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One day at a time, I can't do that. I got to go like one hour at a time. It's more like half hour by half hour. Sometimes it feels like time drags on, it's real slow. Next thing you know, I'm 42.

Jake Silva has spent most of his life in prison. For the past 23 years, that's all he's known. But he says it's never really felt like it's his life he's been living in there.

I'm living somebody else's life. Whoever that person is, is living my life. And I'm living his. It's like we got somehow, some way we got mixed up.

The person who killed Renee, whoever they may be, is walking around free, and Jake is living the life they should have been living. That's how Jake imagines it, anyway.

Like I was skating down the street, going to an alternate dimension, and we switched lives somehow. I'm living his life, and he's living mine. He should be dealing with this shit.

I'm Susan Simpson.

And I'm Jacinda Davis.

I'm an attorney and investigator.

And I'm a true crime TV producer.

And this is Proof Season 2, murder at the warehouse. Proof is a red marble media production in association with Glassbox Media.

New episodes are released on Mondays, and on Thursdays, you can catch our sidebar episodes where we talk about the case, talk to guests, and tell you more about what's going on behind the scenes. You can find additional materials about this case on our website at proofcrimepod. Com. You're listening to episode 6, Meal Creek.

Jake Silva would be the first to admit that he's institutionalized. He knows how to live in a jail cell. He's pretty good at it.

I see everybody else around me struggling, running out of toilet paper, running out of this, doing this and that, and problem after problem. And I don't have that one of those problems.

In prison, you don't have much to work with, but Jake knows how to make deal with what he has.

You should see it. I wish there was a way you could see my cell. I got badass shelves up on the wall that I made. It's part clean the cell in this whole building. It's really nice. My bed's rolled up real nice. Everything's folded up nice.

It's not just his cell he keeps clean either. Jake had mentioned to me before that in the evenings, he'd go out and clean the showers, but I'd assume this was a job or something that he'd been assigned to do.

It's quite cool with all these COs that work in here, so they let me stay out, clean the showers.

Oh, you want to clean the showers? Which is good. Wait, so you volunteered to clean the showers?

Yeah. I got to focus on something positive for myself, living in a system that I'm miserable.

Jake is good at surviving in prison, but that does little to blunt the misery of being caged.

There's a season when the tarantulas come out. And these fucking idiots, they go and catch them, and they bring them in the building, and they try to sell them. Because there's always guys around here that want to have a pet. I hate that, too. Why would you want to have a little animal locked up in a cell? Bad enough, you're in here, or I'm in here. You want to have a little animal locked up like that. And I bought three of them. I gave them coffee, I gave one guy a cup of soup, and I wouldn't let them go.

If Jake can't be free, at least the tarantulus can be. But from talking Speaking of Jake, I always get the sense that it's not the prison walls that make life in prison so unbearable.

It's not really prison itself, but it's just the people, because there's nothing but hatred and anger and misery. I'm like an alien in this environment. That's really how it feels. I don't fit in. Period.

Doing time in prison is hard. Doing time in prison with a rape charge is much harder.

I fucking can only imagine what that fucking guy's gone through. He's got a fucking R on his jacket. He's got a fucking target on his head. That R fucking is no joke.

That's Jake's friend, Louis. Louis has spent time in prison himself, and he has seen firsthand what having an R in your jacket, a rape charge, means for an inmate. Would his life have been easier if he didn't have the R?

Yeah, it would have been a lot easier. Fucking hit it right. Then he wouldn't have guys like me in there trying to stab him.

For the past 23 years, Jake's reality has been waking up in a cage surrounded by people who are waiting for the chance to kill him.

You don't have a clue of what I've had to deal with. Just based on the rape charge alone. That stupid letter is all that matters. I hate it with all my heart and soul.

Immates who have the R can't afford making themselves even more of a target, Jake has told me. So he doesn't do that. He minds his own business.

Literally the only way I'm going to stay out of trouble is to stay in my cell. I don't leave my cell for nothing.

And yet, sometimes Jake will tell me stories about his day that suggests he does not always follow his own advice.

There were bats. There was two free-tail bats. Little guys, but they're bad-ass love bats. I got them tattooed all over me. I got all these idiot porters and gurs out here throwing shit at the fucking bat. He was stuck to the ceiling. He was scared. He didn't know what the hell was going on. And I told all these dudes, Hey, man, they're throwing shoes at it. I told them, You throw that shoe at that bat, I'm going to knock your jaw off. And he stopped. Oh, get it out of here, man. They carry diseases. I said, Man, you probably carry more diseases than that bat does. That bat's just scared. It's not hurting nobody. It's just scared.

I spoke to an inmate from the California prison system, a guy named Alan, who was done time. He was in some of the same prisons that Jake has been in. Alan told me that by putting himself out there like this, by refusing to back down, Jake makes himself more of a target.

I don't know why you would walk around the yard like that. That's the last thing you need to do is draw attention yourself.

At the same time, if he'd been skulking around and weak, wouldn't that also make him vulnerable?

No, because there is a lot of sex offender there, and they're out of the way. They don't want no attention. They're like, Hey, I don't want to crime. They're making sure they're out of the way.

Most sex offenders try to stay out of the way for their own survival. Jake does not always do that, but he has made it through so far somehow.

Yeah, I was strong. You had no choice but to be strong. You'd rather die or something, you know? Luckily, I have a strong head, a hard head because the sucker punch, they don't do nothing to me. Just bounce something.

Having a hard head, as Jake puts it, has helped him, but so has learning new skills while in prison. Not long after his conviction, Jake got his first prison tattoo and found his new passion in life.

2003, so I was 21. I moved in with this guy from San Jose, and he did my whole left arm. And I was just watching him do it. And I'm really good at drawing, so I just fell into it. I do portraits, everything. And I got really good. Everybody wants you tattooed tattoos around here, especially if they're good. Usually, I land on a yard somewhere and people are like, Oh, yeah, that dude, that dude, tattoo's ever good. And everybody helps me out and looks out for me because they know how good I am at tattooing. Everything's easy. And then, you know.

And then, eventually, someone on the yard finds out about the R, the rape conviction, and things get hard again.

Does it ever get easier?

No. No, it gets worse and worse. I'm Morgan Rector, host of the Human Monsters: True Crime Podcast. Do you find life boring within the comfort zone? This is the right show for you. It will test your endurance. The offenders profiled or among the most inhumane. These people specialize in the unthinkable Human Monsters, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners, it's Tim and Lance here, and we wanted to remind you that we have a little show out there called Crawl Space. On Crawl Space, we dive deep into a number of cold cases, not just one offs, but for as many episodes as we need to raise awareness and tell stories of people impacted by crime.

And we are constantly striving to inform our listeners about topics and events that they may not realize have an effect on their lives.

Experts, authors, survivors, and educators in the fields of psychology, criminology, advocacy, history, and more, join us as we work together to understand our community.

We like to say Crawl Space is the place where crime meets culture.

You can find Crawl Space wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Sometime in the early '80s, REO Speedwagon's airplane made an unannounced middle-of-the-night landing.

This is my friend Kyle McLauchland, the star of Twin Peaks.

And he's telling me about how he discovered a real-life Twin Peaks in rural North Carolina, not far from where he filmed Blue Velvet.

What was on the plane was copious amounts of drugs coming in from South America. Supposedly, Pablo Escobar went looking for other spots, quiet, out-of-the-way places to bring in his cocaine.

My name is Joshua Davis, and I'm an investigative reporter. Kyle and I talk all the time about the strange things we come across, but nothing was quite as strange as what we found in Varnumtown, North Carolina.

There's Crooked Cops, Brother Against Brother. Everyone's got a story to tell, but does the truth even exist?

Welcome to Varnumtown.

Varnumtown is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Before Renee's murder, Jake had had a lot of friends. After After his arrest, though, almost none of them were willing to call him a friend any longer.

Everybody just fell off the face of the earth. Nobody wrote him. Nobody. They just all... You know.

That's Jake's childhood friend, Paige. After Jake went to prison, she made a point of staying in touch with him.

I more so wrote him just to keep his spirits up and just to be there for someone for him to talk to.

Most people from Jake's previous life wrote him off completely. Paige's family wish she'd done the same. She was told that it was not a good idea to talk to him.

He was just worried that other people would find out and be angry about it. People just wanted it to go away. Yeah, they still do. Yeah, they just wanted it to be done. They just wanted to be like, This is the story we've given you. Accept it and move the fuck on. And so I think he was just worried because, again, I was one of the only people who was still talking to Jake.

Paige wasn't just one of the only people. She was the only one, aside from his family. But the lives they were leading were very different, and maintaining a friendship with Jake was hard. And it just got harder as the years went on, and the gulf between them grew wider.

One of the reasons why me and Jake stopped talking is just... I mean, he went in there when he was so young. He has no bearing of responsibility because he never had to have responsibility. I mean, he has whatever he has in there, but it's not the same as real-life things. He never got to grow up.

In prison, having a rape conviction puts a target on your back. And in the outside world, being the daughter of a convicted rapist carries its own stigma. Because of your dad, you get shit around town as well.

I used to. Not anymore.

Mandy's life wasn't easy after her dad went to prison. Everyone knew her dad was tie loops, and everyone believed he had killed and raped Renee. For Mandy, it got so bad for her that staying in school wasn't really feasible. And that's probably not what your dad wanted for you.

No, he was upset. He was even telling me to change my last name to my mom's name so that nobody would mess with me.

The police in Manteca had not liked tie loops. Some of them carried that dislike over to his daughter.

I got arrested. This was years later. I think I was 18 or 20. And they were back there watching me, him and three other cops. He was like, I wanted to see Ty Lopes His daughter, he's all, By the time I retire, I'm going to put you away like you're dead. And I was like, Whatever. I was like, Try. But yeah, Tony Sizzle was mean.

When Ty Lopes was arrested for Renee's murder, one of the first things he did was to call his daughter, Mandy, from the jail Payphone, and he told her that he was coming home. Even after his conviction, when he'd call her from prison, he never stopped telling her that.

He said, I would tell you if I was not coming home. He said, I wouldn't just tell you I'm going to come home and not come home or try to come home.

Ty assured Mandy that he wasn't telling her that he'd be coming home to give her some false hope. He was telling her this because he believed in.

He said he's not going to stop, but he said there's only so many places he can go to reach out to try to help him, that if there was something that told him, It's done, and it's over, and he said, I'll tell you.

Ty ended up at Mule Creek State Prison, a prison that had a sensitive needs yard for inmates at risk, inmates like Ty. Mandy and her aunt Elaina didn't know the full extent of Ty's problems, but they got glimpses of it.

I remember I went and visited him one time, and he had a black eye. But I think So I think that was more like gang members getting him off their yard or whatever because of what he was in there for. Well, that, and he was known as the Preacher. The Preacher? Yeah. How?

He was preaching to all the Witness words. You know, he just...

I guess when you get locked up, everybody finds God in some way.

But that was his nickname as the preacher.

While in prison, Ty never stopped his quest to have his conviction overturned. For years, he represented himself as a pro se litigant, filing hundreds of pages of motions and petitions with the court. The docket are filled with his pleas, like a letter written directly to a federal judge. I'm sorry to bother you, sir, but I am totally innocent, and I believe Jake Silva is, too. Have a good day, your honor. Or a handwritten habeas petition, carefully setting forth a claim for relief. I have been railroaded. It is totally obvious my conviction must be vacated now. It is so obvious that there is no case law needed to be cited.

He did always say stuff like that, too. You can hear the desperation in his filings. Yeah. No, he was very desperate. Ty's legal arguments were not the sort that are likely to succeed in post-conviction proceedings. Without a lawyer, Ty had no chance of ever getting anywhere in his case. He was trying everything he could. I know he was trying to get in with the Innocence Project, and then he was really happy once they accepted it. It wasn't the Innocence Project that took on Thaai's case, but a similar organization called Centurian Ministries. Similar to other Innocence Project chapters around the US, Centurian Ministries Centurian Ministries advocates for the wrongfully convicted. He was all excited. He's like, They accepted my case. And he said, Oh, no, it's just a matter of time. It's like, I'm going to be coming back. Centurian Ministries accepted Thai's case in 2011 and partnered with an Innocence Project chapter in California to represent him in court. Finally, after years of failed legal efforts, Ty's case got the breakthrough it needed. He had attorneys who began working on his behalf. Then on Halloween night in 2011, Mandy got the phone call. I was out trick-retreating with my kids, and I guess maybe my grandma waited until the end of the night.

She ended up calling me. She was like, I'm sorry, baby, your dad's dead. And I started yelling at her. I was like, Don't lie about something like that. Why are you saying that? And she's like, I'm sorry, baby, your dad's dead. Earlier that evening, correctional officers at Meale Creek State Prison had found Ty unresponsive in a cell. The circumstances were such that investigators from the Amador County DA's office were quickly submitted to the scene to investigate a probable homicide. Investigators talked to other inmates on the unit about what had happened. One of the inmates they spoke to was actually Ty's former cellmate.

Getting back to Mr. Lopes, how was he as a cellmate? He was the worst roommate I ever had.

In prison, Ty had reputation for not being the ideal cellmate. Opinionated, mouthy. He was not the only inmate on the unit, though, that was unpopular as a cellmate. James Booker, a. K. A. Country, was also someone that no one wanted a room with. Investigators spoke to Booker's old roommate, too.

I'm fully aware of his potential to be a dangerous person. That's not a question. I've been selling these dangerous people, I think. I know how to deal with those situations. And I knew that standing in with Mr. Booker was was not in my best interest, nor he is.

In October of 2011, both Ty Lopes and James Booker found themselves in need of new cellmates, and there was paperwork showing that they'd requested to be cellmates with one another. Though, investigators and inmates and the like found this puzzling.

Mr. Lopes and Booker both signed a request to move in with each other. And they could never understand that because Lopes didn't like him.

This new cellmate arrangement did not last for long. Very quickly, Ty began trying to find a way out of his new cell.

Now, Booker and Lopes were selling this for about 11 days. I heard that Lopes had asked a couple of people in the building if he could move.

Ty's old cellmate couldn't understand why Ty would have wanted to move in with Booker in the first place. But he'd known exactly why Booker had wanted to move in with Ty.

So Country said, I'm going to have him move in with me. What do you think? What was his intention to have Lopes moving with him? He was probably going to kill him between me and him because he wanted a single cell status, and that's the way he did it.

Booker's former cellmate told investigators the same thing about what Booker's plans had been.

Specifically, how he was going to make CDC understand his need to be a single cell. And when Ty, when Loathe came in that cell, Loathe was a big old fat, sorry-ass-looking dude, man, don't work out. Don't do none of that. You understand what I'm saying? What could he do against a dude like Booker? Nothing.

In the end, Ty Loathe had not stood a chance against James Booker.

I'm just thinking that it seems like pretty drastic measures that Mr. Booker would have taken if, if, if. I'm sure that Loathe provoked him. I'm sure he did.

When Ty was killed, there had been a couple of dozen other inmates on the unit. Obviously, there's not much privacy in prison, so there were a lot of people who presumably would have heard or seen what went on. Strangely, though, almost no one did.

Did you hear anything coming from cell 115? I did not. Okay. Did you hear a thing last night? Okay. No, I think I was watching a movie at that time. Okay.

Only a couple of inmates admitted to hearing anything that night.

I heard, How, how? I think that makes you know how, how. Do you remember how long that would have lasted? It went on for a while.

In the end, only one inmate on the unit told investigators he'd heard the whole thing.

Did you hear anything that happened relating to this incident last night? Yeah, I heard the dude trying to get the tower's attention repetitive. But who was this? Long before the dude was dead in the country. I was ready to stay in the saying, Hey, it was just possibly miscommunication, whatever. But you made an effort. You got me an effort to get that dude out of the cell.

Investigators seem surprised by this account, and they asked the inmate, Wait, are you sure it was the guy who was committing the murder, who had been calling the CEO's over to stop it?

The last country. He was on a shower saying, Get this dude out of here. Okay. And then they would tussle some more. And then he would say, Again, Hey, get this fucking dude out of here.

The CEO who had been working the control booth that evening, told investigators he hadn't heard any of that, at least not until it was far too late.

I just walked over to the window, and the shower's noise going on, whatever. But then you just hear this It's a conversational voice, Hey, my cell, he's bleeding. Okay. I look over that way, and there's blood coming out from underneath the door.

When the COs went to the cell door and looked in, they saw tie loaps on the floor. And James Booker standing at the back of the cell. Cos dragged tie out of the cell, but he was already dead. His body was left there in the middle of the unit while investigators were summoned to the scene.

There must have been some type of altercation in cell 115. That's pretty obvious. I've never seen about anything like that before. I saw all the blood, and then I turned around and went back watching my TV, and he hit me in my business.

That night, when investigators arrived at Mule Creek, they tried speaking to James Booker, a. K. A. Country. But he decided he'd rather get an attorney before telling them about the incident with his cellmate. But in declining to make a statement, Booker did make one curious comment to investigators.

If you want to talk to me and you want to tell me your side of story and what happened tonight, okay? I talked to staff several times for the last couple of days, and there's nothing else I can say. Okay.

What did Booker tell prison staff in the days before he killed Thai? We don't know. The investigator never asked the staff.

When speaking to investigators, most of the inmates on the unit told them they hadn't heard or seen anything that night. But when speaking to friends and family, those same inmates told a very different story. Here's what Booker's former cellmate told investigators he had heard.

Because the way he did, that was, you hear it all in the unit, sound like one of the animals that be getting ate. You know what I mean? By the predator animal. You hear him hollering and all that. Tell a hollering, it's going to down and to like a whining. It's just complete silence.

Alan, the inmate I spoke to, had also spent time at Meal Creek. He wasn't on the same unit as Ty, but he knew some guys who were.

I was budded with the porters. He told me everything that happened, and then we had him by the door, he was screaming.

The porter could hear him at begging for help?

Yeah, he said, The whole... Because it's like a U-shaped- I've seen the pictures.

No COs came until it was all over. Did the porter mention why?

I think because they knew this case.

Alan is familiar with how Unit 3 was set up and where Ty's cell would have been in relation to the control tower. He told me the CEOs had to have heard what was going on in Ty's cell that night.

I mean, there's no way they can't because where that cell So it was facing. There's no way they couldn't hear it.

Yeah.

Maybe when they started screaming, they got up and walked away, but there's no way they didn't hear it. I guess it went on for a while, too.

The investigation into Thai's death had wrapped up quickly. It was determined that Thai had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by a massive blunt force trauma. Thai's cellmate, James Booker, was allowed to bleed guilty to one count of manslaughter. Though since he was already serving a life sentence for murder, that didn't change much of anything for him. No word on whether he did get his single cell after all. Hopefully, he did. And as for Thai, he was cremated by the state of California, and his daughter, Mandy, paid for his ashes to be returned to her. After that, Jake Silva was the only surviving defendant in the case. And since Jake wasn't pursuing any post-conviction challenges, the legal challenge to Jake and Ty's conviction died when Ty did. Then, in 2014, when he was 31 years old, Jake was informed he was being transferred to a new prison once again. They were sending him to Meal Creek.

They put me directly in the same building that Ty was in. I could look out of my window and see down to 115, the cell where Ty got killed.

Most of the inmates in Jake's new cell block had been there for years. They'd been there when Ty was killed.

That's how I know all the horror stories about it. The whole building heard him screaming. They He said he was screaming all night long. Help, help. And the cops just ignored it. That big guy in country was going around telling everybody. He told all the COs, he told everybody. I'm not taking a cellie. Whoever you put in a cell of me, I'm going to kill him. Everybody knew. Even COs told me that.

The COs told you that?

Even a couple of them.

Despite what had happened to Ty, Jake was actually happy to be at Meal Creek. If you have to be in the California prison system, Meal Creek is a good facility to end up at. Good food, good programs. Many inmates want to end up there.

At first, it was great. At first, it was cool. I got put in the GED class. I got my GED in two months.

One day, not long after getting his GED, Jake woke up and realized he was no longer Emile Creek.

All I remember is waking up out of the coma. I could barely see, and my whole family was in the hospital room. I don't know what the hell happened. My dad, my jaw was wire-shed. The doctors told the COs that were watching me that I was going to die. So they all decided to let my family in the hospital room. My dad, everybody was there.

A doctor explained to Jake that he had been in a coma and that he had been attacked by another inmate.

I don't even remember anything about that.

What were you told happened?

I was over there by laundry, basically on the yard, and the guy snuck up behind me with that big rock in a bag and hit me in the head with it a few times. They had to airlift me off the yard in the helicopter.

The weapon had been a large rock used for decorative landscaping in the prison yard. It had been placed inside of a laundry bag.

He snuck up behind me. The first hit was in the back of my head. I was unconscious after that. And after, when I was laying on the ground, he kept going. He hit me two more times. He said my mandible was just hanging there. That's what people tell me. I don't remember any of that.

Was he someone you had problems with?

No, I'd never talked to him before. I've never said two words to him.

Alan, the inmate from Mill Creek that I spoke to, told me that Jake was right about this. Jake had never spoken to his attacker. Alan would know he's the one who attacked Jake.

I never said one word to him. I've seen him from a distance, the way he would walk on the yard. He would walk with his chest out and his shoulders out. When you have that type of case on you, you shouldn't be doing that.

Another inmate had told Alan that Jake had an R on his jacket, that he had been involved in the rape and murder of a teenage girl.

I knew it was Home Depot. I heard it was rape, murder, and after the fact, sex of dead body. I heard that. Which bug me the most was that they threw her in a garbage camp.

When this other inmate had told Alan what Jake was in for, Alan had not simply taken his word for it. That, he told me would have been irresponsible. He'd done his own research by asking correctional officers to find out for him what Jake was in there for. The COs had confirmed for him that Jake had an R on his jacket.

When the COs looked into it, that's when the other part came out. I was told that they had a ranger and they tried to put in her private part battery acid to get rid of evidence. In prison, There's so many stories that go on and hearsay and all that. I do admit that. But I knew he had a R, though.

Allen said he was willing to talk to me about the assault on Jake because today, he's at a different point in his life. But But back then, he'd been stuck in a different mindset, a mindset where assaulting Jake had made perfect sense.

Guys like me that don't have nothing to lose when we're not having stress out or whatever, that's what we do. He was like, We go get those guys. And I was going through that. In my part of life, I had nothing to lose. He was walking around with his chest out. And I was like, Yeah, I'm going to get it. And I know he was messed up, but he was a good-looking a young man. He was a pretty boy. So I was trying to take that from him. I heard he was blind, too.

Allen was not charged in connection with the assault against Jake Silva.

Even before the assault, Jake had few connections to the outside world. After it, people wrote him off, not maliciously or anything, but just based on their understanding of what his injuries had done him. Ty Lopes' family had kept tabs on Jake over the years, and Ty's daughter, Mandy, remembers hoping that after her dad's murder, maybe his attorneys could represent Jake instead.

But she called me after my dad passed away, and she said that she can't continue his case. And I was saying, Well, can you continue with Jake? But back then, Jake wasn't okay. He was actually beat up really bad, and he was all messed up, and he couldn't-He was paraplegic now, from what I gather. The last time I heard, he couldn't talk for himself or anything like that, too. He's gotten a bit better.

Jake beat the odds and survived his injuries. But physical and neurological damage was extensive.

I had to learn how to do everything with him. The eating part and the basic movements of my arms. I had to learn how to walk again. I had to learn how to do everything all over again. Everything me. I don't think I'll ever get back on a skateboard. It's too late for all that. All my best years are done.

Jake's vision was severely injured in the attack. But contrary to prison gossip, he has not mind.

If you're up close? Up close, I can concentrate my eyes enough. That's why I'm still able to tattoo and draw and stuff.

In the year since the assault, Jake's physical recovery has gone as well as could have been hoped. But the The brain injury took something away from Jake that he's unlikely to ever get back.

When did you first realize your memory was not what it was?

Right away. Right away, I knew something. It was bad.

In most of the cases that I've worked on, I've been able to use the defendant as a resource in the investigation. They're able to give background information and fill us in on factual details that are not recorded in the case file. But with Jake, that is not always an option. I too often, I can get that when I mention something to him about his case, for Jake, it can be like hearing it for the very first time. Like the time Jacinda and I were driving around together when Jake called, and we were talking to him about his friend Fuji and how Josh Burrows had claimed in his interviews with the police that supposedly Fuji had been there also on the night of the Home Depot party. Jake had no idea this had been the story told in his trial, and the call ended before he could explain it to him. They thought he was there, too, at the Home Depot.

I suppose he was there, too?

Yeah, that's what they believed.

Wow.

All right.

Jake.

It's so hard because his memory is shot. And it's obviously not going to sound great. People are like, Okay, so it's accused of murder, just can't remember anything? How convenient. One, it is not convenient. It is the opposite. It's the opposite opinion. And two...

He doesn't remember anything.

His life is gone. It's not even the murder stuff. He has traumatic brain injury.

And he tries so hard. He's very conscious about memorizing phone numbers. But like he said, Sometimes he'll go back in his cell, and if he just sits and thinks, memories come back to him.

Jake does remember things. Most of him is still there. If you talk to Jake about his trial or what various witnesses said there, he often He has no idea what you're talking about. But when it comes to things that Jake himself saw or did, there's a lot he does remember. But the holes in his memory are still profound. In the process of making this podcast, I've talked to Jake for hours, and very often I will find myself asking him to tell me more about a conversation he had with one of his old friends, only to find out that not only does he have no memory of the conversation, but that he also has no memory of that friend.

You're I'm like, Holy shit. I'm losing myself. It's like I'm falling away. It's a bad, fucked up feeling. You remember more about me than I do. Hey, everyone. I'm Sean.

And I'm Joe. We are the hosts of The Horror Show, the show Disex Mutilates, Dismembers, and butchers all of your favorite and not so favorite cult classics in a horror movies. We're talking about everything from Lory Lafflin dancing on a BMX bike and rad, all the way over to '80s classics like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. Join us every week as we pick another movie that we try desperately to find the good in while laughing our way through the bad. And there's a lot of bad. Looking through his movies, he appears to just love frogs because then we get Toad Warrior in 1996 and Max Hell Frog Warrior in 2002. Not a fan of horror? Don't worry about it. Almost every episode is filled with personal anecdotes and jokes about all things entertainment. Join us every week on any of your favorite podcasting apps and services, or find us at ihatehorror. Com or on Instagram at ihatehorror.

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Foster. If you're tired of soupless nights, You'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast.

I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

Each episode provides It needs enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcast. That's I Can't sleep with Benjamin Foster. Your teenager just raided the fridge and walked out the back door. Hi, Mom. He yelled something over his shoulder that you only half heard. This is the last time you've seen him. You try to remember those words to help the police find him, but you can't.

What if your daughter disappeared?

Your mother, your son?

What if years have passed and you're no closer to finding them?

When a person disappears, the story doesn't stop there, especially for families. Each week, Missing brings you stories of missing Missing Persons and justice sourced from the case file of the nonprofit, Private Investigations for the Missing.

Together, we help raise awareness, elicit tips, and put pressure on police to keep searching.

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When Ty was alive, he was always pursuing his legal case, trying to prove his innocence. But even before the assault, Jake never really did anything.

Staying alive is my only plan I could come up with, I guess. There's no time to make a plan. Live one hour at a time.

His friend, Page, says this didn't surprise her. Jake and Ty had been at very different points in their lives when they went to prison.

So you stuck a kid in a prison. Of course, he doesn't know how to advocate for himself. Ty was an adult. He's had jobs and paid bills and had responsibilities and had to make- He had a child. Yeah, he had to make decisions. He had problem solving skills. He had all of those things. From being an adult, Jake had none of those things.

For years, Paige was the only person, aside from Jake's own family, that stayed in touch with him. Then, one day, out of the blue, a mutual friend of Jake's messaged Paige and asked her how to get in touch with Jake.

Lewis is the only one that's ever asked me for Jake's address and has ever mentioned talking to him. Lewis is the only one that writing him for me.

Initially, Lewis had dropped out of Jake's life the same way everyone else had. Many years would go by before they got in touch again. Then, one day, Jake received a letter, not from Louis himself, but from Louis' mother.

Can you read me the letter?

Hello, you may not remember me. I'm the mother of Louis. I'm writing this note for him. He is doing well. He wants you to call him. He said he has money on his phone, so it won't cost you anything. He said it's very important. His number is, thank you, Victoria. He actually has in parentheses. It's also important to me. That's the whole note right there.

I don't think I knew it was Louis' mother that first reached out to you?

Yeah, twice.

That's how, after a long hiatus, Louis and Jake resumed their friendship.

He still sounds like Jake and still feels like Jake. And he just still wants to pick up right where he left off.

I knew exactly what Louis meant by this. For For us, out here, it's 2024. But for Jake, it's always the year 2000. He's a California skater boy with Manic Panic hair, frozen in Amber. How would you describe the Jake now compared to the Jake back then?

They sound the same, that's for sure.

He sounds like an 18-year-old.

He sounds like a kid still. That's the thing about prison is it preserves you. All that high sodium food. Mama He incentivizes it. I feel for him, especially he's been on some bad yards.

When they were kids, Louis and Jake had bonded over their common love of skateboarding. Now, as adults, they have something else in knowing how to survive on a level four yard in the California prison system.

I haven't had to do that much time like he has, but you do time where time does you. Time's doing him. Don't look at the clocks, don't look at the walls, the calendars. Read the Bible, read some psychology books, read something that's just like, this is the fucking metal music. I think he's probably tormented by the fact, too, that he didn't do it. That's a fucking rough one, too. There's a lot of factors playing into the time doing the hand.

Jake can handle himself in prison, obviously. He knows how to survive in there. But I thought I understood what Louis had meant about time was doing Jake instead of Jake doing time. I asked Jake about it. So we did talk to Louis this week, and one thing he said to me was, I don't think Jake has ever learned how to do time.

I took time in prison? Are you serious? Yeah. That's all I'd know. What does he mean by that?

I think he means that you've never really found the way to survive or exist day to day I'm sitting here now. Yeah, but I think what he meant, and what I understand him to mean is that when I talk to you, it feels like every day you wake up and you're still in shock this happened. You're still trying to process the fact that you are where you are.

Yeah. I grew up in here. I was an 18-year-old kid. This is all I know.

All Jake knows is a world where letting his guard down for even a moment can carry fatal consequences, where there are always people around him waiting for a chance to kill him, and where most of everyone else spends their time telling each other false and incredibly dark stories about who he is.

We're man enough to say it behind my back, but they're not mad enough to come up to say it to my face. So they know I'm very angry, I'm very strong, and I will fight. I'm real quick to fight. I am not this person. I'm not. I'm going to start crying. I'm not this person. You're fucking dating me. You're fucking seven for 23 years straight. You're fucking in this life. I didn't do this shit. I'm just sick of this fucking life. I was a dumb idiot kid on a skateboard, and I loved Renee so much. I'm sick of my life. I know that.

From talking to Louis, I didn't get the sense that he's someone who is prone to unwarranted had optimism. But he had an optimism for Jake that I hadn't expected.

He's damaged. His heart's broken. You know what I mean? He's broken, but not mentally. I don't feel he's mentally ill. He's mentally ill and institutionalized are a good combination, but he's just...

Broken. You know?

You can fix broken things. Put it back together. It can take longer than others to fix.

After finding out about our investigation, Louis has done what he can to help us put the pieces of this case back together. He's gone out of his way to help us investigate using his contacts and knowledge of Manteca to connect us with the people we needed to talk to. What do you hope to see from this, what we're doing?

What do I hope to see that... I'm hoping that you guys could put something together good enough to where somebody will be willing to pick up a case pro bono that's willing to take on a corrupt little city, and for justice to be served and for Jake. If he's innocent, that he gets to be a free man one day, touch some grass and fucking mow a lawn or fucking eat some ice cream, the little things. And if he did it, fucking he'll be rots in hell. But I feel he didn't... And whoever did, I'd hope they'd fucking die.

Louis wants to see Jake free. If Jake is in fact innocent. And Louis wants to see whoever did kill Renee be held responsible, whoever that person may be. Hold on a minute. When Louis and Jake got back in touch again, it had actually been Louis' mother, Victoria, who had reached out to Jake first, which had struck me as curious when I heard about it. I don't think I knew it was Louis' mother that first reached out to you.

Yeah, twice.

Do you know why she was writing to you?

Just because she's concerned or worried about me.

Jake had been touched that Louis' mom cared enough to write to him and express her concerns for his well-being. He didn't get many letters like that, so he'd hold on to this one. But But Louis' mom had not known Jake, not more than in passing, anyway. It was odd that she would want to reach out to Jake so many years later with that particular message. It felt like there might be something more to it. And there was. I couldn't tell Jake yet, but I knew why Louis' mother had written to him. I knew why this was, as she'd added in parentheses at the end of her letter, important to her, too. It was because she believed she knew who had killed Renee. For years, she'd suspected it was someone close to home, someone who was close to her son, Louis, too. She had hoped she was wrong about that, but she didn't think she was. And she had been writing to Jake because if his case ever did get reopened, she wanted whoever was looking into it to know what she knew.

Next week on Proof.

I just have this vision of her. It's almost like a Little Red Riding hood. She's just Little Red Riding hood surrounded by wolves. Because he's the only one that said that he had even had them in his car.

Of the post-Memorial Day sightings, he is the only one who says he actually talked to Renee. Everyone else says they saw her walking down the street.

And I seen the backpack and the shoes in the closet at that house. I've seen that backpack in her closet with the tennis shoes. That's right when I contacted the police. This whole case, this little tangled web of rumors. That's why nobody wants to work on it. Nobody wants to take the time to untangle it.

You've been listening to Proof, a podcast by Red Marble Media, in association with Glassbox Media. We'll be back next week with episode Send us your questions and comments at proofcrimepod@gmail. Com. We'll respond during our bonus episode, Proof Sidebar, on Thursdays. Kevin Fitzpatrick is our executive producer. Our logo was designed by Drew Wasowski, and our theme music is by Ramiro Marquez. Audio production for this episode is by George Panos and Michael Yulitowski. Production assistance was provided by Zian Slava. Our social media manager is Skyler Park. And thank you to our sponsors who make this podcast possible. Follow us everywhere with the handle @proofcrimepod and on our website, proofcrimepod. Com.

And lastly, a note to our listeners. If you have any information related to this case, we'd love to speak to you. No matter how small a detail it may seem, it just might be more important than you realize. You can reach us by email or leave us a voicemail at 929 267-3172.

That's all for this week. Thanks so much for listening.