You're listening, Adfree, on Wondry Plus.

Hey lovely listeners and welcome to Real Crime Profile. I'm Laura Richards.

Former New Scotland Yard, Criminal Behavioral Analyst, Founder of Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service

and Host of the Podcast Crime Analyst, and with me today is...

Hi I'm Jim Clemente, Retired FBI Profile of Former New York City Prosecutor and right producer of Criminal Minds.

And I am Lisa Zambetti, casting director of CVS Criminal Minds, and we're jumping right back into our conversation

with Stephen Pandos, whose sister Jennifer went missing in February of 1987 when she was 15 years old,

vanishing basically without a trace.

And also here with us is Cynthia Hill, the amazing documentary filmmaker who is chronicled Stephen's journey to find out what really happened to Jennifer in their documentary burden of proof.

And we're jumping back in and we were discussing, you know, Stephen's parents had been interrogated and interviewed by the police, taken and had problematic results in polygraph tests.

And there's a lot of footage in the documentary of these interviews and very intense interrogations between Margie, who's Stephen's mother, and the police, as the police are trying to get her to be more forthcoming about what happened that night.

They offered her immunity because they're sort of focusing in on Stephen's father Ron as somebody who may have harmed Jennifer, accidentally harmed her, and then removed her from the home.

But it's really your mom who we see a lot of footage of and hear her trying to defend herself.

Yeah, and that's why when I mentioned earlier that that your mother's changing to the present tense, it's a red flag and can indicate deception, but it can also be, as Laura said, that she's covering for things that are bad that she doesn't want to say because she knows that we'll get a very negative reaction.

And there are a few things during the course of the documentary that your mother says that are very troubling when when you were confronting her and she said, I guess I need a lawyer now, I'll go to jail for the rest of my life.

It's a very strange statement from somebody who wasn't involved, but she also said something that we saw in a, we've seen in a number of other cases and that she said, I've had 22 years to imagine where that child is.

And when she said that child, not my daughter, not Jennifer, not the little girl that I loved, but that child, it shows a distance between her and Jennifer, and now that could be a number of reasons what we do, what we don't do is jump to conclusions because we see these indicators, what we do is say there's something behind this and what is it?

Is it that she distanced herself from Jennifer because the pain is so great or that if she goes down that road, then she will be punished by the person she's with or that it is just the whole thing is just all too painful to really recount, but by saying that child, this is something, if that was a statement that she made on the day that she found the note, for example,

I think that tells me a whole lot more about their relationship than having that same statement made decades later because at that point, it may be normal for somebody to feel distant from Jennifer, for the mother to feel distant from Jennifer.

But it's just something that when you look at these statements, it relies on underlying problem, there's some serious issue there, and when you find out through the history that what was going on in the relationship and so forth, that, and I think the other thing is the behavior of when she was called by the police reaching out to your father and not answering or returning the calls of the police officer,

reaching out to your father, I think shows the level of course of control that your father still had over her even years later.

Right, that was that connection was why I started this whole thing.

...