Ayla Reynolds: Ten Years Later, part 2
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I'm sending my brother money directly to his bank account in India because he's apparently too busy practicing his karaoke to go pick up cash. Thankfully, I can still send money his way. Direct to my bank account.

♪♪

This is Murder, She Told. True crime stories from Maine, New England, and small town USA. I'm Kristen Zevey. You can connect with me at MurderSheTold.com or on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. I hope that you had a wonderful and safe holiday if you chose to celebrate. This episode is part two of Ayla Reynolds' story. If you haven't listened yet to part one, I suggest going back and starting with that one first.

In January of 2013, investigators invited Trista Reynolds to sit down with them to walk through some of the forensic evidence together. Maine State Police detectives had prepared a slideshow presentation of photos from the DiPietro home to show Trista and her family. If descriptions of violence against a child is a trigger for you, you might want to skip ahead a few minutes.

The family was aware that Ayla's blood had been found in the DiPietro home. They even had heard a rough idea of the quantity. More than a cup, an investigator slipped to them at one of the vigils they'd organized. A cup of blood is an enormous amount, especially for a toddler. Eight ounces is 25% of all the blood in her whole body. But they'd never seen the details. They had never had the evidence laid out for them.

They had never seen photographs. Here are the disturbing details of the visible blood that was found throughout the property. Justin's 1996 Ford Explorer had a car seat in the back, and on the left shoulder strap, investigators found Ayla's blood as well as dried vomit in the back seats of the car.

In Ayla's bedroom, her blood was found on the pom-poms of her pink princess slippers that sat on the floor next to her crib. Her baby doll's face and arms were smeared with blood. Investigators believed that she may have tried to wipe her own bloody mouth with the toy that brought her comfort.

On the couch in the living room, a silver dollar-sized stain of her blood was found on the cushions, but it was in the basement that the majority of the blood was found. A fist-sized pool of Ayla's blood stained the center of Justin's mattress, the mattress that Justin and Courtney slept on. Also on the bed, vomit was found in an unidentified pink hair-like fiber, perhaps from a toy.

Next to the bed sat Justin's sneakers, which were stained with Ayla's blood on the tongue and inside. And on the walls and the concrete floor next to the bed were blood splatters that were consistent with Ayla's standing height. Some of the drops were as big as a dime. A blood spatter analyst for the state determined that these spatters were the result of blunt force trauma or projectile vomit.

Also near the bed in the basement were wood pallets leaning against the foundation wall, which were stained with Ayla's blood. And lastly, there was a blue plastic bin and a sheet contained within, both of which had bloodstains. Police said that the sheet had been used to clean up Ayla's blood.

The police determined that some of the spray patterns of blood in the house were likely from coughing up blood, suggesting that Ayla's injuries were both internal and external. It was horrifying. Trista and her family were stunned. The terror that little baby went through is absolutely unimaginable.

Police told them to prepare themselves because what they were going to show next was even more shocking. Police used luminol, which you're probably familiar with, but just in case you're not, it's a chemical that reacts with trace amounts of blood and glows blue. In addition to blood, luminol reacts with bleach and other cleaning chemicals. The glow only lasts for about 30 seconds, and it can only react once.

In order to properly document evidence revealed through luminol, the room must be dark and the camera must be ready. The police showed her two slides from the house that had been illuminated by the chemical, and Trista was devastated. She left the police station in a panic, convinced more than ever that her daughter Ayla had been murdered.

Police had more slides to show her, but she'd seen enough. She later wrote, My daughter suffered greatly while in the care of her father, yet he hasn't been held accountable. It's obvious that a crime was committed there. Apparently, police showed Justin and the DiPietro family the same photographic evidence a few months prior, and according to police notes, Justin had no reaction.

Police also sought to show the photos to the Tadella family, the family with whom the DiPietro's stayed with during their exile from their house as it was being processed by crime scene investigators. The Tadellas refused. They weren't interested. Police also wanted to present the images to Courtney Roberts, Justin's girlfriend, who claimed to have slept in the basement the night of her disappearance, and she too refused.

Trista told the press, Justin, Alicia, and Courtney are still walking the streets like nothing happened. After seeing the evidence, it started to settle in my mind that Ayla really is deceased and not coming back. I'm unable to close my eyes and not see her blood. In September of 2013, Trista wrote an explosive letter to the press about the evidence and photos she'd been shown.

She was tired of waiting, and with or without the blessing of law enforcement, she wanted to light a fire under the investigators and reignite public interest. What did the police say? Well, unsurprisingly, no comment. They refused to comment on the blood evidence other than to say it exists, it belongs to Ayla, and it is more than what would be produced by a small cut.

Police have, however, said that they believe Ayla was a victim of foul play inside the DiPietro home at the hands of somebody who knew her, and that they believe the trio of adults present that night are lying.

Crime Watch Daily went to Phoebe's home in the spring of 2016 and knocked on the door. Alicia answered the door, and the reporter asked her about the blood evidence. Her explanation? Ayla was lactose intolerant and was throwing up. I looked around a little bit online, and symptoms of lactose intolerance do include nausea and vomiting, but aren't one of the common symptoms, much less vomiting blood.

In addition to the blood evidence, there are many other elements of this case that cast doubt on Justin, Alicia, and Courtney's story from that night.

First off is statistical improbability. According to an expert who is featured in a number of news articles, abductions of children by strangers account for around 100 out of the more than 750,000 missing persons cases investigated in the U.S. each year. That's 0.01% of all cases. Only 1 out of 7,500 cases.

And then there are the logistical problems. The DiPietro home is small. There are three small bedrooms on the ground level, and Ayla's bedroom is the last one on the right as you walk down the hall from the side door that they used as a primary entrance. The notion that somebody entered at night found their way into Ayla's room

took her from her crib without making any noise, and snuck out the back door without alerting any of the five people sleeping there sounds pretty extraordinary. If this theory were true, it would suggest that whoever did it had an intimate knowledge of the layout of the house and a clear intended target.

Something else that is odd about the timeline is the 10-hour time frame that nobody checked on Ayla. From 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. is 10 hours, and that is the time frame that Justin said Ayla was alone in her room. Trista, who was intimately familiar with Ayla's habits, said that she didn't sleep through the night. She normally got up once or twice for a diaper change or to have a bottle.

The notion that nobody checked on her that entire time and only discovered her missing at 8am sounds pretty unlikely. Justin's mother, Phoebe, the owner of 29 Violet Ave, was interviewed at her home by national correspondent Susan Candiotti. The segment was aired on both Nancy Grace as well as NECN, New England Cable News, and in it, Phoebe claimed that she was at the home the night Ayla went missing.

But she lied to the nation. She wasn't home that night. She was staying elsewhere.

CNN even ran a segment calling her out on her lie. It was strange and jarring and cast doubt on the whole story. In a story full of twists, the latest, a bombshell. Ayla Reynolds' grandmother, Phoebe DiPietro, wasn't home the night the toddler disappeared. In an exclusive CNN interview, she left the opposite impression when talking about what happened that night. You didn't hear any noise. I did not hear anything.

She didn't hear it. Because she was somewhere else, she now exclusively tells CNN, another location she declined to publicly disclose. Why not come clean from the start? DiPietro says she was trying to protect the investigation at the request of police, but then felt she needed to set the record straight. Police, however, did later confirm that they knew where she had stayed that night and that she had told them of her whereabouts. Why she lied to the media is still a mystery.

Phoebe's response to the other interview questions were odd. When you found out that she wasn't there, what did you think? I thought that I didn't want my son to go get any of his friends and go kicking in doors looking for her. Who do you think would do such a thing? Again, I'm not going to... I've given my theories and my opinions to the Waterville Police Department and the detectives.

I take it you don't think some stranger walked in off the street and did this. It is a very creepy feeling to think that somebody had been casing your house, that they had been watching the family's activities. After Ayla vanished, her grandmother told detectives some things around the house didn't look the same. Some oddities that I had noticed, and we told the law enforcement what those were. She would not reveal them to us.

There's no accident that could have happened that night? No. Something covered up? No. No. I can tell you there was not a party here at the house. People had dinner, watched television, eventually went to bed? Pretty much. Yeah. I really have to avoid that question. Some of her answers had long hesitations. Some answers were vague. Some weren't even addressing the question asked.

I know I'm not getting the whole truth. His mother has put it out a few times that she wasn't in that house, and then all of a sudden she says she was, and now she's going back to that she wasn't. So what is the truth? Was she there or was she not there?

Investigators told Trista something unbelievable about the morning that Ayla had disappeared. Justin had driven to Portland and back before calling 911 around 8.50 a.m. He said that he thought that Trista had taken Ayla and he was looking for her, but he never called her or anyone in the family. Portland is almost an hour and a half away from Waterville, and Trista wasn't even there.

During that long drive, he did, however, call his friend, Derek Tudela, a man who, just weeks prior, had sold him a $25,000 policy on Ayla's life.

Justin, after having Ayla in his care for only a few weeks, purchased a life insurance policy in late October or early November from Derek, about a month before she disappeared. I believe the policy was for $25,000, though I have seen it written that it was $10,000. This policy is a surprising action from a father who was at arm's length for 9 months of pregnancy and 18 months of her life. I

emerging only in the final two months before her disappearance. Trista said that she would get some strange texts from Justin in the weeks following him taking Ayla. He would say that he was afraid someone would try and kidnap Ayla or snatch her. The very last time he said something like that was sometime around December 11th, six days before Ayla was reported missing. His final text read,

I shouldn't have to be scared or live in fear in my own home, thinking someone can come at any time and take Ayla.

Trista said that she interpreted these messages at the time to mean that he was afraid that she, or someone doing it on her behalf, would come and take Ayla from Justin. But after Ayla truly did go missing, its meaning became more threatening and confusing. Trista said that she has always asked herself what those texts meant, wondering why he would have said that to her.

But here's some food for thought. What if Ayla didn't disappear sometime Friday night or Saturday morning? What if she'd been gone for days? Trista said that the last time that she could confirm anyone saw Ayla alive was when she spoke to her on December 8th, nine days before she was reported missing. She was scheduled for a doctor's appointment for December 12th, a follow-up on her broken arm, but Justin canceled the appointment.

Between the 8th and the 17th, Trista said that Justin always had a reason not to put Ayla on the phone. She was sleeping or busy playing or watching a movie. What if instead, Ayla was already gone? Though many signs point to the culpability of the people in the house that night.

But what's most difficult to explain is how is it that Phoebe, Alicia, Justin, and Courtney, the four adults closest to the case, all tell the same story? If something happened to Ayla that night, it seems unlikely that all four were involved in it directly. So why would those who were innocent allow this dark cloud of suspicion to hang over them? Is it the bond of family? Or is there something else at play?

Trista wanted answers. Trista wanted the truth. Phoebe, Alicia, and Justin DiPietro, despite the fact that early on police ruled out abduction, still say that they believe Ayla is alive and well to this day and that she was taken from the home by a stranger. If law enforcement wasn't going to give Trista the information she wanted, she would have to get it herself.

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Trista hired attorney William Childs of Portland, who graciously agreed to take the case pro bono to hatch a plan. And the first step in that plan was to have Ayla declared legally dead. There was a minimum waiting period of five years, but in 2017, she filed some court documents to get a hearing before a judge who would listen to arguments and consider whether it was likely that Ayla was deceased.

They had a duty to serve Ayla's father with notice of the hearing, but Justin had moved. He no longer lived at his mom's Violet Ave home, and from what she had heard, he'd moved to Los Angeles, California. She had no way to reach him, and no one would connect her with him, so she hired a sort of bounty hunter called the Process Server in L.A. to track him down. The Process Server located Justin and asked him, "'Are you Justin DiPietro?' He said he was not."

Anticipating this, Trista and her lawyer had armed the process server with a snapshot of Justin, and when he looked down at the image, he said, Well, you sure look a lot like him. You've been served. In September of 2017, the hearing was held and evidence was presented. Trista provided testimony and so did Detective Jeff Love, head of the Maine Unsolved Homicide Unit.

In a brief 30-minute hearing, Judge Joseph Mazzotti declared that Ayla Reynolds had died on or about December 17th, 2011, the day she was reported missing. The first step in a complicated legal process was complete. By declaring Ayla dead, Trista was able to file a wrongful death suit against Justin DiPietro, the next step in her plan.

Wrongful death sounds like a similar charge to manslaughter, negligent homicide, or even murder. But the key difference is that a wrongful death suit can be brought on by an individual, whereas the other charges, criminal charges, must be brought by the state. The Attorney General's office was not prepared to file criminal charges against Justin, so Trista took matters in her own hands.

Another big difference between a wrongful death civil suit and a criminal murder charge is the burden of proof. In a criminal case, the state must prove that someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but in a civil trial, the burden is lower. The legal term for a civil trial is preponderance of the evidence, and it's often translated as most likely, or more than a 50% probability of being true.

Lastly, in a civil trial, the only penalty that can be levied is a financial one. A jail sentence cannot be imposed. Only money can be awarded. Trista and her lawyer both knew that she wasn't going to get any money out of Justin. That wasn't the point of this lawsuit. The point of the suit was to reveal information, to find the truth.

In December of 2018, Trista officially filed the suit in court, and once again, she was faced with the challenge of serving Justin. He was still living in California, and again, she hired a process server. This time, though, they couldn't find him. They even hired a private investigator to try and track him down to no avail. So they asked for an extension from the judge for 60 days, which was granted, and took an unusual but badass step.

They published a public summons and notice of the lawsuit in the newspaper. The notice was published in the Morning Sentinel in Waterville as well as a Los Angeles-based newspaper for three weeks in April 2019. That's right, Justin was served through the newspaper.

In May, Justin's lawyer, Michael Waxman of Portland, responded saying that Justin's story had been consistent and that he had nothing to do with her death or disappearance. Justin was also forced to respond to a series of statements presented by Childs after the filing, all of which were answered by Waxman on his behalf with a bunch of vague non-answers.

It was at this point that the real purpose of the lawsuit was revealed. Through a process called discovery, Trista's attorney would get the police to release to Trista their case files and force Justin to testify under oath. Childs put in the discovery requests and waited.

After that, everything slowed to a crawl, at least in the public's eye, while thousands and thousands of documents, recordings, and photos were sorted and redacted in preparation for a civil suit whose date in front of a jury had yet to be set.

Trista's lawyer knew it would be a slow process and told the Press Herald, "The state of Maine did a half-million-dollar investigation on this. It's not something that's going to be reviewed in a day or two. It's a painstaking process." Despite that, this was a huge moment for Ayla's case. The police had agreed to open the files to Trista for her use in the civil lawsuit.

Maine State Police unsolved case files are kept notoriously close to the vest. A lot of families are denied access to their loved ones' case files and never have the opportunity to view them while the case is still open.

And then 2020 came, and the pandemic brought everything to a halt. Civil cases took the back burner in an already congested legal lineup of criminal cases and pushed everything back, including Ayla's wrongful death lawsuit. Even in December of 2020, Childs was still waiting for the redacted documents from the state. But this year, in 2021, they received them.

These reports will remain confidential for the moment, but the fact that the process has been completed and handed to Trista's lawyer is a big moment and paves the way for more discovery. Eventually, much of this will become public record, and I'm eager to see it and provide an update.

The next step was to review the police documents and hire experts to weigh in on key issues. Here are some of the experts that they've planned to hire: blood spatter experts, criminologists, polygraph examiners, private investigators, interrogators, body language experts, and statement analysis experts. In other words, they planned to conduct their own complete investigation.

Justin's lawyer, Michael Waxman, said that although he hasn't had a chance to review the forensic evidence, he thought that it would, quote, provide comic enjoyment. He told the Portland Press-Herald, According to Waxman, Justin currently lives in the Midwest, though the article claims that Waxman is unsure of which state.

The same article that was published in the Portland Press-Herald just two weeks ago included this little nugget. Ten years to the day after Justin reported a little missing, he would be deposed under oath by Trista's attorney. Though there's been no update yet as to how it went, the deposition would have taken place on Friday, December 17th, 2021.

Pursuing legal action in this capacity is extremely costly, and even though William Childs is working pro bono, the cost of third-party forensic testing and expert analysis falls in the lap of Trista and her family. So Trista's stepfather, Jeff Hansen, has created a GoFundMe to raise $25,000 to help offset costs.

They've raised over $11,000 so far and they need your help. I've made a donation and I encourage you to do as well, even if it's only a dollar. Tell them Murder, She Told sent you. I'll include the link in the show notes and on the website. And that is where this case currently stands in December of 2021, a decade after little Ayla Bell was hidden in a place where nobody can find her.

In the years following Ayla's disappearance, Trista had hoped that her Christmas present would come through the door, running to be held once again by her mommy. But Trista knows Ayla is never coming back, and her Christmas wish in years past will never be granted. Ten years later, she has a new wish, one that she has renewed hope for as the civil suit heats up: finding out the truth about what happened to her daughter.

Justin, I promise you, wherever you are, one day you will have to face me and tell me the truth about what really happened to Ayla. You can't hide from this forever. Eventually, it will eat at you, and I know I will get justice for Ayla, and I won't stop fighting for justice. I'll live inside a courtroom until the day I get my justice for her.

This year, pink lights were left on around neighborhood homes as a somber reminder of a little girl whose life was taken too soon. Pink was Ayla's favorite color. Trista told the Portland Press-Herald two weeks ago, "I have always said I just want to light up the world pink for her. It means the world to me to actually be driving down the street in South Portland and see Christmas lights, but also to see pink lights for Ayla."

It's more emotional this year. I miss her so much. Trista and her boys hang an ornament on the tree for Ayla, a teddy bear that says Baby's First Christmas. Ayla never got to have more than one Christmas. Maybe by this time next year, Trista's revised Christmas wish will have finally come true, and a grieving family and state will have answers and justice for little Ayla Bell Reynolds.

If you have any information about the murder or whereabouts of Ayla Bell Reynolds, I encourage you to call the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit Central at 207-624-7143 or leave a tip at the website linked in the show notes. ♪

This case was difficult to research because of the sheer volume of reporting that's been done on it. Although there are some contradictions within the source material, we've seen many details reported that are unsubstantiated or completely inaccurate. We strive for accuracy, and if you've found conflicting information, we welcome feedback. If you have a correction, please feel free to send it over at hello at murder she told dot com.

I want to thank you so much for listening. I'm so grateful that you chose to tune in and I couldn't be here without you. If you want to support and contribute to the show, there's a link in the show notes with options. Leaving a nice review or telling a friend is a great way to support too. You can connect with me on Facebook or Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. A detailed list of sources for this case can be found on the blog at MurderSheTold.com. Thank you to Byron Willis for his research and writing support.

If you're a friend or a family member of the victim, you are more than welcome to reach out to me at hello at murdershetold.com. If you have a story that needs to be told or would like to suggest one, or if you have a correction, I would love to hear from you. My only hope is that I've honored your stories in keeping the names of your family and friends alive. I'm Kristen Sevey, and this is Murder, She Told. Thank you for listening.

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