Ep 5 of 15: Skip
31:08 Share

Want the same expert advice you get from the pros in the store while shopping online at DiscountTire.com? Meet Treadwell, your personal online tire guide that matches you with the perfect tire for your vehicle. Get your best match in one minute or less with Treadwell by Discount Tire. Let's get you taken care of. Boaters know that bad weather, like storms, lightning, and wind, can turn a fun day on the water into a challenge.

But what if you had satellite-delivered weather data giving you the full picture of what's around you, even when you're offshore and out of cell range? With SiriusXM Marine, get up-to-date weather directly on your boat's display. Features include radar, lightning, marine warnings, wind and wave info, and much more. And for offshore anglers, imagine having a guide that tells you where it might be best to cast your line. Fish mapping does just that. It's 8-5.

Fishing-focused features, including fishing recommendations, weed line info, plankton info, and sea surface temperature information can help you find fish faster. Plus, you can add SiriusXM Entertainment and listen to ad-free music, plus sports, talk, comedy, news, and more while you're on the water. Visit SiriusXM.com slash marine to learn more.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, plus auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Quote now at Progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary, discounts not available in all states and situations. This is Episode 5, Skip.

By midday on July 9, 2003, DeSoto County investigators and Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents couldn't make sense of a lot of the information in the John Wells case. But there were a few things they knew for certain. One, John was alive for several hours after he woke up on the morning of Tuesday, July 8, but dead from a gunshot wound by 4.30 p.m. the same day.

2. His grandma, best friend, and step-uncle had found a revolver at the scene of his death and hidden it from police. 3. Crime scene techs had collected other pieces of evidence at the scene nearly 24 hours after John was found that indicated foul play. 4. There were traces of drugs in John's system that didn't appear to have anything to do with his death but were investigated nonetheless.

And five, the investigation had a long way to go. Authorities' hope was that the remaining primary witness to the events of John's life on July 8th would enlighten them more. Melvin Eugene Strater Jr., who was known as Skip, was the person investigators wanted to speak with next. Skip was John's step-uncle. His father, Mel Sr., was the second husband of Pat Strater, John's biological grandmother.

John and Skip were not blood related. Investigators brought Skip into the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office for an interview at 2:15 p.m. on July 9, 2003, roughly 24 hours after John was killed. A DeSoto County detective named Kurt Mays and an FDLE agent named John Smith conducted the questioning.

Due to its age, the quality of the tape recording of this interview isn't very good. The parts you'll hear have been cleaned up, and the sections that are inaudible, I'll narrate with direct quotes from transcripts or police reports. One of the first things Agent Smith told Skip was that investigators had been talking with Patrick and Pat, and they would continue to do so to make sure Skip's story lined up with theirs.

While listening to this interview, which only lasted 50 minutes, by the way, I definitely got a sense that authorities were much more aggressive with Skip.

Everything from the words they used to the tone in which they asked him questions felt way more intense than Detective Kim Lewis's approach with Patrick and Pat. Skip was face-to-face with two seasoned interrogators, one of whom was a special agent with FDLE. Pat and Patrick, on the other hand, had only sat down with Kim, a fairly inexperienced interviewer from DeSoto County Sheriff's Office who had a much calmer demeanor.

According to case reports, the detectives interviewing Skip specifically asked him what he remembered from July 8th. They wanted details. Skip told detectives that he woke up at Pat's early that morning because he was expecting a semi-truck to arrive at the sawmill across the street from the house at 7 o'clock. After Skip's dad Mel Sr. died in June, Skip had been driving to and from Arcadia from his house in North Fort Myers to keep the sawmill business running.

During the work week, he lived at Pat's house with her and John. According to Skip, the semi-truck showed up around 7:15 a.m., and from then until 9:00 a.m., Skip unloaded 480 wood pallets from the truck and reloaded it with cut lumber. Around 9:00, he asked Pat to wake John up so John could help him finish the job.

According to Skip, the forklift he had been using to put lumber on the tractor trailer had overheated and he needed another set of hands to get the rest of the lumber onto the semi. So John helped pitch in, and after that, Skip said he also asked John to unload some more pallets from a trailer he'd driven up from North Fort Myers. By 9.30 a.m., all of the heavy lifting was done. There was just one more small chore left to do. Take the trash out.

According to Skip, there were a few minutes between 9.30 and 10 o'clock when he and John went inside the house to cool off. During that time, Pat asked John to run a thank you card over to a neighbor's house who'd attended Mel Sr.'s funeral a few weeks earlier. After John returned from that errand, Skip said he asked the teen to gather up all of the trash from the house and sawmill and put it in a trailer and drive it all over to the dump in the woods near Joshua Creek.

John went outside to do that, but came back a few minutes later with bad news. The wooden trailer used for hauling trash had a flat tire. Skip said John offered to drive up to Walmart and buy a can of Fix-A-Flat tire repair to see if that would solve the problem. And after getting some cash from Pat, John took off in Pat's blue-green Ford Explorer SUV, which was also the vehicle he was allowed to drive after getting his license.

For those of you listening who don't know what Fix-A-Flat is, it's a can of adhesive and aerosol that seals and inflates a tire. Skip said John returned from Walmart with the Fix-A-Flat about a half hour later, which would have been around 11:30 a.m., and he attempted to use the Fix-A-Flat on the bum tire, but it didn't do the trick. Eventually, John and Skip worked together in Pat's backyard and just ended up replacing the bad tire with a spare one from another trailer.

That process took about an hour, according to Skip. And the last time he saw John, it was roughly 12:15, 12:30 p.m. When authorities asked Skip if he'd seen John arm himself with his .22 revolver, Skip said he didn't see John go inside and get the gun, but he remembered seeing a glimpse of it as the teen was riding off. Skip said it was in a holster, sitting below the handlebars on the four-wheeler.

But right here is where I want to stop for a minute and go through this part of Skip's statement a little more. Skip said for sure that he knew John went to the Walmart in Arcadia to buy the can of Fix-A-Flat, and he was home by 11:30ish, so that was where I started. According to GPS, the store on Highway 70 in Arcadia is approximately a seven-minute drive from Pat's house, one way.

So, that means if John was going the speed limit, he would have had a total drive time of roughly 14 minutes to go to the store and get home. According to DeSoto County's case file, a deputy went to the Walmart to verify if John made the trip, and the officer found proof confirming what Skip said.

Walmart's surveillance cameras captured video of John entering the store at 11:15 a.m. on July 8, 2003, and leaving six minutes later at 11:21 a.m. What's kind of weird is that according to the receipt log from the cash register that John checked out at, his transaction took place at 11:23 a.m., two minutes after the video surveillance cameras said he left.

This is a small discrepancy, so I wanted to know, how does his purchase ring up two minutes after the surveillance video shows him leaving? Honestly, I think this is a result of likely one of two things happening. One, the store's register was off by two minutes, or two, the timestamp on the security cameras was lagging behind real time. It's hard to know which for sure. That's why I wanted to track down and interview the deputy who went and retrieved all of this information.

His name is Craig Amant, and he's now retired from DeSoto County Sheriff's Office. We spoke on the phone for a while, but unfortunately, Craig doesn't remember enough about the case. At the time, Craig said he was just a road patrol deputy who was sent to the Walmart to pick up the video surveillance tapes and check the store's transaction logs. But then, after that, he had nothing more to do with the case. But you guys know me. I didn't stop there.

I submitted a public records request for a copy of the footage from the VHS tapes that were seized from Walmart. At first, staff in the records division at DeSoto County Sheriff's Office told me they would only be able to provide me with still images or freeze frames of John walking into and out of the Walmart.

That was fine with me because what I was really after was getting a clear look at the timestamps on the videos, just to confirm with my own eyes what time John went in and out of the store. A few days after submitting my request, DeSoto County told me they would actually have to blur or redact John's body from the images due to him being a minor.

Then, a few days after that, the office called me and said they did not have the ability to even look at the tapes because they didn't have a VHS player. Six months after that, I got a call out of the blue from the department's one and only records clerk. She told me DCSO had purchased a VHS player and was reviewing a total of eight tapes seized from the Walmart.

She said the tapes showed every camera angle from the store, and because of that, there were roughly 2 million individual frames of video to go through. She also said some of the timestamps on the tapes were off, as well as their dates, which I found odd because there's nothing written in the 2003 police reports about wrong timestamps or wrong dates. Eight months after my initial request, I'm still waiting on DCSO to process the Walmart tapes and fulfill my records request.

While I want it to be thorough, at the end of the day, whether John left at 11:21 a.m. or 11:23 a.m. still lines up with what Skip told investigators. The next thing I wanted to do to verify some of the other details in Skip's statements was to contact the driver of the semi truck that picked up lumber from the sawmill the morning John died. Here's Skip recounting that for detectives. "The truck showed up.

That driver's name was Doug Barber. For months, I've been calling, texting, and leaving Doug messages, but he's never contacted me.

So here's my plug. If you're Doug Barber or know him or anyone who worked for J&M Trucking Lines out of Fort Myers, Florida in 2003, send me an email, counterclock at audiochuck.com. I might not be able to talk with Doug now, but DeSoto County Sheriff's Office interviewed him briefly in 2003.

According to his statement in police reports, Doug told investigators that he arrived at the sawmill around 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, July 8th, just like Skip had said, and he left at approximately 9:15 a.m. When detectives asked Doug if he noticed Skip and John or Pat and John arguing while he was there, he told them no, he didn't see anything out of the ordinary, zero hostility at the homestead.

He said he did have a brief conversation with John and asked the teen if he liked living in the country, to which John replied that he loved it. And that was it. Authorities took that brief statement from Doug and sent him on his way. I found nowhere in the police record that he was ever re-questioned. During Skip's interview on July 9th, FDLE Special Agent John Smith started to focus in on what Skip remembered after he last saw John.

And it's during that part of the interview where things got much more formal.

Do you want to set your child up for success? IXL Learning is an online learning program for kids covering math, language arts, science, and social studies. IXL is designed to help them really understand and master topics in a fun way. Powered by advanced algorithms, IXL gives the right help to each kid no matter the age or personality. IXL is used in 95 of the top 100 school districts in the U.S.

There's one site for all the kids in your home, pre-K to 12th grade. Kids can even access IXL on the go through the app or on your phone or tablet. No more trying to figure out how to explain math equations or grammar rules yourself. IXL has built-in explanation videos.

And look, my son is only two and a half right now, but I can already tell by the time he is in school, he is going to appreciate having someone explain why something is the way it is. He doesn't like just to be told. So those explanation videos are going to be super helpful. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. And CounterClock listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash clock.

Visit iXL.com slash clock to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

This message is sponsored by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon, and if you're a parent, you want to make this school year an opportunity for your kids to learn important life skills and continue building independence. For that, there's Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely, and parents can keep an eye on kids' new money habits.

There's even Greenlight's Infinity Plan, which includes the same access to financial literacy education that makes Greenlight a valuable resource for millions of parents and kids. Plus, built-in safety to give you peace of mind. My son is only two and a half, but already he knows what a card is and what it does. He actually took it up to a vending machine the other day, swiped it, and, well, let's just say he's going to be a spender when he's older.

And so Greenlight is the perfect thing for him. There's even a chores feature that lets you reward your kids for honoring their responsibilities around the house. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com slash counterclock. That's greenlight.com slash counterclock to try Greenlight for free. greenlight.com slash counterclock.

Skip went on to tell detectives that after watching John ride off, he went inside Pat's house, sat in a recliner, watched a soap opera, and dozed off. When he stirred awake, he noticed that it was 1:30 and John was still not back from taking the trash.

Skip said he was concerned about John, so he got in his Ford diesel pickup truck, rode through the pasture, and over to the trash pile to look for him. When he arrived, he said he saw John's four-wheeler backed up to the trash pile with the trailer still attached to the rear of it. But John was nowhere in sight. That's when Skip said he started yelling John's name. I blowed the horn, broke the window down, shut the truck off.

After getting no reply from John and not seeing him at all, Skip went back to the house and told Pat he couldn't find the boy.

Pat replied to Skip, saying that when she got a chance, she'd go look for him. But at that point, there was no sense of urgency. Pat made her and Skip a sandwich, they ate lunch, and afterwards, Pat mentioned she was going to the pasture to find John. Skip said she left around 2.15 p.m., 45 minutes after Skip made the first trip to search for John. About a half hour later, she returned, called Patrick Skinner, left to get gas and to go pick Patrick up.

By 3:45 p.m., Skip said everyone started to get really worried. Once Patrick arrived in his car, the group split up to search again. Skip said he told the others that he would walk the pasture by foot, starting at the sawmill, and go all the way to the trash pile while they drove in Pat's Explorer. After about a half hour of walking, Skip said he arrived to the trash pile and saw Patrick holding John's revolver, belt, and holster.

Everyone was hollering for John, and within a few minutes of arriving, Patrick pointed out John's body in the ditch water. And that's when they all three left to call 911 and took the gun and the other items they'd found with them. Skip's first interview on July 9th covered the basic highlights of his version of events. Like I said, it lasted less than an hour, and he didn't get into the nitty-gritty details.

But the next morning, Thursday, July 10th, the sheriff's office called Skip and Patrick back in for second interviews. And authorities held nothing back. I want to know what opinion you have. Because I think you're hiding something from me. I'm not hiding nothing from you. I think you're hiding a whole lot from me there, mister. Detectives wanted to know specific details from Patrick and Skip about who found what at the initial scene and what exactly the group did with those items after they discovered John.

DeSoto County Detective Kurt Mays and FDLE Special Agent John Smith interviewed Patrick. What were you saying about the holster? I know that's the holster we found. Immediately afterwards, Kim Lewis and Special Agent Smith interviewed Skip. There was like a cowboy belt and it was like a green, I guess, like what you call a leg strap or something. Okay, but there was also a third belt, the big belt that he normally wore every day. Was that what you're talking about when you said cowboy belt? Right.

Investigators needed to get clarification on one thing right off the bat, and that was how many belts had been found at the crime scene. According to Pat's previous statements, she said there were two belts, a holster and a strap at the scene. One belt had wildlife scenery depicted on it, and the other had a bunch of Dixie flags embroidered on it. Both were size 28, John's size.

When Pat handed over the gun, holster, thigh strap, and two belts to the sheriff on July 9th, she said all of that stuff was from the original scene. What puzzled investigators on July 10th was the fact that both Patrick and Skip said they only saw one belt at the scene. So was Pat mistaken and had just given police two belts from her house that she knew were John's, but only one was really at the crime scene?

My question is, why would John have had two belts on him while riding a four-wheeler in the woods at all? I know from his autopsy report that he didn't have a belt in his pants when he was fished out of the water. So if Pat's correct, that would mean he was out there with two belts sitting loosely around his waist for no reason, which just seems strange to me.

What I think probably would have helped clear this issue up would have been to bring Pat in for a second interview on July 10th. But for some reason, investigators didn't ask her to come back that day. They only wanted to interrogate Patrick and Skip. Patrick's story during his second sit-down was exactly the same as what he'd said on July 9th, but this time he went into a little more detail.

He'd had roughly 48 hours to process everything he'd been through, and he didn't shy away from expressing that it felt odd to find John's gun, holster, belt, and thigh strap in almost a perfect line that led him to John's body. When I saw the gun, it looked like it had been dropped, so I thought something was wrong. I didn't know what. I didn't know what was wrong, but I felt like something was wrong.

Patrick said after a few days of stewing on it, the neatness of all of the items being in a line by the time he got there was causing him to suspect that maybe he couldn't trust John's family as much as he thought he could. When I saw all the stuff scattered out, I thought he left like somewhere in a hurry, you know, dropped stuff on the way. But when I seen everything else, the marks I seen, the

It just formed that picture in my mind that somebody killed him. Here's Patrick today, going over his thoughts from that time. Probably the first red flag, true red flag that I felt that day was when I started following where those breadcrumbs were. And there was almost like a suspense building. Whether what I actually saw on the ground was someone dying,

pulling him off of the four-wheeler and things happening or whether things were, I don't want to say purposely laid out, but it was almost too perfect to leave those kind of breadcrumbs to that. The fact that I was back there for, I don't know, 10 minutes, not even 10 minutes, I'm not sure of the timeline, I just know it wasn't long, and that they claim they've been looking for him around there all day. I'm like, so you're looking for him, you've already been out here, and

The longer detectives in 2003 spoke with Patrick, the more they started to think that too. So far, police were not leaning towards Patrick having a hand in John's death.

For one, he had an alibi of being home with his mom and instant messaging his girlfriend during the time John was killed. Two, no one saw Patrick with John during the timeframe of the murder. And three, he was extremely shaken up by the entire incident, to the point where he was being fully cooperative with police no matter what. But as long as authorities had him willing to talk, they were going to extract as much information from him as possible and not ease up too much.

Which is why they asked him on July 10th to be very specific about anything else he saw that he felt pointed to a murder and possible cover-up. "Was there anything that caught your attention?" "Marks in the ground." "Marks in the ground. What kind of marks?" "Like, drag marks in the ground."

Patrick, let me interject. For the record, describe what type of drag marks you think you saw. What I'm describing is, could it have been made by a refrigerator? Made by a small object? Like, when I first saw it, it looked like the heel of a shoe? Yeah, something like that. It looked like somebody's feet. Somebody's feet drugged across the ground. I thought I saw, when I was actually there, I thought I saw something like right here.

Did anybody else see him? Skip asked me after we got back to the house if I saw him. On top of that, Patrick went into more detail about the position of that rusty barrel he'd seen on John's back when he found him. He said he felt that the barrel's placement looked purposeful, something he's still convinced of to this day. It appeared to me like it was right over his back, like just behind his shoulders. That's the image that's burned into my head.

The fact that I'm seeing this drum on top of him, to know that maybe he was held down there or hit with something or just battered in that way, I just sometimes wonder what would have been going through his head, who he would have been thinking about. When detectives switched gears and sat down with Skip, they used all of the information they'd learned from Patrick to grill the 49-year-old. Where were the drag marks? The drag marks? Yeah.

Show us where you saw the drag marks. I didn't see the drag marks. You saw some drag marks. It's important to tell us everything, Chip. Where did you see the drag marks? Point out where you saw the drag marks. I don't know if they were drag marks. Sure you do. You brought it up in the discussion with Patrick. Where did you see the drag marks?

If there was any drag marks, there was a mark somewhere in this vicinity. Why didn't you tell us that? Well, I... What do you mean, if there was? You saw the drag marks. Now you're going to lie to me and say you didn't? Did you see drag marks? If that's what you call it, yes, sir. Why didn't you tell? Drag marks of what? I have no idea, sir. You have an idea. Yesterday, I had to ask you something. Yes, sir. I had to ask you, did you form an opinion of what could have happened out there?

He said, "I have no opinion." Now I don't know a man on this earth that didn't have an opinion over those kinds of situations or those facts.

And I want to know what opinion you have. Because I think you're hiding something from me. I'm not hiding nothing from you. I think you're hiding a whole lot from me there, mister. From what? You tell me. You told us yesterday there was no prints. There was no indentation in that earth at all. You never saw anything. Then we have a boy. Well, he asked me if I saw him. He said, and the boy saw it.

Well, you lied to me. I'm sorry. You lied to me over a couple of things, which causes me to really think you're up your eyeballs in this stuff. Well, I believe that. I believe that. You've got an explanation to give me. And I'm hoping you're going to give me that explanation. Because I don't want to walk out of this room until I know the truth. Yesterday you sat there and I asked you specifically...

Did you see any drag marks? No, sir, I did not see any drag marks. No, and full well you were lying your ass off to me. I know, so you're asking me that. Yes, you do. I asked you specifically. You've been denied a kiss now sitting there for a little bit. Why would you deny something that you did see when it's not pointing anything for you?

Skip's nonchalant response only got the interviewers more fired up. The last thing they confronted him with had to do with information they discovered about his cell phone. They asked him directly why he hadn't used it when the group first found John.

Why had he waited until he, Patrick, and Pat drove back over to Pat's house to make sure someone called 911? Skip admitted that he had the phone on him the entire time. But as far as why he didn't use it in the moment, he couldn't come up with an answer. According to case documents I've been through, Skip made four calls from his cell phone between 4:00 and 5:15 p.m. on July 8th, none of which went to emergency responders.

At 4:29 p.m., Skip made a call to an unlisted number. It must not have lasted long because in the exact same minute, he called another anonymous number. Then he called another number that authorities redacted from their reports. And finally, at 5:02 p.m., he called his uncle, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper named Ralph Strater.

Now, just stop for a minute here and think about the time frame that these calls were placed in. 4:29, when Skip placed his first call to an unlisted number, is before any emergency responders even knew John was dead. Pat Strader didn't place the 911 call until 4:35 p.m.

And 5:02 p.m., when Skip's talking to Ralph, things are erupting at the Southeast Hansel property. Police are swarming the area and John's body is still laying dead in the water. So what did Skip and Ralph talk about during their five o'clock phone call? According to police reports, Skip told him that John had been shot.

I've learned three languages in my life, English, Spanish, and French. And I can tell you the most difficult part for me at times was when I was doing the classroom work. And even though I was having conversations with people in those languages, it wasn't the same as being immersed in that language. But with Rosetta Stone, I get the best of both worlds.

Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program, and it's available on desktop or can be used on an app on your phone or tablet. The big thing for me when it comes to learning a language or sprucing up on one I already know is to have that immersive experience, like I said, and really naturally try and pick up the language, first with words, then phrases, and then sentences. And something that's been really helpful with that is Rosetta Stone's True Accent feature. You get feedback on how well you're pronouncing words.

It's like having a personal trainer for your accent. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. For a very limited time, CounterClock listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com slash counterclock.

That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com slash counterclock today. All right, so for a long time, I was completely unaware of like what was good wine and what was bad wine. In fact, I don't know.

I usually just didn't even buy it because I was worried I was gonna take too much of a risk. And when I did, I usually let myself down. But now that's completely changed thanks to First Leaf. It's a wine club that's not your average wine club. It's better.

With each shipment, you get a personalized selection of wines from all over the world, handpicked just for you. First Leaf has this great questionnaire on their website that helped me a lot because it asked me questions like what kinds of foods do I like? Sweet or salty or nutty or oaky?

And all of those things created results that had wines paired perfectly for me. You can tailor your membership to your needs, and you can choose between six or twelve bottles, decide how many reds or whites you want, and select a shipping window that works for your schedule. So get wines to sip and share all summer long with First Leaf. Go to tryfirstleaf.com slash counterclock to sign up, and you'll get your first six hand-picked bottles for just $44.95. That's

T-R-Y-F-I-R-S-T-L-E-A-F dot com slash counter clock. Tryfirstleaf.com slash counter clock. Well, how come you told Ralph that he was born and got killed by somebody shooting him?

Way before we even knew about it. That's not true. I don't think so. That's exactly the truth because that's exactly what Ralph told us. That you got to run the next town and you told them that he's dead and you told them you shot him. Explain to us how you made a phone call to Ralph and told him that. I didn't tell Ralph that he'd been shot. How did Ralph know he'd been shot? He said, you told him.

Unfortunately, I can't ask Ralph Strader about his conversation with Skip for myself, because he's since died. But back in 2003, him telling authorities that Skip knew John had been shot before anyone else knew that information made Skip the prime suspect in the murder investigation. Skip's lack of ability to explain his actions only ratcheted up the pressure on him.

Toward the end of his July 10th interview, Agent John Smith from FDLE was relentless in trying to get Skip to crack.

That boy's dead. Yes, sir. That boy got shot and he got killed by somebody that was there yesterday afternoon. Wasn't me, sir. I swear to God on that. Would you know something? I firmly believe it was you. I'm sure. And I think you'd feel a hell of a lot better if you get it off your chest and you just tell me what happened. I think that boy pissed you off. I think that boy got right in your face and you got right back in his face. I'm sure he did. Explain something to me. Why'd you take his belt off?

I didn't take his belt. How did his belt get off of him? I have no idea. And I think when it happened, when he first went back there with that load, you followed him back in there, you had a confrontation with him, he never even got off that ATV. You had to pick his ass up and drag him over to that water and throw him into it. I did not harm that boy. The boy's dead. What do you mean you didn't harm him?

Did he die immediately? He was still breathing when you put him in the water. He was breathing in the water. His lungs filled with water. Did you know that? I didn't do it. How close did you get to him when you saw him? I did not do it, sir. That is the honest to God. That's not true. Yes, it is.

This went on and on for over an hour. And every time Skip was accused, he denied any involvement in the crime. And for the most part, investigators really had no hard evidence suggesting otherwise. All they had was circumstantial hunches. Sure, they had John's gun, but they were stuck waiting on initial lab results and fingerprinting to come back for that.

Meanwhile, before they let Patrick and Skip go on July 10th, they tested both of them for gunshot residue and accompanied them back to their houses to collect the clothing and shoes they'd been wearing on the day John died. Detectives didn't collect Pat's clothing, though. They only took a pair of white tennis shoes she said she'd worn over to the trash pile.

Within a few hours, the GSR results for Skip and Patrick came back as clean. That proved that neither of them had shot a firearm recently, or at least there was no residue left on their arms and hands by the time they were swabbed on July 10th. After that, FDLE impounded Skip's pickup truck, which, according to the registration, technically belonged to his late father and also Pat Strader. FDLE hauled it off to the crime lab in Fort Myers.

While state agents sorted through the physical evidence and decided what to send off for blood, DNA, and fingerprint analysis, five days passed. And on Tuesday, July 15th, one week after John's death, the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office decided to change up how they were going to keep questioning their prime suspects. You ready? Ready. Mr. Grader, we're coming in the passage to the main gate here.

On a sweltering summer afternoon, armed with a video recorder, they took Patrick, Pat, and Skip out to the Southeast Hansel Avenue crime scene at separate times and had them once again go through their stories. That's on the next episode of CounterClock, Suspicions. Listen right now.

Want the same expert advice you get from the pros in the store while shopping online at DiscountTire.com? Meet Treadwell, your personal online tire guide that matches you with the perfect tire for your vehicle. Get your best match in one minute or less with Treadwell by Discount Tire. Let's get you taken care of. Boaters know that bad weather, like storms, lightning, and wind, can turn a fun day on the water into a challenge.

But what if you had satellite-delivered weather data giving you the full picture of what's around you, even when you're offshore and out of cell range? With SiriusXM Marine, get up-to-date weather directly on your boat's display. Features include radar, lightning, marine warnings, wind and wave info, and much more. And for offshore anglers, imagine having a guide that tells you where it might be best to cast your line. Fish mapping does just that. It's 8

fishing focused features including fishing recommendations weed line info plankton info and sea surface temperature information can help you find fish faster plus you can add Sirius XM entertainment and listen to ad-free music plus sports talk comedy news and more while you're on the water visit SiriusXM.com slash marine to learn more