SPEAKER_00 0:00

In Tragedy, a true crime podcast, we discuss missing persons cases, violent crime, and other sensitive topics that may be difficult for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Our show is a place where every story matters and every voice deserves to be heard. To support this podcast, you can subscribe at www.tragedy a true crime podcast.com for early access to new episodes. And join our Facebook community, Tragedy, a True Crime Podcast, for updates, discussions, and ways to support the families we feature. Welcome to Tragedy, a true crime podcast. I'm Elisa.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

And I'm Michael.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

And today we are on location in Key West, Florida.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

That's right. Even though we are on vacation, the podcast never stops. It never sleeps.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

That's right. Well, we're always thinking about it, right? That's right. And today we are going to kind of put a bow on our work with a missing person from 1968, Jonathan Hagins. That's right. But before we do that, we do have some brief updates in relation to a couple of our cases. And those of you who are listening know that his truck was found. And to our knowledge, since the locating of the truck, there have been three searches in the area where the truck was found. All of those are on behalf of the Waucullah County Sheriff's Office. The first search seems to be really led and organized by the Waucala County Sheriff's Office. We saw a couple of news reports on that. And we just learned, actually today, that there have been two additional searches, and these have been put on by the North Florida Search Team, Inc. This is a nonprofit, and you can find them at nflst.org. And they are out searching for Ian on behalf again of the Waucala County Sheriff's Office. They won't just go out there on their own. So we've heard that they are there because the Waucala County Sheriff's Office has asked them to go out. Some really positive news is that according to Teresa Ian's mom, she's really feeling like the Sheriff's Office is very, very focused now that they have the truck has been located and really doing their due diligence. She's getting a lot of communication from them. As we said, there have been three searches now. So there seems to be some real positive movement from the sheriff's office, which is nice. We know that this nonprofit does, they have drones, they have horses, all kinds of things. And we are going to reach out to them, learn more about what they do, and hopefully they can come on the show and talk about their work a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

I certainly hope so.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

And secondly, we do want to give an update on the Michael John Olson story. Um, last we had talked about Michael John Olson. Remember, he's missing out of West Palm Beach. There was this tape that was sent to us by the family. Michael, do you want to talk about what you did with that tape? Because you really did that.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Yeah, well, my first goal was to get that analog tape on some kind of digital platform so we could really start filtering through and take some of the background noise out and find out what we had. Now, there was a lot of hopes that there was some going to be be some kind of, you know, case value to that tape. And what we discovered that there just really wasn't. It's a little boy talking. Um, he's obviously playing with a recorder. Now we didn't know if it was Michael John Olson. We weren't sure who it was, but we did filter as much as we could. We provided the family. We've now sent the tape back to them along with the digital recordings. And the really cool part is they were able to confirm that it is Michael talking.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Yes. And I got a text message from his nieces, and they're just so grateful. And, you know, of course, this is very emotional for the family, but that is his voice on that tape. And so um could work on that, Michael, and and making that so that it is something that they could hear and um a real important keepsake for them. Lastly, in the next few weeks, we are going to be spending some time in West Palm Beach. So we have reached out to Michael's family, and they are coordinating, hopefully, uh time where we can go into the West Palm Beach Police Department and speak with a representative regarding Michael John's case and sharing any new information that we have and questions from the family directly face to face. And so we will definitely update everybody on that if that ends up happening.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Now, for the core reason for our bonus episode today is to really talk about our assessment or conclusions surrounding the Jonathan Hagen case.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Yes. And you've done a lot of work on that, so I'm gonna let you kick that off.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

All right, so to start with, you know, let's just make sure we're clear that this is our assessment. We're not trying to say this to disparage anybody who may believe in other things, and I'm sure there's gonna be people out there that disagree with us. Our assessment is based on what we found in the FOIA, what we believe from the witness accounts that we've had both on the record and off the record, as well as some of the research that we've done regarding weather patterns and things like that. So let's go ahead and kick it off with let's talk about the FOIA for a second. One of the biggest things that was a premier detail in this case that really bothered us was the existence or non-existence of this snack shack. No one can find this thing. No one has been in that we've talked to, investigators that have gone in after the fact when the case was reopened, and then we have been unable to find it, regardless of any of our research. And Alisa, I mean, you've really dug into this. So with that being said, when we got the FOIA, one thing really stood out, and we talked about this before, and that is there is no snack shack reference in the FOIA at all. 130-something pages. What was it again, babe?

SPEAKER_00 6:05

It's 137.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

137 pages and not one mention of it, yet there's three separate mentions of a bar. Now we go into some of our interviews, and what was really compelling is the two people that we've spoken to, we've got Joe and we've got Joel, talk about the Snack Shack. Joe was five years old. So most likely much of what he is stating has been told to him. This is the memory of a five-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Joel wasn't alive yet. And so he, you know, I'm not tr trying to discount anything he's saying, but let's be honest, everything that he's saying is what he's been told.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Right. And the snack shack came into this story because their recollection and what they have been told is that Jonathan was making his way from the car ramp to the snack shack where the adults were. And that they recall the last thing they saw was him opening the door and walking into the snack shack. And so that is immediately why I started trying to find the name of the snack shack and did all the research with Beaches Library and all of that kind of stuff. And then, as you're mentioning, when we received the FOIA, of course, the first thing I did was did a control F for Snack Shack, and it is not, it is just not there at all.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

And like I said, what is there is the bar. Now, why is that important? When we talked to Susan, she talked about this bar. And we mentioned to her in the in one of our other episodes where she even talks about an experience she had in the bar and then who was in the bar and what was going on in the bar. And you know, it's just it's very clear that her memory is true and probably the most accurate one we can trust in this scenario. And so that being said, I mean, her account is very different. We don't have Jonathan going up to the door and going into his mom or father or whatever. We have three people. We have her, one of her friends, Becky, and we have Jonathan right there. And we well, no, we have four of Joe.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

And so they were in the water. They were absolutely in the water. And so there's there's a debate on how deep. I think that's where recollection can probably be challenging. But bottom line is they're in the water. Okay, so why is this water so important? The water is important because we've been led to believe at this point that you know we should have been able to find Jonathan if he fell in the water. There's no way possible way he could have drowned. No one believes that. But what I decided to do in this scenario is kind of challenge that theory. And realistically, I decided to science the shit out of this. And so getting actual weather reports, tidal reports from 1968, most of that stuff right now is not electronically available. So what I used instead is NOAA's tidal prediction models. And they have weather prediction models, they have lots of different prediction models. Anyone can look this up if they want to. And what was interesting about it is it was indicated to us that high tide was 10 p.m. Well, according to these models, that's not true. High tide would have more likely been been between 6 and 7 p.m. Meaning 10 p.m. would have been a falling tide. Now, why is that important? Any person who's familiar with the beach understands the concept of rip currents. And when rip currents are the most dangerous, is during a falling tide because they're very difficult to see. And let's don't forget it's nighttime. So they're even more difficult to see now. And then now you have children in the water during a falling tide with rip currents very likely being available. So that's not painting a really pretty picture on the non-drowning idea.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

I think also it's important for everybody to remember this was 1968, and so my suspicion would be that there are a lot less lights. When you go to those places now, if you go to like Ocean City or a beach like that, it's totally lit up. Even at night you can see far. But this is 1968, and and there's this car ramp, and that's probably about it. So we can add that also, this lack of just artificial light.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

No, that makes a lot of sense. So now let's talk about okay, he fell in the water. But everyone was right there. You know, he would have floated, you know. The challenge with that is when I did a comparison on his approximate size and weight, um, the approximate temperature that these prediction models also had for the Jacksonville Beach area, it actually did not predict that he would float. It predicted that he would sink. And he would sink right away. And so you start talking about some of the immediate searches that were happening right then. We have an immediate search happening by the lifeguards that were in the area and any person who volunteered and came in that were trying to search for, but now we're, you know, search for Jonathan, but now we're talking about a body that's underwater at night, poorly lit, in a rip current, most likely in a rip current.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

And a little he's very little. He's three. We're not looking for an adult.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

So this was not would he would not be easy to spot at this point. So now there's some people that are going to make the argument that he would have floated. Great, let's have that argument too. At night, any person who's familiar with the beach also knows that wind during the day tends to go from the beach, from the ocean side into land. And at night, it tends to go from land toward the ocean. Any person who lives on the beach knows this. And so, with that being said, even if he was on the surface, you know, weather is pushing him away from the shore, not toward it. And then again, rip currents, the wind, the temperature, none of the science behind this is really helping us find Jonathan at all. Now, let's get into prediction models on body recovery. That gets really interesting. So the best case scenario is someone falls in the water during the day and is spotted. And that scenario, there is a 20 to 40% chance of that person being recovered unharmed. Now, let's start factoring in nighttime, let's start factoring in not starting the s the daytime search until obviously the next day. So now we have many hours have gone by, let's factor in rip currents, let's factor in the likelihood the body would have sank. Um any person who said that he would just wash up on shore further down the beach, I'm I would love to have him on the show. Whoever said that, I think that was something that Paul indicated during his the conversation we had with him. But any person who would have said that, I would love to have them on the show because I can't find anything that supports that in this scenario. Um and the scenario that we see is he most likely would have been miles out at sea um before any kind of daytime search would have begun. So based on that, based on those factors, at this point, we believe that the original investigative team with the Jacksonville Beach Police Department was actually correct and that this was an accidental drowning.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Yes, and we do see that in the FOIA that in 1995, uh, this case was removed from the NCIC, which is the National Crime Information Center. And then again, it was reopened in 2015 on behalf of the family, which we kind of talked about briefly before. But it it does look like that what everything you just described aligns with the original investigation findings and the reason why this case was completely taken off out of the record.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Yeah, I mean the only thing left over, and you know, and we're certainly willing to look at it, is we have the impression that there was additional documents created when the investigation was reopened. At this point, none of those documents had been provided to us. We've requested multiple times. And so what that tells us is that it's likely that those documents probably do not support anything other than what we're saying here, and that's an accidental drowning. We really wish it supported something else. We really wish we could have drawn some other conclusion. I would love to think Jonathan is out there, you know, being raised by another family or something like that, or stole it. That was one of the theories that we talked about. But based on what we're finding, I just think that's very unlikely.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yeah, I remember when we first um started learning about this case and we were sort of picturing in our mind this snack shack, and we were like, what if he walked into the snack shack? What did he do? Walk through? You know, was there a door on the beach side and a door on the street side? And we were just trying to like visualize what this would look like. And how would someone not see a three-year-old just wandering around a snack shack? Did he go out the other door? And it just turns out that like none of that seems to be accurate. There is a a restaurant bar that they were at after they'd been to the pizza place, and it there never appears to actually be a snack shack. So, you know, I think you you bring up a good point. You know, we you always want to have a positive outcome, and you want to believe that this person who is missing is still out there somewhere, but it just doesn't plausibly seem like that's the case. Lastly, I do want to take us back to this FOIA and this 137 pages that we received. We did note that I would say 95% of that is from 2015 moving forward when the case was reopened. And we do have a good open line of communication with Detective Warren, who is leading this case. And so we will be reaching back out and seeing if we can get those original documents from 1968 moving forward, because we know from all the people who were there that they were interviewed. And we would like to get our hands on those interviews and and just go back through those and make sure that those are aligning with sort of what we're thinking.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Yeah, that was one of the things, too, that really stuck out to us since you said it. And I might as well just point it out, you know, directly. We know all these people interviewed, not one of those interviews is in the FOIA. And that to me is strange and certainly something that is prohibiting us from really dialing this directly in.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Thanks for joining us for this bonus episode. And we do have some really fun updates for those of you who aren't on our Facebook page. And if you're not, you need to find us, Tragedy, a true crime podcast, on Facebook. We have had an explosion in listenership. We have over 500 people in our Facebook group, and we hit another really important milestone as far as downloads. And we have had 10 over and over 10,000 downloads now since we went on the Buzz Sprouts platform. And we just want to thank everyone who has been listening and sharing, spread the word. And if you were here because you're listening, you have a connection to a particular person and a particular a particular story that we are discussing. Please, please make sure that you're going back all the way to the beginning and listening to our other stories and supporting all of those families as we grow this community. And with that, next week, we will be returning to our new missing person, Cody Haney, out of Liberty County. And we have spoken with his mom, Michelle, and she'll be talking a little bit about Cody.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

I'm looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

You've been listening to Tragedy, a true crime podcast. Our purpose is to honor victims by sharing their stories through the voices of friends, family, and those whose lives were forever changed. If today's episode resonated with you, we encourage you to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast so these important stories continue to be heard. Together, we can preserve their memories and ensure their voices are never forgotten. If you have ideas for cases we should cover or questions about what you heard, you can connect with us through our Facebook group, Tragedy a True Crime Podcast, on X at Tragedy Podcast, by email at TragedyAtrue Crime Podcast at gmail.com, or by visiting our website www.tragedy a true crime podcast.com. Thank you for listening, and we hope you'll join us next time.