't even look like her.
They had shaved her head and then she's intubated, so she's got, you know, the tube coming out of her mouth and then she's got all these other lines.
You know that in a critical care setting that you would have.
She's really super jaundiced, and she's, like, swollen.
To Tricia, who was a registered nurse.
Leanne appeared to have signs of not one but multiple injuries, injuries that looked a lot like she had been physically assaulted.
I went up there and I took pictures.
I was not supposed to do that, but I did it anyways.
I took pictures.
On her wrist, she had bruises.
On her face, she has bruises.
The emergency room doctors had been told Leanne had fallen and hit her head.
But when the trauma surgeon examined her, he too had his doubts.
The head surgeon, trauma surgeon at Norfolk was like there's no way that this came from a fall unless she fell from like 20-story buildings.
This was not a fall from the bathtub.
I said, you need to call the police and you need to call the police right now.
On July 22nd 2020, 38-year-old Leanne Fletcher was rushed to a hospital in Norfolk Virginia, after suffering a catastrophic brain injury.
Less than 24 hours later, it was unlikely she would ever regain consciousness.
With Leanne, when she was in the hospital, laying there, like, is she going to survive?
Is she not going to survive?
What are the odds?
And being able to deal with that emotionally and going through that day-to-day experience, That's hard.
It's really hard.
For three days, Leanne clung to life on a ventilator, while her family grappled with the horrible possibility that her injury was not from an accidental fall, but rather that someone had intentionally hurt her.
On July 25th, Leanne's family made the devastating decision to remove her from life support just three days shy of her 39th birthday.
Patricia says there were still so many questions surrounding Leanne's death, questions that they believe were not being answered when the family contacted police.
According to Tricia, Leanne's family was told that her death was not being investigated as suspicious.
She says that, according to Kitty Hawk PD, they had talked to Jay Tolson at the scene and that they were satisfied from what they saw, that Leanne's death was likely the result of a tragic accident.
They're like, she fell.
She was drunk and she fell.
I mean, what do you want us to do?
Blame a guy for murder?
That was kind of their attitude.
Which also meant that the initial police response may have treated the scene as a medical emergency, not a crime scene.
Leanne's home had not been sealed.
No photographs were taken.
No evidence collected.
This is insane.
Where is this guy?
Where is this J?
How do we get up with this guy?
Like, do they even have a phone number for him?
Do we even know where he's even at?
Much of the family's pain and frustration immediately following Leanne's death was directed at the local police chief, who they believed should be treating Leanne's boyfriend Jay, as a possible homicide suspect.
So I'm freaking out.
And I'm like, you need to call him and have that taped off.
And he needs to bring him in.
He needs to interview him.
Like, this is bad.
This is really, really bad.
Trisha and Leanne's mother rushed back towards Leanne's home in Kitty Hawk.
And on the way, they called the local police chief to demand answers.
It did not go well.
Family member mode, mama mode, nurse mode, like every mode possible kicked in.
Mary Ann, her mother, starts screaming.
I mean, like hysterically, like I had to get off the road.
Anastasia in this situation.
Families have every right to question law enforcement how they're handling a case.
You know, there are public servants who are tasked with investigating events surrounding a death to confirm or not whether foul play may be a factor.
I don't think anyone will dispute that, right?
Some agencies handle it better than others.
And when a breakdown occurs between investigators and a family...
It benefits nobody.
And I'll also say this.
There were some obvious red flags that foul play may be involved in the death of Leanne.
And the family wanted answers.
And I could clearly understand Leanne's family feeling like investigators just let them down.
I can completely understand that.
And, you know, look, I've definitely seen it both ways.
I've seen it that families were reacting justifiably or other times that they were, you know, reading the room in a way that that really wasn't necessarily fair to the police.
Right.
But you know here obviously, if what the family is seeing is that they're not even looking at the possibility that it's a homicide,
Well obviously, based on some of the red flags, as you just put it Scott, they should at least be doing that.
Too early to say right now, you know, where it's going to turn out.
But again, this is coming from Trish's perspective, but we can clearly see why it was that the family was very, very upset.
So we drive from Norfolk straight to the house.
We get there and we don't want to touch anything.
When we went to the door, I said, you have to be, don't touch anything.
Like open the door and just don't touch anything.
And we start looking and the house is like in total disarray.
According to Tricia, Leanne's house was littered with trash and dirty dishes, which was totally out of character for Leanne, who was known to keep a tidy home.
There was like beer cans and like paper bags filled with like like she was recycling beer cans, and there's like dishes all in the sink.
And there's like little sections that are like really clean, like the sofa.
The cushions are off the sofa and they're like propped up against like the coffee table.
There was just things that weren't matching up, weren't adding up.
However, there were no immediate signs of violence, no broken furniture, no signs of a break-in and no visible blood, not even in the bathroom where Jay had supposedly found her unconscious and bleeding.
When you walked in there and you looked it literally, you could not see anything that looked abnormal to the naked eye as far as blood splatter or any kind of blood.
Like, the bathtub was dry.
There was no blood, no nothing.
Like, zero.
Which just didn't seem possible if what Jay had told the 911 operator and the police was true.
On the 911 call, he made the comment that she had blood coming out of her nose.
And so I'm like, where's the blood?
Why is there no blood?
There was trauma and she fell and hit her head to the point of this extent of an injury.
Where is the blood?
By this time, Trisha and Leanne's mom had been joined by a Kitty Hawk police officer.
And so far, they had found little to indicate that the house was indeed a scene of a crime.
Then they entered the bedroom and... The bed's made, completely made, like, perfect.
Marianne told him, she was like, pull back the bedspread.
And he pulled the bedspread and there was like no sheet and the bed was completely covered in blood.
And that's when they were like, ooh, literally there's like a moment of silence.
He told her, get out of the bedroom.
Get out of the house.
A short time later, a blood-soaked shirt was discovered under Leanne's bed.
I mean, it was literally a cream-colored blouse that was red.
I mean, like Kool-Aid red.
But despite this shocking discovery of what they can only assume is a large amount of Leanne's blood, according to Tricia, the Kitty Hawk PD was still hesitant to jump to any conclusions.
They were determined to wait for an autopsy and the ME's exam to give an official cause of death.
There was no pictures taken.
There was no crime scene taped off.
They're still trying to say that she died from a fall in the bathtub.
And so frustrated by what they perceived as police inaction, Leanne's family retained a private investigator to document the condition of the home and preserve potential evidence.
And some of you may be thinking, is this really a good idea?
You know, there is a lot of risk of potentially contaminating evidence or breaking the chain of custody of evidence, which is very, very important in the prosecution of a case.
If we get to that point,
And I'm sure, Anastasia, you may have an opinion about that.
To your point, Scott.
It's like you never know where it's going to lead, which is why you have to always assume you're going to need it in that pristine condition.
You're going to need to worry about things like chain of custody, so you can already see where things are getting.
You know, potentially at least a bit dicey right here.
But, you know, obviously we can understand –
Or imagine how frustrated this family was and how determined they were just to figure out what happened right.
You know, timing, as you know, Scott, is obviously critical.
You know, if Leanne was murdered, they just can't afford to sit idly by.
So they on their own said hey, we have to hire this private investigator as our best option because they just they didn't know what else to do.
He was a retired homicide detective.
His number one thing was just like getting down here as fast as he could, because he said the scene being processed.
Evidence and like what condition is Jay in?
Like does he have any scrapes, bruises?
And all this is like major that needs to be done like immediately.
Like that should have already have been done.
Have the police collected any evidence from the hospital?
Has her nails been clipped?
Has this been done?
Has...
Anybody asked for a rape kit to been done.
And like, he's starting to go through all these things.
And my mind is like, this guy did this and he's going to get by with it.
So on July 31st, more than a week after Leanne's death, Leanne's family decided to take the investigation into their own hands.
What they found would completely change their understanding of what had happened to Leanne on that fateful night.
Tricia and the investigator entered Leanne's home.
Only this time they came with a secret weapon, a chemical agent called Blue Star Forensic Reagent.
It had the power to reveal what police had apparently not yet found.
So when our investigator came in and sprayed the house and flipped the lights off, it was just like a Christmas tree lit up.
There was just blue everywhere.
There was light without light.
There's not even words to describe what that house looked like when he turned those lights off after he sprayed it.
They used a video camera to document their discovery of blood evidence in multiple rooms on dozens of surfaces, creating a 41-minute recording that showed handprints, blood smears and spatter patterns throughout the house.
Now we have that audio for you.
Listen for yourself.
This is the kitchen.
A significant amount of blood was found in a weird shape here on the floor.
Blood was found on the couch, on the floor in front of the couch.
Blood was found on both sides of this cushion, as well as blood was found in the fireplace.
In the bathroom you could see the smears where they had tried to clean up and on the mirror and the walls of the shower and the floor in the kitchen.
Significant amount of blood was found on the wall, on the side of the sink.
A significant amount of blood was found behind the handles, as well as in a portion of the tub.
It was everywhere.
The bed, the walls in the bedroom, the nightstand, the doors.
There was smears going down the hallway.
According to Tricia, it was like a scene out of a horror movie.
Clearly a violent assault had occurred all over the house and she could only imagine the violence that could have left blood spatter on not just the floors but the walls and even the ceiling.
How was she even still alive with that amount of blood loss?
How was she even still breathing?
According to the retired homicide detective, the pattern of evidence told a horrifying story.
It appeared that Leanne had been attacked in the kitchen and then moved from room to room before being left in the bathtub.
It also appeared now assuming this was a crime that the perpetrator spent considerable time cleaning up the scene, trying to remove any visible blood from the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway, even the living room sofa.
That was just mind-boggling that there was actually that much blood.
And to me, how long did he spend and who did he have in here to help him clean this up?
To both the former homicide detective and Leanne's family.
This was clear evidence that Leanne had been murdered, that whoever killed her had stayed to clean the scene, and whoever it was might not have acted alone.
Days after Leanne Fletcher was found dying of a head injury in her home in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, her family returned to the house with a private investigator.
Their discovery of blood convinced them that Leanne had not been injured in an accidental fall.
She had been brutally murdered.
And whoever killed her not only took the time to stage her injuries as an accident, but spent hours meticulously cleaning the crime scene, all while Leanne was still dying in the bathtub.
Which begs the question was Leanne still conscious and aware of the entire time her attacker was cleaning up around her?
Was she a witness to the attempted cover-up of her own murder?
Did she know what was going on?
Could she hear the commotion of the cleanup and him saying, do I get rid of her?
What was he saying that she could hear?
As you'd expect, Lan's family went straight to local police with the evidence that they had found.
But they were left frustrated with what they saw as a lack of urgency from law enforcement.
We're still actively trying to get them involved to really understand that there has been a crime here.
And look, maybe local police felt that hiring the private investigator was overstepping or that could potentially be problematic if there would end up being a case.
Maybe they are still waiting for autopsy results, but for whatever reason, Leanne's family was not having any luck making their case that Leanne had been murdered and that her killer was still at large, or at least not getting the quick results they were hoping for.
The investigator had been in the house, had called Kitty Hawk Police Department, tried to get them on board.
They were not even returning his calls.
Like, he called several times, and they never returned our private investigator's call.
He said, we're just going to have to take this into our own hands.
And so that's exactly what they did.
Leanne's family turned to social media to share Leanne's story and to air their grievances against local law enforcement.
I went on there, as this is what's happened.
This is what's going on, and the police aren't doing anything.
Kind of like a cry for help on social media.
The family also shared the video footage taken from Leanne's house showing the blood-stained bedding, the blood-spattered walls and other potential evidence that had not been collected by police in the immediate aftermath of Leanne's so-called accident.
The family says the public's response, especially in the Outer Banks community, was immediate and overwhelming, with many people who knew Leanne rallying to her family's demands for justice.
Then my private investigator, who was also a former homicide detective, says to me are they doing anything right now?
I said, no.
He said, then you have no other option.
And that's how I looked at it.
I had no other option.
And I just started going to the news.
The story soon gained national attention, with concerned citizens and domestic violence advocates rallying around Leanne's case.
The hashtag Justice for Leanne was soon trending all across the country.
Then the DA calls us, and he's like, we need to have a meeting.
We sure do, don't we?
According to Tricia, things were said in the room that alluded to some troubled history between the family and law enforcement that perhaps they believe was now factoring into the divide.
And also then feeling they were still getting nowhere, the family decided to again appeal to the public, and they say that at that point the case went viral.
So...
Scott here, look, I mean, there's obviously so much that you can unpack here, but...
I think the obvious question, too, is about creating a public campaign, right?
I mean, is it a public pressure campaign?
And I think Tricia would tell you, like, absolutely yes.
Like that was their motivation because, whether it was, they felt they weren't getting any investigation or the investigation wasn't fast enough.
And again, you know, law enforcement did put out statements that they had been investigating the case but that it wasn't happening in the timeline that the family was happy with.
But Tricia says it wasn't happening at all.
But look—
Public pressure campaigns or public campaigns can be helpful sometimes to highlight cases that are otherwise, potentially at least being ignored, but they also can cause, you know, other factors or other I'm trying to think of the right words here but factors that could be problematic later if the case isn't allowed to take its natural course.
You can look at it both ways.
Yeah, I mean.
They're well within their rights to air their grievances, whether it's on the steps of the police department or on social media.
I mean, that's within their rights.
But also you have to think about when they start giving information out that may have been given to them, whether through their private investigator, things that you may want to hold close to the vest, if you're investigators, to determine that if you get somebody in custody and start questioning them about certain things, they may be giving relevant information out that you may not, as an investigator, want out there.
So there's both sides of the story, but certainly it's clear how this family feels, Anasika.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
They feel they weren't getting the attention that they felt like they deserved.
So it's a difficult pull and push here, or push and pull, however you want to put it.
But certainly what's most important is, I think both parties wanted the investigation to move as quickly as it could, But one was being more careful and the other was just being out there to get the word out.
And also Anastasia.
As part of the information posted on social media, they viewed Jay Tolson as their prime suspect.
And remember, the Outer Banks, it's a small community.
And with Leanne's story on everyone's lips, Tolson himself being named, he was feeling the pressure.
People are literally shunning him.
In the face of growing public pressure, the district attorney's office announced they were coordinating with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to investigate Leanne's suspicious death.
At this point, the DA finally said, we're going to get the FBI involved.
We're going to let them come in.
But there was still the issue of the autopsy.
Investigators had stated that they needed to wait for the ME's official cause of death before Leanne's death could be determined whether it was an accident or an actual crime.
But unfortunately that report it just further complicated things because it listed Leanne's cause of death as complications of blunt force trauma to the head, with hepatic cirrhosis contributing, and the manner of death remained undetermined.
Which likely sounds pretty confusing, as it did for Leanne's family.
So let's unpack it for a little bit.
At the center of the uncertainty about the manner of death was the fact that Leanne's body, at the time of being transported to the hospital, appeared jaundiced, a condition that the skin appears to be yellow as a result of a liver failure.
Now, when talking about adults, the most commonly known cause of jaundice is cirrhosis, a liver disease caused by long-term alcohol abuse, which was a detail that Trisha says.
The police seemed stuck on.
They were trying to say that that's what caused her death was her alcoholism, that she was dying from liver failure, and then she fell and that's why she bled out.
But according to Tricia, while Leanne did drink alcohol, she showed no signs of liver failure in the weeks leading up to her death.
Leanne was seen by a physician and actually had a procedure scheduled for cataract surgery and had had a knee procedure six months prior to that and had labs done and had no signs of any hepatic failure, no signs of jaundice.
The week that she died, she was scheduled for cataract surgery.
One of the first signs of jaundice, where you mainly see it, is in the eyes.
The white of your eye will actually start giving a hint of yellow.
And she had none of that, zero.
But according to Leanne's doctor, there was another possible reason why Leanne's skin had appeared jaundiced from heptic failure.
After sustaining her fatal head injury, she had been left to die, possibly for much longer than even Tricia had imagined.
The trauma surgeon said, this did not just happen in the last 12 hours.
This takes time for this amount of swelling with this injury.
The jaundice was from her organs starting to actually shut down because she had laid there for so long.
So just how long did Leanne lie in the bathtub with a fatal head injury?
Was it a couple of hours as Tolson had claimed or was it much longer?
It was critical to establish a timeline of her movements on that day and his.
And one way to do that was with the help of witnesses, starting with a co-worker of Tolson's who claimed he had overheard Tolson on the phone with Leanne the morning of July 21st, more than 24 hours before Tolson's call to 911.
This guy comes to us after and reaches out to me on social media and heard the threats.
And heard him threatening Leanne, saying he was going to go home and beat her ass.
But the most damning witness account came from Tolson's boss, who claimed he had spoken to him just hours after Tolson had called 911.
Jay had went to his boss and said that him and Leanne had gotten into a fight and it got out of hand.
He was very emotional and he was crying and his boss actually left the job site with him and said what do you mean?
And he's like, it got out of control.
She's in the hospital.
This was after he had called 911.
He actually went to work and told his boss.
Tolson's boss at the time suspected that there had been a violent domestic dispute.
He was like, I mean, like, how bad is it?
He's like, it's pretty bad.
All of this, of course, contradicted what Tolson had told both the 911 operator and first responders who arrived at the scene.
He calls 911 and basically in just the short minutes of the 911 call he basically tells them three or four different stories that she was really drunk last night.
He thinks she took some pills.
She fell in the kitchen.
Then she fell in the bathroom in the tub.
She had been sick.
I mean, there was like multiple stories just on the 911 call.
But Leanne's family and a growing circle of friends and concerned citizens were convinced they knew the real story.
That Tolson must have returned to Leanne's house, found his belongings on the porch and confronted Leanne with violence.
The blood evidence that showed up after spraying the house with the chemical reagent showed that the attack likely started in the kitchen, where his attack caused blood to pool on the floor and spatter on the walls, ceiling and even the sofa.
Now again presuming it's Tolson that he would have then likely dragged her body upstairs to stage the fall in the bathroom by undressing her and putting her unconscious body in the tub.
Now it's hard to know just when the attack took place, but what we do know is that he waited until after 9 am to dial 911.
So what did he do for the hours that Leanne was fighting for her life?
Trisha believes he called for help to clean the house and destroy the evidence of the murder.
So then who did he call?
According to Trisha, phone records subpoenaed by SBI show he called who she says was his other girlfriend.
So he actually called her the night prior.
He called her on 721 late night, like between 930 and midnight, and basically called her that entire night and that entire next morning until she responded around 430 in the morning.
She responds to his phone calls and his text messages.
And he's telling her that him and Leanne got into a fight and that Leanne was unconscious and that she hadn't woke up from the fight and that he didn't know what to do.
And now she says that she told him, I don't know why you're calling me.
You should be calling 911.
Why I'm not a doctor.
So did those phone records suggest that Tolson had succeeded in convincing her to help him cover up the crime.
Well, Tricia thinks so.
So from 430 in the morning until like 930 there was no communication between these two individuals.
Like it went from blowing the phone up to like dead silence.
And what was Jay doing from 4.30 in the morning until 9.30 when he called 911?
So what was going on in those five hours?
We all know later that the house had been cleaned up.
All the blood was cleaned up.
There was clothes washed.
There was fans going in the house directed towards the sofa where the sofa had been scrubbed.
There is blood splattered everywhere that you can't see visible naked to the eye, because it had been cleaned up.
Armed with the phone records and the growing circumstantial evidence that Tolson had indeed lied to police, the case was presented to a grand jury.
On October 26 2020, that grand jury returned an indictment and a warrant was issued for Tolson's arrest.
But there was just one problem.
Tolson had been tipped off about the indictment and he was now on the run.
A phone call from an individual that said, Jay's skipping town.
He's got on a boat and he's heading towards Maine and he's heading towards Canada.
He knew he was being indicted.
Someone had told him, you're going down for this crime.
On October 26 2020, a major storm was hitting the Outer Banks and the suspect in the murder of Leanne Fletcher was in the wind.
But this was the Outer Banks and, as she told us, nothing happened here without Tricia finding out about it.
He gets Jay on a boat during a storm.
So my SBI agent is like there's no way that he's on a boat and he's heading to Bunker Maine because, like there's a freaking storm Trisha.
I said, he's on a boat on the way to Maine.
I'm telling you, he is going.
So he calls me and he's like, we're on it.
We're gonna find him.
Don't freak out.
I can tell in my agent's voice that he is gone and he is missing.
He is gone.
After this huge campaign to finally get justice for Leanne's murder, it's hard to imagine what Leanne's family must have been going through.
The man you always suspected was her killer was now potentially about to get away.
The guy got on a boat in the middle of a storm and sailed to Maine.
I mean, that is completely like something out of a movie, Anasika.
And with that, you've also heard the saying, the long arm of the law.
Well, the same can be said of social media, because even in Maine, Tolson could not outrun his notoriety.
He actually was found by a local officer in a ditch, passed out on the side of the road.
And someone called and said hey, there's this guy that's apparently intoxicated and he's in a ditch.
So they go pick him up.
And they start by his name and his date of birth.
And the police there are smart enough.
Something's fishy about this situation.
And that police department starts doing their job and looks on social media.
And they're like this is the guy that committed this murder.
That's publicized all over social media, all the way to the UK.
And this guy is literally here in Maine.
This is crazy.
And so they contact our sheriff's department, and the sheriff's department contacts the SBI and it's like hey, your guy's in Maine.
Trisha remembers getting the call from an SBI agent.
Within 16 hours I get a phone call and he said I cannot tell you where I'm at and what's going on, but that I have Jay and I'm about to get on a plane.
After what had turned into a grueling saga for Leanne's family, law enforcement had finally made an arrest.
Jay Tolson was charged with second-degree murder of Leanne Fletcher.
Tolson was extradited to North Carolina and held at the Dare County Detention Center on a million-dollar bond.
They did indict him.
They did charge him with second-degree murder.
After numerous delays, Tolson's trial began in late August of 2023, more than three years after Leanne's murder.
It was important to Leanne's family that not only was the cause of death blunt force trauma, but that Leanne's apparent liver failure was not a result of alcoholism but the direct result of being left to die.
And the ME has our back on it.
She's like, that's true.
This is 100%.
This is something that was brought up when the ME actually was on the stand was could this happen to someone that laid there for multiple hours and their organs started shutting down?
And she said, absolutely.
But despite what seemed like overwhelming evidence, the prosecution still faced hurdles.
Most importantly, defense claims that Leanne's family's decision to hire a private investigator and collect evidence on their own had tainted the crime scene and the chain of custody.
And in fact the judge threw out some of the evidence collected at Leanne's home for that very reason.
All the stuff that our private investigators had collected, like the sheets and the bedding and the recordings of the interviews.
And that's why they talked us into asking for him to take a plea deal.
On August 31st 2023, four days into the trial and after two days of testimony, Tolson pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.
At the sentencing hearing, Leanne's cousin Tricia, gave an emotional statement condemning Tolson's decision to delay calling 911 and his attempt to clean up the crime scene.
She told the court that had he sought immediate help, Leanne might have survived, but instead he robbed her children of their mother.
She was a good person.
She would not harm a fly.
And the fact that someone was going to go without punishment and Leanne basically, was not going to have justice and she was just going to be another statistic.
There was no way.
There was no possible way I was letting her go down like that.
There was no way.
The court acknowledged the pain of the family but accepted Tolson's plea in part to avoid further trauma from an extended trial.
In the end, the judge sentenced Tolson to 56 to 80 months in prison.
They said he'll probably get 20 to 25 years.
When we heard five to seven, it took the breath right out of us.
Tolson was credited with nearly three years of time already served.
He was released in May of 2025.
He spent exactly four years and eight months to the day.
No charges were ever filed against anyone else.
This case was about a woman, a mother of two, who was brutally attacked and left to die in her own home.
But this was also about one family's quest for justice and their fight against what seemed like impossible odds.
I think that the most justice for Leanne was holding not just Jay accountable but the police department, the mayor, the DAs and all of them accountable and hoping that with this in the future that they'll handle other cases differently.
But the fight for justice, it goes on even after the trial.
Leanne's family has remained active in raising awareness and advocating for procedural reform in investigative practices.
She will never be forgotten.
As long as I can keep her alive, she'll stay alive.
And just know that if this happens, ever happens to your family member, that it is a war.
It is a war and it's a process, but don't give up and fight and fight.
Don't give up.
Leanne's story is a tragic reminder of how domestic violence can escalate quickly, especially when the victim tries to end a relationship.
Leanne Fletcher was a devoted mother, a caring friend and a generous soul who opened her home and her heart to someone in need.
And he repaid that kindness with violence.
Her story also reminds us that every life matters, every victim deserves justice, and about the unwavering love of family to make sure the truth comes to light.
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 Walker Lamond.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjean Grande.
I think Chuck would approve.
I think Chuck would approve.
