The Sunday Story presents: The Last Ride
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As a journalist, I can tell you there are some stories I just cannot get out of my mind. I think about them over and over. This is also what happened to a journalist named Janine Zeitlin. Nearly 20 years ago in 2005, Zeitlin was a young reporter at the Naples Daily News in Naples, Florida. In the course of her reporting, she heard about two local men who had gone missing the year before.

Both were men of color. They had disappeared a few months apart on the same stretch of road, and both were last sighted in the back of a police car, driven by the same man, a local sheriff's deputy. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. Zeitlin was surprised to find that her paper hadn't been covering the story. So she started digging into it, and she hasn't stopped since. What she's found says a lot about justice, about who matters and who's overlooked.

I'm Rachel Martin and this is Up First Sunday and today we bring you the first episode of Zeitlin's investigative series into the disappearance of Terrence Williams and Felipe Santos. The series is The Last Ride from the USA Today Network Florida and WGCU Public Media. Episode 1. One deputy, two missing men.

My name is Janine Zeitlin. I'm a journalist who has long covered the cases of two young men who vanished after separate encounters with Deputy Stephen Calkins in Naples, a wealthy town on the Gulf Coast. It's a straight shot across the Everglades from Miami. Felipe Santos was last seen getting into the back of Calkins' patrol car after a minor traffic crash in October 2003. Three months later, on the same street, Terrence Williams vanished after getting into Calkins' car.

In both cases, Calkins, who is white, said he gave them rides to gas stations. Circle Ks. Felipe and Terrence were in their 20s. Both were men of color. They have not been seen or found since. On the police closer, it says to serve and to protect. That did not happen. That did not happen. I first met Terrence's mother, Marcia Williams, in 2005, about a year after her son disappeared.

I spent time with her as she searched through an overgrown lot for signs of Terrence. I interviewed Felipe's family, too. And in the news reports I've dug up, I still look to be the last reporter who interviewed Stephen Calkins. I believe he only talked to me because I dropped in the fact that we share a hometown in rural Illinois. My colleagues Ryan Mills and Melanie Payne were just as haunted by the cases. Why were they never solved? Did the police drop the ball? Did the national media fail these men? Did we?

We thought a podcast would get this mystery to more people. Maybe it could help in some way. Also, the cases highlight systemic issues. They reveal how reluctant the police can be to believe one of their own could be responsible for wrongdoing. They expose disparities in media coverage of missing men and missing people of color. And they illuminate the deep wounds that are left when no one is held accountable.

Also, the story has so much compelling information. There's audio from Calkins that has only been released in recent years. Here's a snippet from a polygraph exam Calkins underwent after Terrence Williams disappeared in 2004. It was with his own agency, the Collier County Sheriff's Office, where Calkins worked nearly two decades. Okay, you know why you're here today? Yes. And what's that?

I gave somebody a ride and he disappeared. A later session with another examiner grew much more tense. You know, I mean, this is nothing other than the fact is that every time we ask you a question, we have to go back and get clarification. And every time we have to go back and get clarification, it makes it look like you're trying to hide something. And if you're trying to hide this, what else are you trying to hide? Do we got a body laying around in the sticks somewhere that we don't know about? The only thing we're trying to do is make sure that what you're telling us is the truth. I think I've told you everything I'm going to tell you.

Calkins has long maintained his innocence. He has never been arrested or charged in these cases. No one has. But hearing those polygraphs for the first time brought me back to the questions that remain unanswered. It reminded me of the pain these families have endured for so long. When I first met Marcia in 2005, I interviewed her in her home. I remember boxes of Terrence's belongings towering in the living room, a dozen bottles of cologne, a suede coat,

a Ralph Lauren shirt with a tag still attached, all just left behind. Back then, she told me how she would clutch one of his dreadlocks while she searched for clues online. Her answering machine played this message, voiced here by my colleague Melanie.

Whatever is now covered up will be uncovered, and every secret will be made known. Matthew chapter 10, verses 26 through 28. Back then, I didn't have kids. But when I started thinking about having kids, I thought about all the tragedies I had covered as a reporter. All the horrible things that could happen to my future children. And at the top of my list was this. I thought about the tragedy of not knowing what happened to your child, but knowing it was terrible.

Year after year, I saw Marcia fight to draw attention to the disappearances through sheer force of love and will. And in 2018, when there was a major development in these cases, I knew it was due to Marcia's persistence.

In this week's Behind the Headlines, a double dose of star power may shine light on a pair of mysterious missing persons cases in Collier County. Filmmaker Tyler Perry and notable civil rights attorney Ben Crump came to Naples in 2018 for a press conference. Crump has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.

Perry and Crump stood with Marcia Williams before an audience in a conference room at our newspaper's office. The office happened to be on Immokalee Road, the same road that Felipe Santos and Terrence Williams disappeared from. The presence of Perry and Crump and the resulting media attention was a huge victory for Marcia. Early on, she had begged the press to cover these cases.

At the 2018 press conference, Crump announced legal action against Stephen Calkins. We're here to announce that we are filing a civil wrong-for-death lawsuit where he will be subpoenaed and he will be made to come to be deposed and give sworn testimony for the first time to answer all the questions that Marcia Williams has for him. This lawsuit is going to formally say

what people have been informally saying, and that is that he intentionally murdered Terrence Williams and Felipe Santos. -Finally, someone had said out loud what so many people believed, but what Stephen Calkins has always denied. -These two young men disappear off the face of the Earth, and the last person to see them live was this sheriff's deputy.

And his stories were so inconsistent, so unbelievable. And even though he had all those inconsistencies, there were no charges filed. Calkins is a person of interest in the cases. The only person of interest, according to the Collier County Sheriff's Office.

But despite investigating the cases for years and involving several other agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office, no criminal evidence has been found implicating Calkins. Yet, he was fired from the sheriff's office after lying and changing his story about his interactions with Terrence. This civil suit was a glint of hope in these frozen cold cases.

Crump said during the press conference that a judge could compel Calkins to talk as part of the civil suit. Calkins had stopped talking to investigators about the cases more than a decade ago. He would soon hire an attorney to fight the suit. And, my God, it's long overdue that he answer these questions. Maybe the lawsuit would bring the answers Marcia Williams deserved. Would something finally come out to solve this mystery?

At the press conference, Crump turned it over to Tyler Perry. A person who walks it like he talking, Mr. Tyler Perry.

Good morning. I really don't want to be here in this moment. I wish none of us had to be here in this moment. This has got to bother you. If you are a decent, human, kind person with a soul, I don't know how you can sit and not be upset that these two people, black, white, Mexican, none of you matter, would be put in the back of a sheriff's deputy's car, someone we are supposed to trust, put in the car and then they disappear. I don't know anyone who that would not move unless you just have a heart of stone.

Then, Perry announced he was offering a $200,000 reward for tips. And he moved on to address an ugly media pattern. It's one I've seen often in my 20 years as a reporter. Missing white women get way more coverage than missing men and missing people of color.

I hesitate to say this, but it's so true. When somebody goes missing and they are a blue-eyed, blonde woman, it's all over the news. This woman has been struggling privately for many, many years just to get attention. No one would even give her attention. This is a good place to note. I'm blonde-haired and blue-eyed. And I recognize that the fight for attention these families have waged would never happen to my family if I went missing.

I saw what media bias looked like in my own community, my own newsroom. It took even longer for the cases to make a ripple outside of Naples, as Perry told it. I had a reporter to tell me, an actual reporter from a major network, when I called trying to get attention, saying, well, the victims aren't sympathetic. They aren't sympathetic. Those are the exact words that were said to me. So they didn't want to run the story. But you have the power in here to help the story get out.

Honestly, I was surprised that a reporter for a major network would be so blatant in their indifference. And maybe this cuts to the heart of what went wrong. Felipe and Terrence weren't initially seen as victims. I'm Rachel Martin, and you're listening to Up for Sunday and journalist Janine Zeitlin's investigation into the disappearance of two young men of color from the same road in Naples, Florida. The story continues after the break.

In 2019, Ryan, Melanie, and I started taking a deeper look at the disappearances of Felipe Santos and Terrence Williams. But that year, I got a job in Miami. When I came back to Southwest Florida a year later, they were nearly done with their research and interviews. Then, the pandemic upended our world and the news cycle. We're a small newsroom. Ryan, Melanie, and I were needed to cover COVID stories. Then, Melanie and Ryan got new jobs. Still, I wanted to finish what we had started.

And deep down, I hoped the podcast would lead to some useful tip. I began wading through their research while knowing not a lot, actually very little, about putting together a podcast. We talked on Zoom on Melanie's last day in 2020, before she left for her new job. Can you guys hear me now? Okay, phew. Okay, now I can hear. Now I'm going to start recording again. This meeting is being recorded.

I feel like I'm leaving something undone. And for so long, they were left undone. Am I kind of abandoning them the way, you know, they were abandoned? I just feel bad about that. And I felt that about Marcia. You know, we're about the same age, and both black women, and...

She's just so close to her son. Every time I would see that woman's face, my heart would break for her. What do you think about taking it over? I definitely feel nervous about doing it justice. We've left you a lot. I never counted how many interviews we did, but we've done...

dozens and dozens of interviews for hours and hours and hours of conversations. I think the accountability piece was always kind of a major key of what we were trying to do because we didn't want it to just be an exploitive, can we make this a worthwhile effort, you know, as a public service. But I also think it's like a level of media accountability too. I wish I would have been more aggressive, I guess. I failed them and I'm counting on you not to.

It's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. The most logical place to start in the heap of reporting was the beginning of this mystery, the day Felipe Santos went missing, October 14, 2003. What happened when Felipe Santos crossed paths with Deputy Calkins after the minor traffic crash? Why did investigators think Felipe may have reason to disappear?

In October 2003, George W. Bush was president. The Black Eyed Peas had their first major hit. Flip phones were replacing pagers. And it was that time of year in Naples when retirees start migrating south to Florida. Felipe was 23. He had been working in the United States a few years and sending money back to his family in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was a farm worker and also worked construction, where the pay is better.

Felipe lived with his family in Immokalee, an immigrant-rich farming town that supplies southwest Florida with labor. About 40 miles separate Immokalee from Naples, yet the differences are stark. In Immokalee's downtown, roosters meander through parking lots of Latin grocery stores. In downtown Naples, you can throw a rock and hit a Rolls Royce. In Immokalee, you see a lot of people riding bikes because they don't have driver's licenses. And many don't have licenses because they're undocumented.

Felipe did not have a license, and he was undocumented. The morning of October 14, 2003, Felipe was driving a 1988 white Ford Tempo on Amakli Road, which connects Amakli in the east to North Naples on the Gulf Coast. Amakli Road ends at the beach, Del Norwegen State Park. It was a Tuesday and a typical fall day here in terms of weather. Hot and sticky.

Felipe's brothers, Jorge and Salvador, were in the car too. They were concrete workers. South Florida was in one of its many construction booms. There were plenty of jobs to go around. The sun had just started to come up. It was before seven. In the lane next to Felipe and his brothers was Camille Churchill. She was headed to her job as a security guard at a gated community, which are plentiful here. She was driving a white Mazda Protégé, according to records.

He came over without realizing I was passing him. And he made contact with me. I made contact with the next car. My car was spinning out. That's Camille in a 2019 interview with Melanie and Ryan. He was acting like he was going to flee. So I pointed at him and said, go to Green Tree Plaza. And so he did. And we get out of the car. He offered me money. I said, no, I want this on record because it's

I've been in a lot of accidents, and most of them are my fault. And this one wasn't. Nobody was hurt, but Camille wanted the crash on record for insurance. She called the police. In sheriff's records, it says the caller, quote, chased the Mexicans. They waited for the police.

Felipe and his brothers must have been scared. They were nervous, just pacing, just walking around. They were speaking Spanish, so I don't, I have no idea what they were saying. Deputy Stephen Calkins arrived on the scene. Yeah, well, first thing he says, what happened? I said, you know, we're in an accident. And he just was shaking his head saying, I'm really, really getting sick of this s**t. And I figured he meant the same thing that I was frustrated about.

Immigrants driving with no license, insurance. It's not just immigrants either. I've had a boyfriend that didn't have a license. He drove all over the place. And it happens a lot in Florida. Ryan pressed Camille for more details on how Calkins reacted. He said he was friendly with you. He was professional with you. Did you see any change in the demeanor when he was dealing with Felipe? Not really, no.

So it wasn't like he was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No, no, no. But what she said reminded me of something I had seen in Calkins' personnel file. The exact date of the report is unclear, but one of his performance reviews noted that Calkins had received counseling around 1999 from a superior for, quote, his unprofessional behavior toward citizens. Camille said that Calkins did another thing that she found odd. There was something strange, but when he took us,

I don't know if you have it in your notes, but he took us for a reenactment of the car accident. No, this is the first I've heard about that. No police officer has ever done that in all the accidents I have been in. I got shotgun, and he put Felipe in the back. And so he goes, drives down to Machu Picchu Road, turns around, comes back. And I don't know if Felipe was understanding what was going on, because I don't think he spoke very good English.

He was sitting like this in the cop car, leaning forward, listening to what was going on. I don't think he said anything. That whole reenactment thing? That struck me as weird, too. On the other hand, it could be seen as diligent police work. Ryan asked a Collier County Sheriff's Office investigator about it. That was certainly not standard procedure, he told Ryan, but it wouldn't set off alarm bells. Then when he went to drop me off, my supervisor was there to pick me up to take me to work. So I just...

Got out of the car, said, am I good to go? He said, yes. I got in the supervisor's car and left. Camille's car had a flat tire after the crash, so she left it there. She still carries some guilt for her role on that morning. Felipe had offered her money not to call the cops. Thinking back, I should have took the money and ran. I would have known that we don't have a crystal ball to tell us what's going to happen in the future. She didn't see Calkins arrest or handcuff Felipe, but she assumed Calkins would take Felipe to jail.

So did Felipe's brothers, Jorge and Salvador, who saw Calkins put Felipe in the patrol car. Certainly these were logical conclusions. Felipe was driving without a license and without insurance. The Santos family grew concerned when Felipe didn't return home. They grew even more concerned when they checked the jail, said Julia Perkins with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

She and the coalition have helped advocate for the family. They started to get answers about where he wasn't, right? He wasn't in jail. He had never been to the jail. He wasn't in any of the local hospitals. There wasn't any more information. I think as that developed, they started to get more and more worried, right? Where then could he be? This question would go unanswered.

There has never been another confirmed sighting of Felipe Santos since he was seen in Deputy Calkins' patrol car. But why did the police initially think that Felipe had fled the country? And why was his family so convinced that he didn't? In the next episode, we'll explore that question, dive deep into the records on Felipe's disappearance, and interview a lead investigator on the case. We'll also learn about the milestone in Felipe's life that made his disappearance even more alarming and heartbreaking to his family.

In The Last Ride, over eight episodes, we'll provide the most comprehensive look at this unsolved mystery yet. We'll also investigate how these cases were handled by the police and the media. We'll interview people who have never talked in-depth to the media before and hear once-confidential recordings, including dramatic polygraphs with Stephen Calkins. We've scrutinized hundreds of pages of records to provide as full of picture as we could about the disappearances.

and Calkins. That pursuit took us from Florida to Tennessee to Illinois to Iowa. We'll explore why it took years for these cases to get the kind of attention they deserved and the lengths law enforcement took to investigate Calkins. And we'll follow the civil suit against Calkins to its shocking conclusion.

There's nothing suspicious on a deputy sheriff unarresting somebody and giving them a ride.

That's courteousness and professionalism and something that we promote. I said, to hell with you and to hell with your deputies. Somebody in there stinks. If you have any information about this case, call the Collier Sheriff's Office at 239-252-9300. Or, to remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 800-780-8477.

I'm Janine Zeitlin, producer, reporter, writer. If you have anything you'd like to share with me, I'm on Twitter, at Janine Zeitlin. Our co-producer and audio editor is Amanda Inscore of Naples Daily News and the News Press. Sound design by Richard Chinqui of WGCU. Reporting by Melanie Payne and Ryan Mills. Executive producers are Florida Investigations editor Laura Grenias and WGCU executive producer Pamela James.

Additional support from Mark Bickle, Cindy McCurry-Ross, Scott Stein, Amy Shoemaker, Corey Lewis, John Torres, Alex Dryhouse, and Rose Charles. Legal Review by Tom Curley. Original Theme Song by Christopher Russell. Audio Assistance by Jared Gonzalez. Please support journalism like this by subscribing to the Naples Daily News, the News Press, or donating to WGCU Public Media, or supporting your local news source.

If you like our podcast, be sure to rate us wherever you get it. It really does make a difference. Thanks for listening. The Last Ride is an investigative series from the USA Today Network and distributed by the NPR Network. I'm Rachel Martin. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.