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Shownotes Transcript
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I met John, it was the third or the fourth grade. We moved over to Hansel Avenue. I had two stepbrothers and they were already friends with John. He lived right down the street, somewhat at a diagonal, about a thousand feet away. And we all kind of hit it off. We rode four-wheelers through the neighborhood, actually probably terrorized a little bit. We went fishing a lot in Joshua Creek, as a matter of fact.
This is Patrick Skinner today, in his mid-30s. He's a husband, a father, and former best friend of John Wells. It took me several months of searching to track him down. You'd be surprised how many Patrick Skinners there are out there. But I did finally get a hold of him.
Patrick moved away from Arcadia several years ago and hasn't really been back since. But in July of 2003, he knew John Wells better than anyone. The pair was together pretty much every day before, during, and after school. Through high school, we rode to school together. We still went fishing a lot. Went to softball games. His girlfriend was on a softball team after school.
And he certainly was not shy. I was more the introvert, I would say. John, he was kind of a jokester. By the time the boys were both 16, Patrick says he noticed a shift in John's attitude. His friend started standing up for himself more and pushing back against his grandma's house rules. When I first met John, he seemed a bit timid, to tell you the truth. He was always shy.
scared to deviate. I actually think he was under some pretty strict supervision there for a while. He had very strict conditions. I don't want to say that we free roamed, but my stepbrothers and I, we free roamed. We ran wild.
John, not at first, no. He seemed to be under his grandmother's thumb a lot and very afraid of consequences or deviating and just doing something a little bit wrong. As we got older, that changed. He kind of come into his own. When John turned 17 on May 1st of 2003, he was just one year away from full independence.
Patrick says that's when John's desire to leave his complicated family life behind became the strongest it had ever been. According to Patrick, John was increasingly more vocal when he disagreed with his grandmother. Some of his angst even carried over into school, where he was put into behavioral reform programs. He wasn't bad. He wasn't violent. He had a smart-ass mouth. He had a smart mouth.
I do know he wanted to get out. Of Arcadia? Not out of Arcadia, specifically out of the house he was living in. He just, he wanted out of that. There were just some strict rules there. Like, I mean, I think it was kind of rough for him. And I don't know to the extent of how rough, but that was his main goal. He wanted out of that house. Patrick says whenever John got the chance to be out of his grandma's house, he used cannabis as a way to escape. But that was pretty much it.
I never knew of him to be in anything except for marijuana. As a matter of fact, he really didn't even drink. In the wake of John's death, Patrick was shocked to learn that his friend had other substances in his system. Cocaine was a huge surprise to me. I do know that he hung around some people occasionally that I did not associate with. I could see them being in cocaine. But John, no, I would have never, never thought. Never seen it, never heard about it.
All of these little bits of information that Patrick knew about John were what DeSoto County detectives wanted to learn when they had him come in for an interview on July 9, 2003, the day after John died. This is Detective Kim Lewis. It is 1226 p.m., the 9th of July, 2003. Present is Patrick Christopher Skinner.
For the rest of this episode, you'll be hearing excerpts of this archive tape mixed with some clips of Patrick's interview with me in present day. The reason for that is because portions of the 2003 interview get very fuzzy and hard to hear, but Patrick's more recent interview with me will help fill in those gaps. Patrick was only 16 when police first interviewed him, so his mother Lisa accompanied him while he spoke with investigators at the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office.
The conversation took place about a half hour before authorities got Pat Strader into the station for her first interview. You heard parts of her conversation with Detective Kim Lewis in the last episode. When Kim Lewis first sat down with Patrick, John had been dead for less than a day, and Patrick had no idea how his best friend had actually died.
So walking into the sheriff's office, Patrick was unaware of what authorities knew at that time, which was that John had been shot. And just to clarify here, according to reports, all of the law enforcement investigators who were involved up until that point knew John had been shot. But Detective Kim Lewis had not yet learned the information that a gun had been found at the scene and then removed. Only the sheriff and his chief deputy knew about that.
So when Patrick told Kim this: The first place I go is over to the four-wheeler. About two feet away from the four-wheeler was John's gun. It's a little six-shot revolver, .22 Magnum. That got a wild reaction. They all jumped up. And it was like I set a fire under everyone. And people were screaming to other people. Phones were getting picked up. And at that point I asked him, "How did he die?"
she said he was shot. And that was the first time I actually found out that he was shot. Once Kim Lewis got the part of Patrick's story about finding a gun at the scene confirmed on the record, she started questioning him about what specifically happened after he picked up the gun. Here's his response from his 2003 interview. It was dropped in the dirt. And John just doesn't leave a gun laying in the dirt. So I thought something was wrong.
Sure, there were six live rounds in the gun? Sure. Did you see them? Yes. They look like regular .22 shells, but they had a sharp red point on them. Is that what you dumped out of the gun? Yes. Were all six of them red-tipped? Are you confident that all six were identical? Yes.
I found his belt, probably 12 feet away from the gun. And then Skip found his holster in the middle of the belt and the gun. So he held out the holster. I put the gun in the holster, took it back and put the holster clip on my pocket. I put the belt in the Explorer. I walked over to the water, looked down in the water, and I saw John laying in the water.
I looked at Skip. I made a hand motion for him to come over. I didn't want Miss Trader to see. He come over. Lil' Dean said, "That's just a drum in the water." But Miss Trader was already walking over there and saw him. And she just flipped out. Skip asked me if I could drive them all back. So we got an Explorer. We drove back up to the house. I put the gun in the back seat. That's it.
Kim was puzzled by Patrick's version of events. If he was sure that John's revolver was fully loaded with six unfired bullets in it when he picked it up, that meant it couldn't have been the gun that shot John, accidental or not. Just based on what I've read in police reports and heard in the tone of Kim's voice during the interview, it felt like Kim believed one of two things.
One, 16-year-old Patrick was misremembering. Or two, he was lying and was involved much more than he was letting on. To shake him up, Kim confronted Patrick head-on. That part of the audio recording from 2003 is really fuzzy, so here's Patrick's recollection of it in present day. They asked me flat out, did you kill him?
That was her work. Did you kill him? No. And was it an accident? I did not do it. And they would tell me, look, if it was an accident, we would understand. He's like, but you need to tell the truth and you need to bring this out. And I'm like, look, I did not do it. I'm like, everything I have told you has been 100% the truth.
Kim changed tactics after confronting Patrick and pivoted to asking him what he knew about John's relationship with his grandma and step-uncle Skip. Patrick's response to that line of inquiry definitely piqued investigators' interest. Do you know if Skip and John have any problems? Not as far as I know. I don't really know the guy. Has John ever expressed to you any...
- He said he's got a temper. Said he's like his granddaddy, he'd do something wrong and he'd just start yelling at you. He said he's got a quick temper.
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Patrick told Detective Kim Lewis that there were times John didn't get along with his step-uncle Skip. After Mel Sr. died in June of 2003, Skip, who'd rarely come out to Arcadia before then, started working at the Southeast Hansel sawmill and living in Pat's home Monday through Friday. Tension building between Skip and John during the summer of 2003 is something Patrick remembers John brought up in subtle ways on occasion.
He did mention Skip a lot to me. Just that he was there, some non-verbal cues I guess you would say that he just maybe felt a little uncomfortable like his grandfather's passed away and now this person's coming in and just essentially running the show at that house, running the sawmill across the road and I think John may have kind of thought that that would be his responsibility when his grandfather passed away.
In addition to John's discomfort about Skip hanging around in Arcadia, Patrick says John also started growing increasingly resentful of his grandma's strictness.
Over the years, Patrick said he never witnessed firsthand Pat discipline the boys for disobedience, but he heard it all the way from his house. I don't know exactly what he went through with the household, but Pat was always pretty nice to me. But I've heard the kids, Matt and John both, screaming from my house before, as in they're getting their butt tore up.
Did John ever express to you that he was angry about living with his grandmother or angry and being Arcadia or wishing he could live with his dad or wishing he could live with his mom? He never is mom. He didn't really talk about his mom much. His dad, there for a while when we were younger, like he loved his dad, obviously liked to be around his dad, but I don't think he was around much.
As he got older, he started speaking with his dad more and developed a closer relationship with his dad. He did want to go be with his dad for a time. I don't know really what stopped that. I don't think his dad was in the best living situation as it was either. So I think that just never came to fruition. He stayed at his grandparents. Although he did visit his dad a lot more as we were driving age. We were free. We could go anywhere we wanted.
And that was true for John, to a certain extent. Despite the small freedoms John had outside of his grandma's presence, she often pried into his personal life and habits. According to Patrick, Pat often cornered him with questions about whether or not John was getting into trouble, expecting Patrick to reveal if John was misbehaving.
For some reason, she trusted me. I was a good boy. And not that I wasn't, but out of all the friends, she would ask me things. Is John smoking marijuana? Is John doing drugs? Is John doing this? Did John go see such and such? I don't know. No, not that I know of. No, he's not smoking marijuana. He was. I wasn't. I actually never tried it, but he had gotten into it.
But for some reason, she would always pull me off to the side and ask me questions like I'm just going to rat out my best friend, one of my best friends, for anything that they were doing wrong. I never understood that. He says when Pat called him on the afternoon of July 8, 2003, to come help her look for John, he figured it was another case of Grandma trying to keep tabs on John and going about it in a way that relied on Patrick.
And when she called that day, that's why I didn't even bat an eye to it. I'm like, here we go again. Like, you know, what does she want now? So without much hesitation, Patrick said he agreed to help Pat search for John. But if he's being honest, he had zero sense of urgency about it. I slept in late.
I IM'd with my girlfriend at the time for probably a good part of the morning. She was actually up north. We didn't like being away from each other, you know, teenage things. So, and I think I may have actually been IMing with her when I got the call from Pat about John. She can't find him. He went over to burn trash, wants me to go with her to try to find him. That's not verbatim, but that's just what I remember about the conversation.
I am to my girlfriend at the time, like, hey, got to go look for John. And she's like, what now? I'm like, I don't know. This, you know, his grandmother, because she knew all about grandmother pulling me to the side and expecting me to just tell all, I guess. According to case documents, Pat made her first call to Patrick at approximately 3.15 p.m. She told him she was going to get gas in her Explorer first, then she would swing by and pick him up.
Patrick was so disinterested in Pat's request that he gave into his grogginess and he fell back asleep for a brief period of time. He woke up to her honking her car horn in his driveway, and by the time he got dressed and walked outside, Pat was gone. A few minutes later, at approximately 3.45 p.m., Pat used her home phone to call Patrick again and asked him to come over and help her look for John. I went over in my own vehicle, and I was like,
I got in my car, I drove to John's house. Still really didn't know what was going on. I parked outside of her house and kind of, and this is where it all gets kind of fuzzy around some of these finer details. She told me again, you know, John went to take the trash over. We can't find him. We've looked for him for hours and called for him. And Skip was there. And again, I didn't know Skip real well. But I'm like, so we're all three going to
"Back here? Okay." We all three went in the Explorer. We went back straight to the burn pit. Right away I get out and she's yelling for John. Patrick refers to the trash pile in the woods as a burn pit because sometimes he saw John burn the garbage as a way from keeping it from getting too nasty. I don't think he burnt it every time. They'd pile some up and burn it, but that's where they dumped and burned their trash.
Again, not something the Department of Environmental Protection would love, but hey, it's the country. Anyway, Patrick remembers after he, Pat, and Skip arrived at the trash pile and saw John's idling four-wheeler, the next few minutes of his life got very intense, very fast.
so the four-wheelers there backed up to the burn pit i think the trash was still loaded and there i looked down and there's a pistol right next to the four-wheeler and at the time i'm not i'm not thinking anything like so i pick it up and i'm like yeah that's kind of weird john took care of his things especially his knives his guns he was actually a clean freak in some ways when it come to that stuff so to actually to find it in the sand
It's just abnormal for him to do something like that. It was right next to the four-wheeler, and I pick it up, and as a little .22 revolver, I remember pulling a pin, and the wholesaler had fallen out of it and, you know, putting it back together. Did bullets come out? They did, and that's part of my memory that I didn't think at the time it had been fired based on what fell out in my hand.
So it was a six shot, so six unfired bullets should have fallen out if it wasn't fired. Five full bullets, one casing should have fallen out if it was fired. Right, and I don't remember seeing an empty casing. But then again, I'm not sitting there counting them. I'm literally pulling a pin and the cylinder's falling out. It was an old single action, I think, that you've got to roll.
And one by one. And I ended up popping the whole cylinder out of it. Would you have known the difference at that time of a casing versus a... Yes. Yeah. I wasn't familiar with the particular gun. Hence, I pulled the pin and fell apart. But actually, they did ask me. Skip asked me had it been fired. And I think that's what prompted me to pull the pin because I'm sitting here looking and I don't know.
But I let them out in my hand and I'm like, "No, they're all good." Put it back together and I think I recall setting it on top of the four-wheeler seat. Pat is still yelling for John around. So I'm kind of like, "What am I doing here?" You know, just, this is ridiculous. So about 10 or 15 feet away from me, I remember it was either a belt or a holster.
At that point, I'm looking at the ground. I'm like, guns here, holsters here, belts here, something else over here. It's just almost like something was, breadcrumbs were almost laid out to find. And that's not what went through my mind then. It's just something I started following. And I got to the edge of this standing stagnant water. And I'm looking down in the water.
and just looking around to see if I see anything else that's fallen down. And I'm not sure what I'd seen at first. Or maybe I didn't want to know what I was seeing. I could tell there was a body in the water. I stared at it long enough, and he appeared to be on his stomach. His arms were kind of like this, and there was like an old rusty 55-gallon drum sitting on top of him.
When Patrick told me John was, quote, like this, he gestured and hung his body like a scarecrow, both arms spread up and out. And I'm still second-guessing myself. I know that's some trash. That's not what I think it is. I remember the murky, nasty water and the sediment that was just settled all over his body like he had been there for a while.
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After the initial shock of realizing it was his best friend who was face down in the water, Patrick alerted the only adults around him, Skip and Pat. So I said, Skip, Skip, come here. And I pointed and he throws my hand down and he grabs me and he pulls me away and he grabs Pat and starts pulling us away. And she's like, it's him. It's him. Is it him? And Skip's like, yes, it's him.
And he shuffles us over, puts us, he's like, "Patrick, you drive." She's hysterical, just screaming at the top of her lungs. So I'm driving, I'm in somewhat of shock. I'm kind of numb at this point. I'm still second guessing whether or not I saw what I saw. And I hear I've been shuffled away and they're telling me to drive. I believe Skip actually grabbed the stuff off the four-wheeler, including the gun, and put it in the Explorer.
She settled down and Skip told her, yes, it's him, we need to call the cops. It was during the short ride back to Pat's house to call 911 that Patrick says the conversation about what to do with John's gun, belt, holster, and thigh strap came up.
Pat asked me, she's like, "Patrick, please don't tell him about the gun." And I kind of looked at her, she's like, "He's a minor." She's like, "He was over there by himself." She's like, "I just, I don't want to get in trouble." I'm like, "Yeah, sure, whatever." How many times was that brought up to you to not talk about the gun? Several times on the way back. And I just said, "Yep, yep, great. Won't say nothing. No problem." Did you feel weird about that?
All I can remember is thinking how selfish you're trying to be right now. You're scared you're going to get in trouble. You let him go off with a gun all the time. He was great with a gun. He was better with... I mean, he went through all the safety courses. Yeah, we were minors, but we live in Arcadia. So some of that was just going through my head.
As soon as the trio arrived back at Pat's house at 4:30 p.m., Pat got on the phone with dispatchers, and the bundle of stuff the group took from the scene stayed in the Explorer. While Pat was speaking with 911, Patrick said Skip made an odd remark. Here's Patrick mentioning it during his July 9th interview with Detective Kim Lewis.
He asked if I saw what looked like drag marks in the ground. Did y'all see, did I look like drag marks in the ground? He asked me if I saw them. I said yeah. In what context did he say that? Was he being an investigator and trying to find out what happened? Was he concerned that somebody might see those? How did you perceive what he was saying to you? He acted like he didn't know whether they were drag marks or not, what it looked like to me.
like the marks to the ground, he pretty much asked what they look like to me. And what did you say? I told him it looked like he had been drugged across the ground. It looked like his feet marks to me, like his feet had been drugged across the ground.
Patrick's memory about whether or not he and Skip had a conversation about drag marks has faded over the past 19 years. But he does remember something about it coming up in their conversation immediately after they found John. Did Skip ever say to you that those are drag marks? Did you ever think that there were drag marks? What was your memory of that? At one point, I do remember a little area that was a little more disturbed than the rest, but...
I honestly can't recall whether they were called drag marks or, but I do remember seeing the disturbed ground." On top of having some kind of discussion related to drag marks, Patrick also told Kim that Skip mentioned that he wanted to be present when police interviewed him. Today, Patrick is unsure if Skip told him this directly or if Skip suggested the idea to his mother Lisa.
Lisa got involved around 5 o'clock after the police had been called and Patrick had returned home visibly upset. I get home. I walk in. I see my mom. She knows something's wrong. And she asks, what it is? And I'm like, it's John. And she's like, what about him? And I told her, he's dead. And I lose it at that point. I'm a basket case for probably the next 45 minutes.
I believe my mom may have went over there because I couldn't talk. I couldn't get words out. I believe she may have went over there to see what was going on. And I think she talked to Pat and Skip. I don't remember him saying that to me, but I almost think he said that to my mother. Like that he wanted to be there. Here's Patrick telling Kim Lewis about this information during his July 9th, 2003 interview. He wanted to be like present while y'all was questioning me.
So he told you last night before you went home the last time that he wanted to bring you up here? He wanted to be present? I guess he thought cops are going to be at their house today. Everything Patrick revealed to Kim in his first interview made her and other investigators start to turn their attention more on Skip. But before Kim completely pivoted away from Patrick and started her interview with Pat, she asked him one very important question.
One that had been on repeat in everyone's mind, except for some reason, the three people who'd found John. Why didn't anybody go in the water and get John? Patrick's answer to that question is the same today as it was back in 2003. First instinct for a lot of people is to run down and
Like, look, I don't know why that instinct didn't hit me. Maybe it's because I'm trying to process what I'm seeing and then I'm getting immediately pulled away from it. I don't know. Or maybe it was her being hysterical and I can't answer that. Then I remember making this statement to the police. I made this statement that I knew he was dead. I knew he'd been there a long time and I keep going back to this sediment in the water.
murky water in a ditch like that you stir it up it turns almost opaque and as it settles over whatever it settles as the sediment settles out it settles on whatever it happens to be in the water and from what I remember what was under the water was just covered in this silt so I knew it had been in the water for a long time or at least long enough for that silt to settle
For almost two decades, Patrick has lived with a lot of internal guilt about the fact that he didn't do things differently 19 years ago. I felt actually guilty about not forcing myself down there to try to help him. But I think it's mainly the cops that made me feel guilty about that. I mean, if you're ever in the situation I was in, sometimes it's hard to say what you would do until you're put in that situation.
It did not sit right with DeSoto County detectives that neither Patrick, Pat, or Skip had attempted CPR on John when they first found him. It's something Kim pointed out during Patrick's interview and about a half hour later when she got a crack at Pat. But because neither of their responses had been anything other than, "Well, we assumed he was dead because he'd been gone so long," Kim had to move on. The investigation had too much ground to cover to get hung up on that.
Like you heard in the last episode, we know Kim interviewed Pat on July 9th, around 1 o'clock, shortly after speaking with Patrick. Investigators didn't clear her or Patrick as potential suspects after their initial interviews, but based on some of the things they said, authorities felt confident the last of the prime witnesses, Skip, had to be questioned in quick succession as well.
Everything in the case was rapidly evolving, and by the time DeSoto County Sheriff's Office got Skip in the hot seat at 2:15 p.m. on July 9th, an FDLE special agent had joined the interrogation process. That agent, named John Smith, along with Kim Lewis, wanted to know how Skip's version of events was going to stack up against Patrick and Pat's stories.
Based on what police had learned so far, Skip was the last person to see John alive, riding off into the woods on the four-wheeler at 12:30 on July 8. Skip was the guy authorities had to pin down. And pinned down is exactly what they did. You lied to me. I'm sorry, sir. You lied to me over a couple of things, which causes me to really think you're up your eyeballs in this stuff.
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