Text Version:
(Introduction to show begins)
TODD MATTHEWS (Missing Pieces Host): I’m Todd Matthews. This is Missing Pieces. Tonight we have Tomijo Bolton Schmid, sister of murdered Jason Dale Bolton. Welcome Tomijo.
TOMIJO BOLTON SCHMID (Guest): Hi. I’m glad to be here.
TODD: How are you doing?
TOMIJO: Okay.
TODD: This is an anniversary day, right?
TOMIJO: Yeah, it is. Yeah. I was up all night last night thinking about it. Every year I do the same thing.
TODD: How many years has it been?
TOMIJO: It’s been 16 years. He left home 16 years ago last night with neighbors and possibly his cousin, and didn’t come back home.
TODD: And he was 16 years old then, right?
TOMIJO: Yeah, he was 16 years old then.
TODD: Wow. Well this is quite and unusual case and I’ve looked over your information for quite a while now waiting for this because we were waiting for this particular anniversary date for this reason. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened from the time he went missing?
TOMIJO: Well he didn’t really go missing. He had been working with his cousin down in the stone quarry and had been helping put a roof on a house with his uncle, the week prior to him leaving home and getting out with these friends, these neighbors which we grew up with, every one of us grew up around them. Then he left and they all ended up at this party, at least that was what their original story was, okay? The original story was that they all went to a party together.
TODD: In what town?
TOMIJO: Near Laurel, Indiana.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: Which is in Franklin County, Indiana.
TODD: Okay. I’ll ask you questions in the conversation like that so that people can get a clear idea of what we’re looking at. Go ahead.
TOMIJO: Actually, we were led down the wrong road from the get-go. I received a phone call around 3:00 – 3:30 a.m. the morning of August 21st, 1991, and it was from my ex-husband and he’s telling me that my brother is dead in the road and his buddy, Tiny, ran. Well that freaked me out, it freaked my husband out, actually my husband was the one that took the phone call, and my two older boys were sleeping in bunk beds in the livingroom and heard the entire conversation.
TODD: So you just got a call that Jason is dead in the road?
TOMIJO: Yeah. Yeah, from my ex-husband. Well I start calling around to the sheriff’s department and they are talking to the next county over, which is Fayette County, Indiana, and there was some confusion about where it was at because help couldn’t find him.
TODD: Well how did your ex-husband come to find him?
TOMIJO: He was there. He had to be there. There person that claimed that they ran over Jason, was living with him. And my ex-husband’s wife is this boy’s cousin, which is my Uncle Bud, the cousin that Jason is supposed to have gone to the party with, his relative.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: Same relation but on the different side of the family, from my aunt’s husband’s family, what hit him, or supposedly hit him.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: And nothing was adding up. Nothing at all was adding up, but anyway they sent help in the wrong direction and they couldn’t find him. The Sheriff’s Department in Franklin County told me to go on up the hospital. Well I went up there and I was met by Indiana State Police, and they took me back to where Jason was at, me and my husband and my step-dad. They didn’t tell us anything and the first thing I wanted to know was, why did Jimmy, my ex-husband, know this? You know, why did he call me? Why didn’t I find out from somebody other than him? Well, they wouldn’t talk to me. You know they told me to keep the domestic out of it; it’s not domestic.
TODD: So your ex-husband and Jason actually saw each other from time to time?
TOMIJO: Yeah, from time to time. My ex-husband had just gotten out of prison, prior to this, maybe just a couple months prior.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: Anyway, we’re in the morgue at the hospital and the coroner he just pulls the sheet back to where we can see his face, nobody’s seen anything else at that point in time, and didn’t tell us about anything.
TODD: About his injuries, or…
TOMIJO: About what had happened to him, his injuries. He said that by his appearance, a car hit him and there was no need for an autopsy, and he was released to a funeral home within hours of him coming in, just a few hours.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: But anyway, after I’d seen his face, that’s Jason, and I went back out trying to talk to the State Police and they still wouldn’t talk to me. Then we went by the scene out on the road where Jason’s body was at you wouldn’t believe it looked like that, it looked like somebody had butchered him.
TODD: So actually went with your present husband out to the scene?
TOMIJO: Yeah. Yeah, and it looked like somebody had butchered a deer because there was so much blood. Then we went and told my Mom and had to take Mom back to the hospital to talk to the coroner and she wanted to see Jason, but the coroner wouldn’t let her. We left, we went back to my grandparents’ house; we stopped by my Uncle Bud’s but my cousin Jamie wasn’t home, and to this day I don’t know where he was at, but he said he went to work and Jason was supposed to be meeting him to go to work, and he went to work without him. The day went on by and my Uncle Bud whittled a cross all day that day, he worked on this cross and we all went back out to the scene. Jimmy, my cousin, and my Uncle Bud’s sister drove by and she tried to convince my Uncle Bud that Jimmy didn’t call me, and to try to make me…they just tried to convince everybody that he did not call me.
TODD: What was their story otherwise?
TOMIJO: That I was trying to cast the blame on him…
TODD: But at the time there wasn’t any blame to cast.
TOMIJO: …and keep his kids from this and that I was trying to send him back to prison, which I wasn’t.
TODD: Well you hadn’t even thought of that at that point in time, that was very early on in the…
TOMIJO: Right. It was right when this all first happened. Well, to this day, he still tries to say that he didn’t call us that morning.
TODD: But you’re sure it was him; there was no doubt about it?
TOMIJO: Yeah, because after he told me, he told my step-dad.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: You know, just big red flags. It’s just like it was yesterday, Todd.
TODD: I know. And it’s hard, and I feel bad doing at this time, but this is the time, I think. I know you’ve got to get it out and it’s never going to be easy, you know that.
TOMIJO: No, I know. I know.
TODD: Now the scene, now there was nothing taped off or no effort to clean it up, or…?
TOMIJO: No.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: No, there was no effort to clean it up. There were vinyl gloves laying around. My sister picked up Jason’s teeth out in the road and she has his teeth to this day, she’s got both of them, and picked up some change that came from his pocket. No, nobody did anything, to do anything.
TODD: So you actually had teeth, there were teeth there?
TOMIJO: Yeah, it had knocked his teeth out; his teeth were laying in the road, and pieces of hair, and it was awful. But getting on past all of that, the very next day after the funeral, we started getting all this information that was coming in to us and we were trying to give it to law enforcement.
TODD: Okay, from where were you getting the information that was coming in? Witnesses? People that you knew?
TOMIJO: People…different relatives, and things like that. Threats were being made, “We got one. We’ve got two more to go.” Two to three weeks prior to Jason getting killed, I was in court with my ex-husband and he made a threat to my Mom and my Grandma that if he couldn’t have his kids, they weren’t going to have theirs either.
TODD: And this was documented in court?
TOMIJO: Pardon?
TODD: And this has been documented in court?
TOMIJO: No, it was at the courthouse, but court was over with, and at the end he was walking out the door, and it was stated to my Mom and my Grandma. It was too coincidental. He shows up at the scene, and he’s the first one to call me, and a lot of other factors here. There are too many unanswered questions.
TODD: Why do you think he might have called you and then maybe changed their mind and wish they hadn’t have done that? What do you think happened? Why would he have called? Do you think he was really trying to let you know at the time, or what? What did it seem like when you were having that first phone call with him?
TOMIJO: That he was playing another cruel joke.
TODD: You actually might have thought that it was not even true?
TOMIJO: Yeah. I thought he was making it up and that is was just a cruel joke. I couldn’t believe it until after I got to the hospital. I kept saying all the way up there, “This can’t be. This is not Jason.” Now you know and it was. And then we couldn’t figure out where Tiny was, and the police didn’t catch up with him until 8:00 p.m. on the 22nd.
TODD: Did he know anything?
TOMIJO: To this day, he doesn’t remember anything, but he was the last one with him. He was on the road with him, or he says he was on the road with him.
TODD: And I know you’re nervous, just relax, you’re just having a conversation, it’s okay. Don’t be nervous. There’s no reason to be nervous. It’s okay. Take your time.
TOMIJO: But I don’t know if he was actually there or if he was part of a cover-up. In 2005, I started getting anonymous letters. Getting back to the crime scene pictures and stuff, we didn’t receive those pictures until about 4 years ago, that’s when the proof popped right out there at me when I first saw them. I knew then that the whole story…the whole road they sent us down on was all wrong. You know I knew it in my heart then, when it happened, but after seeing these pictures, I called Indiana State Police and said, “This here shows that their story is all wrong, from the get-go!”
TODD: So, up until this point in time, you thought it was just simply that he had been hit by a car?
TOMIJO: Well that’s what we were told and that’s what we had learned to live with.
TODD: But when you got the photographs…where did you get the photographs? Who released the photographs?
TOMIJO: I was watching A&E and I’d seen a show about a mother trying to get information from law enforcement, concerning her son’s so-called suicide and she was convinced that it wasn’t a suicide, but that it was murder, and she was right. And I don’t remember the show or the case, but I saw the Freedom Of Information Act, and when I saw that something popped in my head and said, “Call the coroner and see what’s there and use this,” and I did.
TODD: So that’s what you told them then at that point in time, the Freedom of Information Act, “I want to see the photographs.”
TOMIJO: Yeah, and he first denied it me, and he told me flat out, “No.” And the next morning I get a phone call and he says, “I thought about this all night,” he said, “If you can meet me in half and hour to 45 minutes at the courthouse, I’ll give you what I’ve got.”
TODD: What do you think changed his mind? Do you think it was because of the actually Freedom Of Information Act or his own heart?
TOMIJO: I don’t know. I don’t know, because he’s the one that actually picked that little testicle up off the road.
TODD: Because this is what you found out 4 years ago, what you found out when you saw these photographs was that your brother had actually been castrated in addition to being hit by a car.
TOMIJO: Yes.
TODD: But you never knew this before this point in time?
TOMIJO: No. No.
TODD: Was there an autopsy that was performed that you didn’t know about?
TOMIJO: Not that I know of. No, there wasn’t, because the coroner had released Jason’s body to the funeral home around 8 o’clock or so in the morning.
TODD: Do you think that this happened to him before or after he as hit by the car?
TOMIJO: I think it was done before he was hit by the car. The car was part of the cover-up.
TODD: So, I’m just trying to make it clear to our listeners, what Tomijo found out was that her brother was actually castrated, I saw the photographs, they are very, very clear and it’s obvious what has happened to him, and then he was struck by a car. What did you say when you saw this?
TOMIJO: I just freaked out. I started bawling and crying and I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t get them to listen to me at the time when it first happened, and it’s been all these years and nothing was ever done. It was all ugly. It was all swept under the rug. Jason’s case wasn’t investigated as a murder 16 years ago. It turned into a drug investigation that has lasted 16 years, is what I believe, at the sake of destroying a whole family, instead of going after the druggers and the child molesters, and that’s the people that were protected that night, it wasn’t my little brother, and it wasn’t his family. It was the druggers and the child molesters and the perverts that were having the under-aged drinking parties and the LSD parties.
TODD: So you think that this is the event that he was at when he got into the situation?
TOMIJO: Yeah. Yeah, where the fight took place then they took him out there to the road and finished him off.
TODD: Well, is it near…?
TOMIJO: Yes.
TODD: This spot in the road, was this near where you thought the party took place?
TOMIJO: The spot in the road is within a half a mile to a mile from all suspected places.
TODD: Wow. Now, you’ve decided to publish these photographs.
TOMIJO: I think it took place in Franklin County and they took him over into Fayette County to finish him off. Well the police on the county line helped me, they have all this time, to get the story straight, and everybody just vowed to keep their mouths shut. See, the first 7 years after this happened, my Uncle Bud talked about the Statute of Limitations…
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: …well I kept my mouth shut because I knew there was no Statute of Limitations, but they didn’t, and I just kept myself close to everybody involved here to put pieces together.
TODD: Yeah, there is no Statute of Limitations on a murder.
TOMIJO: No, not on a murder, and it’s hard telling how many other crimes that were done that night, and if the anonymous letters that I started receiving, if there is any truth in that…you know…
TODD: Have you gotten a clear description in these anonymous letters? Obviously we don’t want to tip your hand and reveal the content of anything that you don’t want out there.
TOMIJO: Well, the anonymous letters are on the msn site.
TODD: Okay, so what do they point towards?
TOMIJO: That Jason was trying to protect a girl from being raped, and they turned on him and they beat him.
TODD: Where might this girl be?
TOMIJO: I don’t know. I don’t know.
TODD: So she was never identified in this?
TOMIJO: No. No.
TODD: Now I’m looking at your website, you know you went public with some very, very graphic pictures. I mean when I first saw them I had to sit down for a minutes because that was…they’re quite shocking.
TOMIJO: Well I did that for a reason. I’m at my very end and I’m not getting anywhere, and you’ve got these people coming up to you, the ones that you know were there, they’re the ones that I know were involved, they’ll come up to you and pat you on the back and say, “We hope you get them. We hope you get them.” And every one of the uses that same phrase! And I want people to know what they did to Jason and how the community didn’t care, and the police didn’t care to tell us what happened.
TODD: Because, years later, was there any interest in it media-wise? I mean it was 12 years later.
TOMIJO: There has never, ever been any media attention in Jason’s case. In fact, when it first happened, they ran a newspaper article of some other person that was killed that night, and there was something else going on in town that was a shooting that went on in town that night and they were trying to prove that guy killed somebody on purpose, which that actually was an accident. While that stuff was going on, the stuff with Jason was going on at the same time, and I don’t know and it’s hard for me to explain.
TODD: You just feel like things were just mixed together.
TOMIJO: They just assumed that this was a regular accident and the trooper that investigated the scene, this was one of his first cases. He was a brand new trooper and he has just made second-in-command at the Indiana State Police Post here in Connersville, and it took him 16 years to get to this point. I have called him, and called him, and called him and I’ve bugged him to death, I’ve kept him informed on everything that has been going on over the past 16 years, and nothing is done.
TODD: Now the coroner, now when you obviously saw what you saw, and there’s no doubt about what has happened to him in these photographs, did you talk to the coroner again after that?
TOMIJO: Oh yeah.
TODD: What was his…?
TOMIJO: After I called I was trying to see if he could help me get Jason’s body exhumed, because I thought that if that one wound on his chest is a knife mark, there would be cuts in his bones, you know?
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: And Jason, he was embalmed and he’s entombed in concrete, you know, and there’s something there. And not only that, everybody he left with that night and went to wherever they went, they were at the church; we had the funeral at the church. It’s the type of wake that you go and you stay with the body from the time they get the person until the time they leave the church.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: It’s like a 24-hour event and they were all there after we got there, my Uncle Bud, and Tiny’s Dad were the first ones there. They helped carry the casket in there and get it set up, and all the boys that were with Jason that night, were his pallbearers. And my Uncle Bud made a statement, he said to me one time, he said, “The truth is Jason took the truth to the grave with him.” And then there has been talk of the knife, and you know in my heart I think they slipped that knife right in his casket.
TODD: So you never knew of that mark on his chest before seeing the autopsy photos?
TOMIJO: Not until I had seen the pictures.
TODD: And you know I can see that too. And what do you think was the cause of the car wreck…not the car wreck, the…?
TOMIJO: That’s what the coroner said. The coroner said that everything that was done to him was the result of the car hitting him, but the car was supposedly going 45-50 miles and hour, the driver was playing with his radio and looked up and seen a body in the road, swerved to miss it and hit Jason. But it didn’t happen that way, because if it would have, he would have been tore all to heck because that was a late-1980s model Dodge car that hit him, and they sit real, real low to the ground, maybe an inch off of the ground.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: The only part of that car that ran over him was the wheel, and he had to be placed there because his leg is not broken, there’s not a scratch on his legs, nowhere.
TODD: So have you spoken to the man that hit him?
TOMIJO: No. No. No, I haven’t talked to him since before it ever happened, but his brother called me back at the end of May, just out of the blue, he called wanting to pump me for information, I guess is what he was doing. Actually he tried to ask for a job.
TODD: Well did the coroner seem…he said that what looks to be a castration happened as a result of the car hitting him?
TOMIJO: Yes, after he showed me the pictures. The first picture he handed me was the little testicle…
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: …and he handed it to me and said, “The car did this. The car did this.” I didn’t even know what it was.
TODD: You know I saw the pictures of the scene and it looks kind of crazy that it could happen that way and this case was closed.
TOMIJO: Yeah, it was closed right at the get-go, and I can’t even get a simple accident report from the State Police. The State Police won’t release anything.
TODD: Well, what about the Freedom Of Information Act, one again?
TOMIJO: It doesn’t work with them. They say that I have to have a lawyer to get it.
TODD: Have you went that route?
TOMIJO: Well we’re trying to go that route but I don’t feel we should have to. I feel that Fayette County and Indiana State Police, it was their duty to investigate that and to investigate everything I was telling them, and they just blew me off. And if they would have just listened to me then, we wouldn’t be here today, and this community wouldn’t be in the shape that it is in today, because all these grownups now were little kids then. You know they’ve seen people get away with murder, and nothing was ever done about it and it’s gone on for years here.
TODD: So as far as law enforcement is concerned, there was no homicide that night? This was an accident and it’s over.
TOMIJO: Yeah. Yeah, but the thing of it is that, all these years later, it’s still an open case. The coroner has got him down as being laid out drunk and passed out in the road and got hit with his friend…
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: …and the Indiana State Police has got it as an unexplained death.
TODD: But the driver said that he swerved and missed somebody else and hit him standing up, right?
TOMIJO: Right.
TODD: That’s three different stories there that don’t click together.
TOMIJO: Yeah, and then two of them were charged with obstruction of justice; the boy that ran away, he got 3 months for obstruction of justice. They dropped the obstruction charge on my ex-husband and I don’t understand it at all. They flunked several different lie-detector tests. I was hooked up with a private detective by one of the guys that did the lie-detector tests, and this private detective, I haven’t been in contact with him going on over 2 years now; he will not get back with me. He’s got my depositions that he made off with, and…I don’t know…there’s just so much, so much.
TODD: You’re just going around in circles with this.
TOMIJO: It’s just going around in circles and it’s still going around in circles.
TODD: Now you need to do an exhumation to actually do a new autopsy and you talked about maybe a possible knife mark on the rib.
TOMIJO: Yeah.
TODD: Okay now, what have they told you in regards to the possibility of doing that?
TOMIJO: Whenever I called and talked to him, the coroner, he flat out refused. He said that he wouldn’t change anything on that report and told me what a stink I stirred up, and I told him that the stink wasn’t going away; the stink was only going to get worse.
TODD: So he actually regretted having given you the photographs, apparently?
TOMIJO: Yeah. At that point in time, yeah.
TODD: Is he still the coroner?
TOMIJO: Yeah, he’s still the coroner, but this is his last time. He can’t run no more.
TODD: Okay, so that’s an elected, he’s not a doctor.
TOMIJO: Yeah, see they’ve changed the laws in Indiana now.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: He’s got to have an actual license.
TODD: He’s got to be a medical doctor, then?
TOMIJO: Yeah.
TODD: Okay.
TOMIJO: He’s an elected to office.
TODD: So what do you think? What’s your plan now? I know you’ve done a lot of work on the Internet.
TOMIJO: My plan now is to just keep doing what I’m doing and try to raise money to get an attorney, because I can’t do any more without an attorney.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: And getting back to the pictures, the graphic photos, there is so much from this story that the kids of today need to know. They need to know…they need to see that this is what happens if you go out and you can’t trust just anybody. You can’t trust anybody. Your best friend will turn around and do this to you, or stand back and let it be done…and not say anything…and not tell you family what’s happened to you. Up here in Laurel, Indiana, this is a dangerous area, it’s always had a bad name, and if somebody isn’t going to stand up and do anything, nothing is ever going to change.
TODD: Well I have to ask you, has this ever happened to anybody before? Are there any other cases where something similar to this has happened before, where somebody was hit by a car or castrated or something that this reminds you of?
TOMIJO: Well, there was a case of a body being found on a road right close to Laurel, with three gunshots in his head. That happened in the early 80s, 1983, I believe, Mark Airans, he was shot three times in the head and that case has still gone unsolved, and with everything that I have stirred up with Jason’s case, it got all these old cases stirred up right now. And there was another, a girl, that was murdered in the early 80s and her name is Darlene Russell. And there is a missing girl by the name of Denise Pflum, that’s missing from Connersville, Fayette County (http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/p/pflum_denise.html). They’re all listed on my msn-site, but none of them has ever been solved. And the Darlene Russell case, she was murdered on the Fayette/Franklin/Rush County line, and they say she was…her body was mutilated too. I don’t know, that’s just talk that I heard, but I heard that her body was mutilated too, but she was a female.
TODD: Well, we’ll try to look for a news report to put in the transcription at this point so that we’ll have something to maybe not make this hearsay, but something that we have documented.
TOMIJO: Well there should be newspaper articles but I can’t find anything on the Internet, and in the 1980s there wouldn’t be anything online from then, I can’t find anything on it, but it did happen.
TODD: We’ll definitely try and find a little more information, in fact, I’ve got a friend I think might be able to help me with that because she actually has had some activity of the Pflum case, so I’ve got somebody that might be able to help us on that, so we’ll definitely take a look deeper into that. Wow, it’s been a hard 16 years, hasn’t it?
TOMIJO: But the thing of it, Todd, all of these connections go back to the same ring of people, the same ring of people.
TODD: Even the Pflum case?
TOMIJO: Yeah, she went to a party, she forgot her purse, and went back to the party to find her purse and she didn’t come back.
TODD: Do you know any of her family?
TOMIJO: Not really personally, and I really don’t want to say too much on that.
TODD: Yeah.
TOMIJO: Because I’m just afraid to.
TODD: Yeah, well, and that makes sense. That makes sense, absolutely. You’ve had a hard time today; I know you have.
TOMIJO: I just know…I know in my heart, and after receiving the pictures and all the documentation, all the documents, I don’t know who in the world was giving the coroner his information to fill that paperwork out because even all of that is wrong, and we didn’t even know that until I got the documents.
TODD: So we’ll have to point out some of these errors at this point, we will find things where there are errors, all of those things, we’ll try to point all of those out in the transcription so that the story will be really clear. It’s complicated, now you’ve got a complicated story, and untying it to make it where somebody can understand it and listen to it and make sense, it’s hard, it’s not easy to do.
TOMIJO: It’s very hard.
TODD: We’ll definitely do our best.
TOMIJO: See, about 3 years ago now, I went to ‘America’s Most Wanted’ website, and I’m thinking, this is my thinking when I go there, I’m thinking, “Nothing else has worked. I can’t get no help. I can’t trust this cop. I can’t trust this cop. I don’t know who to talk to.” So I went to ‘America’s Most Wanted’ board and told Jason’s story there on the board, and after a couple years go by, Nancy Angelbound AMW finds me and she has helped me so much to get everything together and gave me pointers on how to do this and how to do that, and at that point in time I had already had the pictures published on the msn site, you know.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: And I’m sorry if that has offended anybody out there, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what else to do. I knew that if I couldn’t get others involved, nothing was ever going to get done and nothing was ever going to change.
TODD: You know I think your point with the pictures was ‘a picture says a thousand words.’
TOMIJO: Yeah.
TODD: It shows that something is not quite right.
TOMIJO: Jason is talking to you.
TODD: Yeah.
TOMIJO: Jason is talking through them pictures.
TODD: Well so now, what about ‘America’s Most Wanted’ did you get any real reply from them as far as…?
TOMIJO: Well, I mailed them everything I had. I made copies of all the pictures and all the files that I got and they sent me a postcard telling me they’d be in contact with me soon and I haven’t back anymore about it and that was in 2005.
TODD: Well, you know, I did the same thing, but they won’t do anything without law enforcement’s consent, I do know that. As long as law enforcement is not really cooperating, you know, what do you do when you feel like law enforcement is part of the problem?
TOMIJO: Uh huh.
TODD: What do you do?
TOMIJO: I don’t know. I know that law enforcement hasn’t cooperated any throughout the whole ordeal.
TODD: And I don’t know the exact…what’s going on in their minds, so I can’t say what they’ve done is wrong or right, I don’t know, we just don’t know and we don’t have enough information to even know what’s happened there. Oh, wow.
TOMIJO: But I did take them a tip. The week of April 14-15, there was a newspaper article that came out in the paper about the big Meth lab that blew up, up here in Connersville, when I recognized the name of somebody that had sent me an email back in 2005. Well, with that email and me making that connection, I took that information to the Sheriff’s Department and the State Police because with that email, it states that she saw Jason that night before dark, and he was with people that were never ever mentioned being with him, and I took that to them and they said they’d look into it and I still haven’t heard anything.
TODD: I mean if they are investigating and they are finding out stuff, I know you feel like you need to hear something, and after 16 years…
TOMIJO: Yeah.
TODD: …you know a word every now and then would be good.
TOMIJO: Yeah.
TODD: Some type of reassurance.
TOMIJO: Right.
TODD: Wow.
TOMIJO: I don’t know. I just keep praying that one day I’ll assume that this will all come to head and it’ll be over with and I can have my life back. I know that nothing we can do is going to bring Jason back but we can change things so it doesn’t happen again and no other family has to go through what we went through.
TODD: Now I did see, we saw photographs of his tombstone as well.
TOMIJO: Uh huh.
TODD: You’ve got him a beautiful tombstone.
TOMIJO: There were a lot of hours put into that tombstone.
TODD: And we’ll put a picture of it at this point so that everybody can take a look at it. It obviously had a lot of work put on it. It’s one of the most beautiful stones I’ve ever seen and that shows a lot of love from the family to have that created.
TOMIJO: Seriously, Todd, Jason was a good kid. He was raised mostly by my Grandmaw and my Grandpaw, and my Grandmaw and my Grandpaw pretty much raised me and my morals, they taught us the example that do unto others as you would like others to do unto you, and I have lived by that, you know?
TODD: Are your grandparents still alive?
TOMIJO: My Grandpaw is gone now. My Grandpaw died March 5, 1999 and so did my Uncle Donnie. My Uncle Donnie burned up in a car fire in front of my Grandmaw’s house at 1:00 a.m. on March 5th, and then my Papaw died at 6 o’clock that night in the hospital, but Papaw was dying anyway.
TODD: Well what about your grandmother now, is she well?
TOMIJO: She sold the farm and moved to town, and there isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t think about things, and I truly would like to get something done so that she can see that there is justice here on earth.
TODD: And it’s hard to see a relative go that didn’t have what they were looking for.
TOMIJO: My Uncle Donnie investigated this all the way up until he died, until he burned up in that car in front of the house.
TODD: Now that was an accident, right?
TOMIJO: Well it was ruled an accident, but he had just come from where these people live at, he had just been there, so I don’t know if he, I don’t know but that’s another…
TODD: You’ve got a lot of ‘I don’t knows’ in this, I know that.
TOMIJO: Yeah, but we accepted that as an accident, but Jason’s, we cannot accept as an accident because it wasn’t an accident.
TODD: Now I can probably have somebody that knows more about this type of thing look at these photographs and give us a better opinion without seeing the details on the case. You know I don’t want them to see what’s been written, I want them to see the photographs and give me…and of course, it’s an educated guess, you know, but I’d like to see what somebody else’s opinion is, so I’m going to try to work on that for you, and see what we can come up with, with that. Now a reward? Was there ever any reward for information on this case?
TOMIJO: The only reward is my personal money that I’ve got set aside.
TODD: Uh huh.
TOMIJO: And it’s so little, I’m ashamed to put it on the poster, it’s only $1,000.
TODD: Hey, that’s something. That’s something and it’s a place to start. So that $1,000 is good for what? What do you require for that?
TOMIJO: Information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. If you have seen the reward poster that is on the website, that’s the conditions.
TODD: And we’ll have that poster at this point in the conversation as well. Well, you got a lot out and I know this is a very difficult and you’ve dreaded doing this. I know you looked forward to doing this interview and you’ve dreaded it at the same time from the emails where we talked about it a lot and I wish I could do more other than to allow you to have the opportunity to speak. I hope it’s made you feel somewhat better that you’ve actually been able to talk about it.
TOMIJO: Yeah, it does. It makes me feel better to know that there’s somebody other than me and my friend, Angelbound,
TODD: Her name is Nancy, right?
TOMIJO: Yes, Nancy Angelbound, AMW.
TODD: I’ve run across you both on MySpace, I think.
TOMIJO: Yeah.
TODD: So that’s a good tip for somebody, MySpace is used for something constructive like this to try to get help.
TOMIJO: Yeah, MySpace is really good for this. You know MySpace gets a bad rap from some people but they’re doing a good job. They’re doing a good job at what they do.
TODD: Well you have to make it be what you want it to be. You can complain about it and say that it’s no good and children waste their time on it, well that’s all true, but…
TOMIJO: It is doing good.
TODD: …you can use it for a tool and just like the Internet, everything can be used for something and instead of complaining about it, let’s turn it around and make it be of use for something and I’ve seen a lot of people get their stories out that way.
TOMIJO: Yeah, and that’s something else, you know, we could take what happened to Jason and we could get them into court and get law enforcement to do what they’re supposed to do, we could save so many kids and young adults and young girls from things from happening. (Sighs)
TODD: I know it’s hard. I know this is hard for you but it’s okay, you just calm down.
TOMIJO: I just don’t want to come off to anybody like a crazy nut, because I’m not.
TODD: You’re not.
TOMIJO: I’m not.
TODD: No, you’re not and I don’t think anybody would trade places with you right now. Most of the people that listen to this show, understand, and they know because a lot of them are people that have been there with you, maybe in another situation, but they understand and we just let people be what they are here, and who they are, and tell their story.
TOMIJO: There is so much more to this story.
TODD: Well I think that we’re going to have to work on a few things and there are a few things we can work on with this. We can get the story published on the website and let people listen to it, and like I say with all our guest, I think we’re going to have to have you come back at some point in time when we can do some type of update or follow-up on it.
TOMIJO: That would be great. That would be great.
TODD: And you call me when you have something and you let us know. You know where to find me, you usually find me through MySpace messaging so you know where to find me and you let us know that you’ve got something that you want to talk about. And we try not to be reckless with data and everything that we try to put out in these interviews. We try to be constructive with it and we don’t try to be shocking with information and you know that’s not what this is about, this is a public service announcement, not a ratings show.
TOMIJO: Right.
TODD: We just want the truth to come out and sometimes it’s hard to get to the truth because we really still don’t know what happened.
TOMIJO: Really, that’s all I want. I really just want the truth. I’m not mad at the police or the coroner or any of that, I just don’t understand why they didn’t tell us the whole truth from the get-go.
TODD: Well maybe we can get some of those answers with what we’ve put together here today, maybe this will take us to the next level, so that’s what we’re going to try to do with this and hopefully some of our listeners will give us some feedback, that’s what we’re asking for tonight. You can follow the links on the website or email myself of Tomijo and we will get you to some of the more graphic sides of this case. You have a discussion group, right?
TOMIJO: Yes.
TODD: So we will have the information of how you can get to the discussion group, and you approve who you want to be there, and I can certainly point out some people on our Cold Cases group, that are good people that you would want to be there. So we’ll help you with that too and hopefully we can get somebody there who can give you some good information and good feedback.
TOMIJO: Okay, and I thank you so much.
TODD: We’ll try.
TOMIJO: I thank you all.
TODD: It’s all we can do, is try, and that’s what we’ll do so we’ll say goodbye to our audience now so we can get this uploaded and ready to go for tonight. Goodbye to everybody and I’m going to talk to Tomijo a little bit more, off the record. Goodnight everybody.
TOMIJO: Goodnight. Bye.
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When Jason woke up the morning of August 20, 1991, he was living with our Mamaw and Papaw. Jason was working in the stone quarry with his Uncle Bud, Cousin Jamie and Bud's brothers Steve and Henry. They all had also been putting a roof on a house of a man by the name of Mark O. Mark O. was Big Tim's friend and Big Tim is also Tiny Tim's dad. There was a party planned for Tiny Tim on this day... a welcome home party. Jason and his co-workers this day made several trips to Orange (where Big Tim lived) to buy some pot and to see if Tiny was out yet. Later that evening after work Jason went home and got cleaned up. Jason told his grandparents he loved them. Grandpa Luther had been saving money for Jason. Jason only asked for 10 dollars but Grandpa Luther only had a 20. Jason told him that he would bring him back the other 10 dollars. Then he hugged them, said he loved them and said he would see them after a while, because he was planning on working the next day.
