Episode 3: The Treadmill
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March 15th, it's approximately 11.40 a.m. This is Detective Castro. I'm with Detective Jones, and we're going to interview Jill Blackstone at Sherman Oaks Hospital. Some of the most critical components of any police investigation are the interviews with witnesses and suspects. And Jill Blackstone was both at the moment. The only person who knew what really happened to her sister Wendy and the dogs at their Friday night barbecue.

It was now Sunday morning and Jill was still in the hospital. When detectives arrived to interview her, they checked with the medical staff to make sure it was okay to talk with her. They were told that Jill's vital signs were normal and she was completely coherent, so they could go in. So how are you feeling this morning? You said you're okay? You feel okay? Yeah, I have lupus, so I'm tired a lot, but yeah. Oh, you have lupus? I do. Oh, how do you have that on?

The detectives listened patiently. Then they tried to focus Jill. But Jill interrupts the officers, and she says she has a sad story to tell them, and they might want to close the door.

This is Episode 3 of The Blackstone Sisters, and I'm Barbara Schroeder.

There's a lot of history. Okay, I was just going to go over some just real preliminary stuff right now, if you don't mind. Now, is your full name Jill Blackstone? After finally getting access to this interview, there were two things I wanted to check out right away. The first, to see if something Jill's attorney, Danny Davis, said was true. He told me that Jill should never have even been interviewed because she was under the influence of carbon monoxide. Was loopy, slurring her words. Your mom's name?

Her name is Ruth. Father's name? My father's name is Murray. Murray. And do you have any other siblings? I do. My sister Lisa. Lisa, okay. And how old is Lisa? Fifty.

Jill sounds pretty lucid. Oddly, unemotional maybe given that her sister and Izzy had just died. Perhaps the doctors had given her some drugs, but the nurses told detectives the only meds Jill was on at the moment were the ones she took for lupus.

The second thing I wanted to check right away was about another claim Jill's attorney had made. The one about how detectives didn't read Jill her rights at the beginning of the interview.

He was correct. Jones and Castro waited almost an hour to Mirandize Jill. Are you working right now? Are you actively working? Okay. Are you an employee or retired? Self-employed. Self-employed? I'm a TV producer. I go project to project. Oh, okay. So you basically work for yourself. I tried to find out why the officers waited to read Jill her rights, but they still weren't allowed to talk with the trial pending. It sounds, though, like they were either using a classic interview technique where you let your subject talk to make them feel comfortable...

Did you go to school for that? No, I totally, I'm the one person in television who didn't have an internship or any desire to be in TV. I fell into my first job at a TV station and loved it. No kidding. How long ago was that? Oh, I was like 25. Or maybe Joe Blackstone was just an engaging conversationalist.

I went to undergrad for geography. I went to grad school for mass communications. Okay. And there was a TV station near me, and I applied for a job as like a secretary. And this guy said, I think you'd be good on this show we're doing. Wow, no kidding. And I just loved it. You remember the first show you ever went on? Yeah, it was...

So I was like, why the hell are you talking?

This is Anthony Ferrer again, Jill's former colleague turned therapist. Well, first of all, I will just say this. Rule of thumb, all producers really kind of know this because we've all seen video of the person who confesses or talks to the police without an attorney. And we're all like, this is great for TV, but like, you're so dumb. Because Anthony has the rare distinction of both knowing Jill personally and being a therapist, I asked him to help analyze this interview.

And just a quick note, he's never treated Jill Blackstone professionally, but they talked as friends. Here's what he noticed first about Jill's conversation with detectives. She's sitting in the bed talking to these cops. She's not expressing remorse or shame or any kind of, even if it was an accident, I would be, I can only say what I would be. I would not be talking about Maury Povich. I would not be talking about Lupus. I would, I don't think I could speak, period, end.

And you should also know that after my lupus, I had to declare bankruptcy because of the medical bills. What did you make of the first 20 minutes or so where she, she's not talking about Wendy. You're either in shock and like all common sense has sort of gone to the wayside or you've really kind of are narcissistic and have kind of already have this story that you think you're going to get away with.

that you're that good, right? So there's a lot of like me, me, me, me, me, me, me, right? Like a lot of talk about me, me, me, which is very narcissistic, very histrionic. And I know that there's a typical patient. They suck you into their story. If you're not a trained therapist in like dialectical behavioral therapy, you can get sucked into the story like they're pulling you in.

When's the last time that you actually worked? I think January 22nd. It was for TLC. TLC? Oh. Yeah, it was called All About Sex. No, I watched that. Oh, you did? You produced that? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay.

Anthony listened to the entire three and a half hour interview. Here's what stood out to him. Around 15 minutes into the conversation, the officers are asking the last few information questions. Do you have any cars? Uh-huh. Okay. What kind of car do you drive? The Lexus. It's a hybrid. A hybrid. Do you know what year it is? 2014. Just got it. Yeah. It's a new car. It's one of the new models. Yeah.

And now they pivot to why they're here. And Jill finally addresses the elephant in the room. Do you know why we need to talk to you about what happened? I imagine because there was a death at the home. Right, right, with your sister. Yes. And we just wanted to go over what happened and what you know of it. And let me just say, I should say in the beginning, that because of lupus, because it was a...

psychonuriatric because I've been in therapy for 800 years and go to a psychologist and psychiatrist. I'm very good at compartmentalizing. Okay. So I've sort of put the grief away till later. So I can talk to you very cognizantly, very presently right now. Okay. It doesn't mean I'm not...

sad inside. Oh, no, no. We don't. You know, if there's one thing, yeah, we don't look at that. I imagine you see all kinds of things. Everybody processes grief in different ways. Okay, so given that, what we want to do is just talk to you about it and find out exactly what happened so we can kind of put...

Anthony said to listen carefully here because Jill commandeers the conversation. She ignores the officer's request to tell them about the night Wendy died. Instead, Jill wants to give them some family history.

Well, I mean, we can go over all that. Yeah, absolutely. A little bit of history might help you. Wendy is disabled. Okay. She has profound vision loss and hearing loss. Okay. So she is my dependent.

She can't do anything without me. She can't drive. She can't go anywhere. She's socially isolated. She can't work. The condition she had, was that something that came on genetically? It's a genetic disease. Both of my sisters have it. Lisa's progressed much, much later. Lisa's didn't show up until she was well into teenagehood.

Wendy was what we thought was a clumsy kid. So walking into walls, getting hit by balls at basketball, you know, in league or something, like just clumsy. So she grew up, so we grew up teasing her about it. So that led to terrible self-esteem. How old was she at the time? 12, 13, 13, 14.

Anthony found it fascinating that Jill was so willing to share personal and family information with the detectives. Or maybe, he suggested, this was evidence of Jill Blackstone's producing skill. Because as any good producer knows, sharing personal stories is a great way to elicit empathy. So Wendy's had a sort of tough life that way. A hard time making friends because when you're in your 20s, we lived in, this won't mean anything to you, but if like, this is New York.

Here's Bayonne, right across the river. And it's a pain in the neck. Nobody wants to cross the river to go pick up Wendy, to go to a bar where she can't see a thing. Right. So her social life was zero. And my parents became very protective. And it became anything to make Wendy happy. So they got Wendy through high school by sending her to a private school. They got her through college, barely. But when she got out of college...

It really fell apart. And that's when it sort of became my job to give her life. You know, like, oh, you're going out for the weekend? Take Wendy.

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The officers were wondering how the sisters had become roommates. Jill said there was never really a plan, it just kind of happened, after Jill left the family home in Bayonne, New Jersey. I moved to Chicago to do Jerry Springer. Wendy used to visit Jill in Chicago several times a year, and so when Jill got a new job and moved to Los Angeles, Wendy just started flying out to the West Coast to visit her sister. She loved being in L.A., and eventually ended up just moving in.

When I moved out here, I bought a very large house. I was doing very well. And I bought a five-bedroom house. And she took the second biggest bedroom. And it was her space. The roommate situation for the sisters worked out well. Wendy was grateful to finally be able to leave their parents' home in New Jersey, have some independence, and live in sunny California. And Jill had a built-in caretaker for the dogs whenever she had to travel for work.

If Wendy ever needed help, she'd call one of their friends or the sister's parents would often come out to stay with Wendy. These were the best of times for the entire Blackstone family. When I moved in that house, my sister, my other sister and her husband had a young baby and then maybe two. And they were able to come a lot, two weeks at a time. We had great family trips there, tons of room for everybody. It was great. But as is so often the case, the good times didn't last.

Because Jill said she realized after a few years of living with her sister that Wendy needed more out of life. She just had no awareness of the world. At one time, she complained about the food I was getting. So I said, OK, I'll give you $100. How much do you think you need a week for groceries? She said $100. I said, here's $100. Give me a list. And I went to the store and I came back with three things.

You know, like, I mean, maybe eight things. But she's like, that's it. As time goes on, you know, talking to my parents, she's living essentially an adolescent life. And truthfully, it's not selfish. I believe that Wendy can have a better life than what she has. And that's how I phrased it. I said, Wendy's life is waking up.

doing her little gardening, she gardens in pots, she kicks a ball for the dog, and she reads on her iPad, she listens to audio books, and that's it. And she saves up TV on her TiVo to pass the weekends. I can't believe that that's all you want for her. It's not what I want for her. They wouldn't hear it. She's not accountable on any level, and that's not okay. Her friends are my friends. I have nothing that I can call my own.

You have to help me with this. This is not a healthy life. You have to be willing to enforce that if she doesn't live by my rules, she's going back to New Jersey. And they just couldn't do it. Just couldn't do it. So they placed, it sounds like, the burden of care and everything on you with her. For sure. I supported her financially.

There was this way in which she describes Wendy as like incapable and a burden, but like yet there's evidence that she was capable of doing stuff on her own. Maybe not perfect, but still. So let's say she didn't have proper boundaries. She ends up with her sister.

It's hard to, of course, it's hard to believe that like everyone would feel a little at some point exhausted that you have to do everything right. You have to pay the bills. You have to buy, you know, you're the one who has to provide shelter and food and all these other things. Because, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying Wendy could do a lot. She's definitely limited.

As time went on, I hauled my parents to my therapist's office. I hauled Wendy to my therapist's office. I hauled Wendy into a different therapist's office years ago and said, I won't even go in there. Talk whatever you want to talk about. Woman comes out and says she didn't talk. Look, I don't know what to do with that. Right. So...

After living in the big Hollywood Hills house for about seven years, Jill decided to sell it.

And so one day I just said, I'm done with this house. It's like, you know, enough with the upkeep. I've been in a room that I haven't been in a year. This is crazy. I got to downsize. And so I bought the house that I'm in now. The house on Llandale? Llandale. Okay. Wendy, according to Jill, was very unhappy about the move because she had been so familiar with the layout of the old house.

And now with her vision getting worse, Wendy had to learn how to navigate an entirely different home. Plus, she told Jill she missed the pool at the old house. And Wendy spent weeks telling me, I hate it here. That was her quote. I hate it here. I hate it here. And I was like, you've got to give me a break here. At the time, that house on Spring Oak Drive had a pool, had palm trees, had a lot of land. She was living the life. Right. And

And I said, you understand that most people don't live like this ever. So when we moved, we got seven years of that life. That's not sad. And she just took it as a loss. And she had a very, very hard time moving into this house.

Also causing some friction between the sisters was a treadmill, Wendy's treadmill. She used it almost every day to exercise. One big problem, though, the treadmill was in Jill's bedroom because there was more room there.

Right, right. Right.

A quick side note here. The quality of this recording gets pretty bad because the microphone slipped. So we've asked an actor to read from the official transcript. I'm like, you walk in on me when I'm meditating, when I'm masturbating and everything in between. Could you like knock? That was verbatim on how our conversation would go. I asked her not to use it while I'm in my bedroom because my bedroom is supposed to be my sanctuary. It's the only place I have in my house that I can be alone. And that's a big thing for me.

I just want something that's my own. And so a while ago I said, can you please not use it when I'm in there? And she said, okay. So Anthony, did that surprise you that Jill shared that, you know, pretty personal information with the officers? Also a good soundbite. Just saying that,

I know I don't want to be that guy, but you bring up an interesting point, though, that maybe she said that for shock value or, you know, get some sympathy. And then like the treadmill walking in on her masturbating. I'm like, do you not have a lock on the door? Again, this is another way of like not being able to set boundaries, like put a freaking lock on your door.

So, you know, and again, not trying to judge her, but just this inability to create boundaries. A lock is a boundary. Like parents should lock their doors so that kids don't walk in on them having sex. So if again, and maybe I'm saying that because I feel Wendy was her child, like and she shouldn't be walking in on her masturbating.

And I said, can you sit down for a minute? She said, what? Really defensively. And I said, I just want to talk to you about, you know, private space and stuff. And she yelled, fine, I won't go in when you're in there. And she walked out. You know, I think it's really easy to look at Wendy as a disabled person and incapable of being a not nice person. Right. And Jill, really,

might have felt like she, you know, felt both. Like, I love this woman and she's a pain in my ass, right? Like, for lack of a better word. And not so nice sometimes. Could Wendy have had an attitude with her a lot and like, whatever? Sure. Like, just because you're disabled and blind and whatever doesn't mean that you can't be a pain in the neck and hostile towards your sister in some ways or disrespectful or whatever.

cross boundaries. So I think it's important that we realize Wendy is a full person. She's not just a disabled angel. She was a full person. Maybe setting boundaries was harder with Wendy. Maybe having these honest conversations was harder for her to have with Wendy. Maybe she couldn't be how she was with her employees to Wendy because there's this idea that I can't be mean to someone who's disabled.

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I started taking a very realistic look about what my life is going to be. I'm 52. I have nothing. And I want something. My life is going by. Wendy is consuming my life. I sat Wendy down one night in September, and I said, we need to talk about the future. And she said, okay. And she gets really defensive, stiffens up. Okay, talk.

So I say, "Well, I want to know about the future, you know? And what do you see for us? And I'm 52. What do you see happening?" And she said, "Well, this." And I said, "So, us? Here?" And I'm like, "In this house? Together? Alone?"

And she said, well, yeah. And I said, okay, who's paying for this house? This is a million dollar house. Close to a million. And she said, well, I assume you're going to go back to work. I had just left a job.

And eventually they're going to die, meaning my mother and father. And then we'll get the money left from us from the house and use that. So I said, well, there's a few problems with that. I have lupus. I can't work at the level I used to. I used to make a great deal of money. And I'll be the first to tell you I can't maintain that level anymore. And our parents, what if they live to be 95, 100? And I said, that's not a plan.

I need to think about the future. And you're leaving me to think about the future. And that's a lot for me. Like, I lose sleep at night and that's not healthy for me. And I can't, you know, I've taken more Xanax than I should be because I can't get through the day. I have stomach pains. I can't live like this. And she didn't, she just couldn't hear it. Walked out of the room.

My therapist last week, he said, how would you phrase this in a haiku? And I wrote, I hate the experience of hating you. And it's true. It's just not my skin. I'm not good at it. You hated Wendy? No, I don't. I never hated Wendy. All right. I'm just, I'm just asking because... Even in anger, no.

Listen, I there was parts of it that struck me personally. I'm turning 50, but I'm single, right? Like I'm single right now, kind of single. But but either way, there is this. Yeah, you get to this place. It's like, how did I get here? I'm 50 years old. Like I have a lot of things, but like I it came at a cost, like all of the success came at a cost of a relationship because there was no time for one.

And I know, you know, I think this also goes to talk show culture or producer culture, right? Like infamous, infamous for being a young person's career. And I worked with mostly women. It was like all the producer around me was always women. All they complained about was like being single and wanting to find a husband. And Jill talks about that too, like being alone and not having opportunities.

So, you know, in a lot of ways, she had given up a lot already. And then she has this person at home that's counting on her. Jill told the officers that before Wendy died, she had been looking for a new place to rent for her and Wendy since she had just sold her house in order to cut costs. But Jill also made a suggestion to Wendy. Maybe she could go live with their parents for a while. Wendy hated the idea. Their parents' house was dark. The weather was cold. She wanted to be with Jill and the dogs.

She wasn't going back there. She said, her quote to me was, I would rather die than go back there. I said, you don't mean that. She said, I do. I would rather die than go back to New Jersey. She loves it here. Jill then went on to reveal to the detectives that she had been seriously looking into places where Wendy could live by herself.

Did Wendy know that you were thinking about putting her in a care facility or something like that? Any idea? We had one discussion, and I said, I need to talk to you about something. I said, I've been looking into alternative housing situations, and she started to cry. And I said, I don't want you to cry. I do this because I love you, and I don't think this is the right life for you. I believe that this is...

That there is something better for you out there, where you could be productive and social and happy, and it's not forever. Right. But right now, I have to get rid of this house, and I have to figure out what my life is. And I think this could be a good alternative, and it's not forever. I'm not sending you off to Timbuktu to never see you again. It would be someplace where I would be close. I'd only just begun the search. Okay. Okay.

So in your opinion, was she on board? No.

She was not on board on this. And one night she asked if I wanted her to stay at my friend Robin's house. And I was like, Robin's house? Did you even call Robin? She was crying. No, but I'm sure she'd make room. I'm like, why would you go to Robin's house? She said, because I know you don't want me here. I said, can you not? Can we just can we talk like two human beings? And no, the answer was no, because she went back into a room and cried.

But you could see there was a gloom in the house. And what became apparent to me was there was a palpable depression in the air. And it just became so clear to me. It was just all on me. It was up to me to make sure she was happy. It was up to me to make sure she was safe. I'm lying in bed at night like, where do we go? What do we do?

About a month ago, I said something to Tracy like, I honest to God am about to be the lead story on the news. And she laughed and she said, oh, come on, you're the strongest person I know. And it stopped me. And I said, you know, even strong people break. Almost an hour into the interview now and the tone of the conversation shifts. The detectives have let Jill talk. They've been patient, but now they need to get to the reason why they're here. So let me just go ahead and read you a right here.

Jones and Castro are going to confront Jill. They found all that suspicious evidence at the sisters' house the night before, including the suicide letter next to Wendy that Wendy didn't sign. And since they just heard Jill tell them that she had been frustrated with Wendy, was looking for a way to live alone,

Well, that was perhaps going to be the most important question. Did Jill have a motive to get rid of her sister? So what happened? I mean... So I will say at some point that you're going to have to talk to my doctors because I have a brain thing. Okay. And I'm going to invoke a lawyer at some point because I don't know how much I remember, but I'll tell you what I remember of that night. I can take you to that night. Okay.

For the next two hours, detectives are going to interrogate Jill Blackstone about what really happened the night Wendy died. I get where you're seeing this from. All I can say is I'm the best person I know. I've devoted my life to taking care of animals and Wendy, and I would never want to bring her harm. I know what it looks like, but this, it's, it's not me. It's not. Jill Blackstone's version of events coming up next in episode four of The Blackstone Sisters. Thanks for listening.

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Walmart Plus members save on meeting up with friends. Save on having them over for dinner with free delivery with no hidden fees or markups. That's groceries plus napkins plus that vegetable chopper to make things a bit easier. Plus, members save on gas to go meet them in their neck of the woods. Plus, when you're ready for the ultimate sign of friendship...

Start a show together with your included Paramount Plus subscription. Walmart Plus members save on this plus so much more. Start a 30-day free trial at WalmartPlus.com. Paramount Plus is central plan only. Separate registration required. See Walmart Plus terms and conditions.