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00:00I just got a little bit of groceries, they're in the back seat, I came out I saw that bag
00:29in the back I thought it was just somebody putting trash in my truck which has happened
00:32before.
00:33So I opened that outside bag and I saw there was another bag inside of it with what looked
00:38like some clothes and some blood on it.
00:41You were putting some groceries in there and saw the bag?
00:43Yeah, I saw the bag and I said somebody's throwing trash back here or something.
00:46So I opened the first one to see if it was garbage and some red and it looked like some
00:52socks or something.
00:53But you didn't see what else was in there?
00:55No.
00:56Alright.
00:57Obviously there's something bad in there.
01:04I was dispatched to a call of a suspicious item in a pickup truck at a local supermarket
01:20with what looked to be blood coming out of it.
01:27We never know what we're going to get.
01:30It's always a mystery.
01:34At the scene, I did activate my body camera.
01:37You didn't open it.
01:38You just touched it?
01:39The outside bag I opened.
01:41Okay.
01:42And then what did you see when you opened it?
01:43I saw those old dogs and that blood on her, what looked like blood on her.
01:47Okay.
01:48And then you closed her right back up?
01:51And that's what walked away.
01:52I didn't touch anything after that.
01:55It was a rainy cold day and the last thing that anyone wanted to do was to be looking into
02:01a bag in the back of a pickup truck.
02:04And my initial thoughts were it was probably a dead animal because here in Arkansas there's
02:09a lot of hunting and I didn't expect something horrible.
02:13If it's an animal thing.
02:14What?
02:15It looks like an animal.
02:16Oh, it could be an animal.
02:17Sorry, you did.
02:18At airport?
02:19Yeah, that's blood.
02:20Oh, wow.
02:21And that's when I started calling for extra authorities to come and help.
02:42Up on my arrival, as I got in my vehicle, I walked around towards the truck and there
02:58were black bags.
03:00I did notice a red liquid in the bed of the truck.
03:04Hey, let's just leave everything like it is.
03:07Let's shrink tape up around our cars.
03:11I walked back over to the back of his truck.
03:40Where some other officers were.
03:42And it was pretty tense at that time.
03:46Which bag is it in?
03:47It's in this one?
03:48Yeah.
03:49In foil.
03:50I opened the bag.
03:51That's when I saw a partial face.
03:57I was horrified at the moment and really didn't know what to think.
04:07Oh, yeah.
04:08We're going to photograph it as it is and then we're going to tell it what looks like.
04:12We didn't know.
04:13We didn't know if it was a real human head.
04:16It was a couple of days out from Halloween and I want to make sure that this wasn't some
04:22sort of prank.
04:23First I was like, okay, it's close to Halloween.
04:26Are we sure that this is some sort of whatever.
04:29Being so close to Halloween, there was definitely some apprehension about it being a prank.
04:33We thought it could be decorations of some kind or some kind of Halloween prop.
04:38All this was in effect?
04:40Yes, sir.
04:41Okay.
04:50That's a human head.
04:53Yeah, it's real.
04:54We opened the bag and we peeled back the aluminum foil and saw that it was an actual woman's head.
05:05This wasn't any crime.
05:06She was murdered.
05:08Hey, we apparently have a human head in the back of this truck in a trash bag.
05:14This isn't like some sort of prank.
05:16This is a real head.
05:17Obviously, there's a pause there because you realize that you were hoping that it was a prank.
05:23Then you have a million other things that start running through your mind at that time.
05:26The level that somebody would go to to remove somebody's head from their body, it did seem personal.
05:33When I opened the bag and I saw the human face, I was so horrified.
05:43And I would say I was probably in shock because during my years here at the Hot Springs Police Department, this is something that they don't tell you will happen.
05:54This is something you don't expect to happen.
05:56This is something you don't train for.
05:58As detectives, we try to not personalize the cases that we respond to.
06:04But at the end of the day, this was, in fact, somebody's mom, grandma.
06:08It was just unimaginable to think that someone could cut someone's head off and put it in a trash bag.
06:15That was just unthinkable to me.
06:17My first thought was, where's the rest of her?
06:20Where did this occur?
06:22And were there other victims?
06:24Those things obviously start running through your mind.
06:27We need to figure out who she was.
06:29This was a mystery.
06:31Let's try to get these looky-loos back as best we can.
06:38Next, we turned our focus to a gentleman named Adam, whose truck it was, and who had made the phone call that summoned us to the scene.
06:46That's your truck.
06:47That's my truck.
06:48How long ago did you pull up here?
06:50I don't know. Within an hour.
06:52We want to gain information, and the best way to do that is to keep him calm.
06:55Whether the story he was telling me was true or not, we were going to find out.
06:58Let's get you out of the range, just have you seat my car real quick.
07:03You're not in trouble, you're not under arrest.
07:06We're fixing to lock all this off, okay?
07:09Now, I didn't check the back of my truck before I left my house.
07:13Yeah, where do you live at?
07:14Maybe four minutes, five minutes from here.
07:16Okay.
07:17You didn't notice anything in the back then?
07:19No, I didn't, but I also didn't go back there and look.
07:22Yeah, okay.
07:23And do you see anything else?
07:25No.
07:27You always have to have a level of skepticism with anything anybody tells you until you
07:31find out the facts.
07:34He's going to call his wife and have them come to the PD.
07:40Yeah.
07:41I opened the bag, and there was another bag inside of it, and that's when I saw what looked
07:50like blood and some, like, clothes, and so I just walked away.
07:55I put my hands up and walked over to the red box and called the police.
07:59Normally, in a situation like that, people react in all kinds of ways.
08:03Sometimes they are very, you know, overdramatic and can kind of flail around and scream and cry.
08:12Other times, they remain silent, kind of like Adam did.
08:14At that time, we did not know if Adam was involved or the extent of his involvement in this case.
08:20Adam kept saying he didn't know the victim.
08:23With no way to confirm who she was, we had to start somewhere.
08:27I'm going to call the county real quick, see if they got any missing.
08:29She's about 65.
08:30Hey, do you guys have any missing persons, females, maybe in their 60s?
08:35I contacted our local sheriff's department to see if they had any missing persons of somebody about the same age.
08:42Oh, okay.
08:44Well, we, uh, we've got a head in a bag out here.
08:47We had no female missing persons in her age group at that time.
08:51So, earlier in that day, officers did take a missing persons report for a man named Aaron Goodwin.
08:57None of this seemed to be linked together.
09:00So, either we were missing something or we weren't able to connect all the pieces to yet.
09:06The next step would have been putting out a nationwide bolo for any missing persons that might fit her age group.
09:19This is Detective Hunter Scott, okay?
09:21Hey, how are you doing?
09:22Your car, we're going to do some photographs.
09:25We're going to tow it to the police department.
09:27But yeah, your car, unfortunately, it's a crime scene right now.
09:29Next, we turned our focus to the back of the pickup truck where the head was found.
09:34Adam's truck was fairly clean.
09:37There was no other evidence that was collected from his truck.
09:41So, it led us to believe that the truck was merely a means to transport the head to another location.
09:47While at the scene, officers had got with the big box store security to ascertain whether or not another person is observed on video putting the black bags into the back of Adam's truck.
10:02The security footage gives you a lot of information.
10:04Obviously, if somebody had dropped those bags in the truck in the parking lot, we would have had somebody to start looking for a suspect.
10:12Video surveillance revealed that Adam pulls up in his vehicle.
10:16He walks inside.
10:17He pays for his groceries and walks outside as he's putting his bags in the back of the truck.
10:24And then he is observed going around and investigating the bags under the back of his truck.
10:29It was evident that no one came up to his truck at any point.
10:33No one even walked even remotely close to his vehicle.
10:36That told us that this had happened somewhere else.
10:39Adam's truck was still part of the mystery that we had to figure out.
10:42But in any homicide investigation, the first thing you want to do is identify the victim.
10:47If Adam had known this particular person, there was some sort of elaborate conspiracy to frame Adam.
10:56You got to start at the very beginning with her identification and how that leads back to Adam or anybody else.
11:03We were still left with more questions than answers.
11:05When you're dealing with dismemberment of an individual, there's always the possibility
11:11of other victims.
11:14We didn't know if we had a serial killer or if this was an isolated incident.
11:17If there were going to be more bodies or what this was going to look like.
11:20Nothing about this crime made sense.
11:34They'll probably need you to come down to the station.
11:36Okay.
11:37But yeah, your car, unfortunately, it's a crime scene right now.
11:47Right.
11:48Well, like I said, it ain't good.
11:50Adam, who discovered the head in his truck, he was a little nervous.
11:54As we spoke more to Adam, I started to realize that he could have been an intricate part of this.
12:01We didn't want to tell him exactly what we had found because at this point, he was still a person of interest in this case.
12:09Obviously, he's the first person you want to talk to.
12:13And the best place to do that would be the police department.
12:16We walked Adam into the interrogation room and nothing was off the table until we spoke to him.
12:25Just like everyone else, we treated him the exact same.
12:28There were no assumptions and no exceptions.
12:31Adam's demeanor was very calm, so our language back to him was a mirror of that.
12:48I didn't want to agitate him, just in case he was willing to provide more information that we were looking for.
13:07Hey, sir, how are you doing?
13:11Hey, Adam.
13:13Um, I know this is a strange situation, okay?
13:18Um, so what we kind of want to do is find out what happened.
13:23Yes, there's a crime scene in the back of your truck, okay?
13:26Um, and so we're trying to just piece together what's going on.
13:29Okay, I want you to understand that.
13:31We just want you to help us, um, so that we can try to piece together what happened.
13:37We needed Adam to give us a rundown of his entire morning routine.
13:43What happened that day, what happened that morning.
13:46Walking us through his timeline from home to the grocery store to finding the bag,
13:51and then what led us to where we are right now.
13:54Where all have you been today?
13:56Today?
13:57Yes, sir.
13:58Just to Walmart.
13:59Okay, so you left from your house and went to Walmart, and then tell me what happened when you got to Walmart.
14:04I got there around noon or so.
14:09Had a short grocery list.
14:11Just a couple of things, milk, flour, eggs.
14:15Wife's doing some baking.
14:19Came back out to the truck.
14:20I noticed something in the back, and looked a little weird, so opened it up.
14:29I saw what looked like blood, and I backed away and called 911.
14:35Okay.
14:36During the interview with Adam, we were trying to figure out if there were any kind of cracks to his story,
14:41and trying to fill in those missing pieces.
14:45Adam's story from the scene back to the interview room, they were almost identical.
14:50His timeline of events didn't change at all.
14:51Let me ask you this.
14:52Have you had problems with anybody, that anybody would be trying to pull a Halloween prank on you, or anything like that?
14:58Problems with any neighbors?
15:00No.
15:02No.
15:03And I get along with all my neighbors pretty well.
15:04I mean, it's a quiet neighborhood.
15:06Adam really didn't have any problems with anybody.
15:09Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as things in his neighborhood that would lead us to believe that this could have happened there.
15:17In a case like this, there wasn't much to go on.
15:21But even the smallest detail could be what we needed to solve this case.
15:25Have you had any weird things in the neighborhood happen?
15:29What happened?
15:31I had somebody steal the motor off the back of my boat about maybe two months ago, and I filed a report about that.
15:38Okay.
15:40But there had been some recent thefts. It kind of piqued our interest.
15:44Have you noticed anything unusual? Anybody strange in the neighborhood, vehicles, anything like that?
15:50Um, I have seen a guy walking down the street, older gentleman with a backpack a couple of times, and I don't know where he's going to, but...
16:00Okay.
16:01Um, I see him walking up and down our street, so I don't know if he just walks everywhere or what, but I don't know him.
16:07When Adam said that he had saw the man with the backpack, that seemed odd to him.
16:12That's obviously something that we wanted to look into as well, to see if he played any role in this case.
16:16Would there be anywhere on your street that maybe somebody has a homeless camp?
16:21Like, is there any woods or anything right around their house, or anything like that?
16:25Not that I can think of.
16:26Okay.
16:28Um...
16:29The man with the backpack obviously could have been a convenient detail that Adam is trying to throw us off,
16:33to maybe throw blame upon somebody that we didn't know who it was yet.
16:38But also, we thought that maybe this mystery man was involved.
16:43When we have a serious incident like that, especially something so heinous,
16:49it's also possible that the person that's responsible was in the area watching us respond to the scene.
16:55It kind of gives them a high to see us responding to the thing that they caused.
16:59So, we went back and reviewed body camera footage from the crime scene, just to see if anybody looked out of place.
17:09Like the man with the backpack, that Adam said that he had seen.
17:13After reviewing body camera footage, we didn't locate the person that Adam had said that he had seen walking with a backpack.
17:24Adam could have just been giving us false information to where we were just kind of running in circles.
17:30The way things were going during this investigation, we weren't ready to take anything at face value.
17:35One of the things that came out in the investigation was Adam stated that he had been at the Doubletree Hotel
17:41at a work conference the night before, which obviously piqued curiosity.
17:45It was important to kind of figure out why he was at the Doubletree and if that could lead us to any indication of what happened in finding this bag.
17:56Detectives responded to the hotel to see if they could retrieve video of the parking lot and Adam's truck.
18:03Getting the video would take time.
18:07We did go to Adam's house and verify that the crime scene did not occur there.
18:12No evidence was found, which was pretty frustrating.
18:19Adam is still a person of interest.
18:22But we did end up releasing him.
18:27Then during the initial part of this investigation, we got a call that changed everything.
18:32Officers in Burden County, Missouri had responded to a welfare check and discovered a middle-aged woman deceased in the home, headless in a bathtub.
18:49It was a homeowner, Connie Goodwin.
18:51If these two cases were connected, then we were dealing with something far more disturbing than what we originally realized.
19:00I received a call from the Vernon County Sheriff's Department requesting assistance investigating a homicide.
19:16They located the body of a female victim in the bathroom of the residence and she was missing her head.
19:24The female was identified as Connie Goodwin.
19:28Vernon County sent her identification pictures to our agency here and our local coroner's office was able to confirm that the head that we had here was indeed Connie Goodwin.
19:45Identifying her remains was a huge development in our case, but we had no idea how her head had ended up in Hot Springs over 300 miles away.
19:56We had a crime and now we needed to know who was responsible.
20:00In our family, mom was the calm in the storm.
20:13She always held everybody together.
20:15She was always the one to reach out, want to plan family gatherings.
20:21As people would start to drift, she was always important to her to draw people back together.
20:27Family was very important to her.
20:35In the beginning, the only thing I could think of was that, oh, they're going to go check on her and she's just going to be passed out and they're going to take her to the hospital and she'll get better.
20:47And then when I found out she was gone, I was like, OK, we're going to find out that maybe she had a seizure.
20:57What had happened is something I would have in a thousand years even considered could happen in any way.
21:05We live in the country, a small town. Bad stuff doesn't happen out here, especially not to good people.
21:13It didn't seem real.
21:14Connie's house was in a rural setting. Search warrants were obtained. As the investigators were processing the scene, they located a knife in the bathtub.
21:36So we found nothing other than that.
21:43We tried to see if there was any link between Adam, the owner of the truck, and Connie Goodwin in any way.
21:51There was no link between Adam and Connie Goodwin.
21:53We kept hitting roadblocks along the way, so it was frustrating. We were essentially back to square one.
22:04So a detective's primary focus had shifted to Connie's family.
22:12And we knew it was important to find out what happened to Connie by talking to the people that were closer to her.
22:17The person who called this in was her sister, Debbie.
22:25And if you just have a seat in one of these, this won't take long at all.
22:30If something happened to Connie, she would most likely be the person that knew about that.
22:36OK, so I'm just going to ask you some very basic, standard questions.
22:39And by the way, I'm Sergeant Barker.
22:44How do you know Connie?
22:46How do I know Connie? She's my sister-in-law.
22:48We learned from Debbie that she had made several attempts to try to contact Connie throughout the night and was unable to contact her, and that was not normal to Connie.
22:59OK, so you went inside calling for Connie, obviously no answer.
23:03There were all the rooms.
23:06The bathroom door was locked, and so I just started hitting the door, and I kicked it once.
23:12Then it busted on the, not the doorknob side.
23:16And I saw Connie in the bathtub then.
23:22Tell me what you saw.
23:24Debbie was not thinking about a crime when she entered the residence.
23:29But when she looked into the bathtub, everything changed.
23:33You went to check a pulse?
23:35I caught her neck, but all I felt was bone there.
23:43I'm not, I'm not sure that her head was there or not, because I just remember it being bony.
23:52In my profession, we see tragedy daily.
23:56Especially working homicide investigations.
24:03We see the worst a body could be in.
24:08For a normal civilian to witness something like that, you really feel for the people that are put in that situation.
24:19During the investigation, we asked Debbie the most important question for our investigation.
24:24Do you know if she had issues with anybody?
24:28Not that I've heard.
24:30They have a son, Aaron, in Arkansas, that has been having some kind of episodes that just kind of strange that she didn't ask us to keep him in prayer.
24:46Kind of sounds like maybe he was schizophrenic or something. I don't know.
24:53The information we received about Aaron was not a direct lead, but we can't overlook anything.
25:00We learned from Debbie that Aaron was planning on going to Arkansas.
25:14Aaron, that's with Johnny in Arkansas.
25:17I'm Connie's husband.
25:25Do you know when they left for Arkansas?
25:27No, I don't.
25:29Debbie said she tried to contact Johnny, Connie's husband, and Aaron by phone and was not able to get a response from any of them.
25:36And they find Connie's been murdered. Obviously, that raised some serious red flags.
25:45We could be dealing with a couple of other victims in this situation.
25:51And if that was the case, then we possibly had a killer in Hot Springs.
25:54Following Debbie, the detectives interviewed her daughter, Keila, hoping that she could fill in any of the gaps.
26:04You're going to think I'm crazy, and I don't even know if I'm supposed to say anything.
26:10Maybe six weeks ago or so, Aaron was involved in some kind of headshot shot.
26:16And he says that these people that jumped him and beat him up pretty good have threatened to kill him and then come after his family as well.
26:29We learned that Aaron was in a bar fight with a bald guy with a neck tattoo who he thought was out to get him.
26:39Our investigation has shifted to try to figure out who this person was and if he was somehow involved in this incident.
26:47We had a vague description of a tattooed man.
26:52That still didn't help us solve this mystery.
26:55The Sheriff's Department attempted to locate this bald-headed neck tattoo guy.
27:01However, nothing was ever discovered.
27:05Nothing about this case was making any sense.
27:08We ran Aaron's name through our database.
27:17His dad had reported a missing earlier from the Doubletree Hotel.
27:22The missing person report had one key detail in that John could still be at the Doubletree Hotel.
27:28John was listed as the contact for any information about Aaron's disappearance.
27:36We needed to locate John.
27:39We didn't know whether or not he was alive.
27:42There were just too many pieces that weren't making sense or adding up.
27:45When we arrived at the Doubletree Hotel, we did find something a little disturbing.
27:55One of my other daughters called and she said, Aaron is missing.
28:06This is my baby brother and he loved his mom.
28:09He was always very protective of her.
28:11Like if one of the grandkids might get feisty with grandma.
28:14Oh no, you don't talk to my mom like that.
28:17If he had something to do with this, he would have set up.
28:20I do remember that was my first reaction.
28:24We had a lot of pieces.
28:26A severed head in a stranger's truck.
28:28Now a missing son.
28:29A father who had been heard from.
28:31We were hoping just to bring it into this mystery.
28:34So we immediately recognized the address of the Doubletree Hotel.
28:37And we were able to piece together that Adam, the owner of the truck, had been there previously for a work conference.
28:44Later we went to the Doubletree.
28:47We located Connie's husband, John, in the lobby eating dinner.
28:50And just asked if he would come down to the station to answer some questions that we had.
28:55John seemed calm and collected and understood why they wanted to speak to him.
29:00Mr. Goodwin, this is Detective Hunter Scott. I'm Detective Sergeant Freeman.
29:04Like I said, we're here to ask you about this report, do some follow-up with you about this report you made this morning about your son.
29:14Detectives use different techniques whenever interviewing persons of interest or suspects.
29:19Part of them is putting them at ease and also slowly feeding them pieces of information to see what they're willing to give you in return.
29:25Who came up with that? Did it come to Hot Springs? You or Aaron?
29:28Well, he wanted to come down here and do his walkabout. I assumed. And I said, why would you come to a city of 35,000 people?
29:37But I guess I got to look at the map and there's a lot of mountains and stuff around me.
29:41When John told us that struck us as odd, that you would, you know, drive 400 miles to Hot Springs to go camping on the weekend.
29:50And so we pressed John about what had happened before they left for Hot Springs.
29:54I said goodbye to Connie, kiss and all that. I locked the door behind me. He said, I need you to go to .
30:03He didn't go with you? No. No, he stayed there. So I come home and here's my driveway.
30:12I stopped and he threw the plastic bag in there. He already had his backpack in there or anything.
30:17So we pushed John a little bit harder to see if we could locate Aaron and to find out his whereabouts.
30:28I brought him down here and rented that place for three days. He was going to go on his walkabout.
30:35So I went in and rented it, came back out. He's going through his gear.
30:40And he goes, well, yeah, I'll be up in a minute. Went up to the room, probably a span of an hour or so.
30:50And I go, something's not right. You know, he'd been up here by now. And when I'm down, he's gone. His gear's gone.
30:59After you reported your son missing, you found out that your wife was deceased?
31:05Yeah.
31:06How did you find out?
31:08Well, my son-in-law called me.
31:11Reporting his son missing and then finding out that his wife was deceased, maybe the time was a little too convenient for this case.
31:18In my years of experience, there's usually a standard reaction to finding out that a loved one is deceased.
31:26John didn't seem to portray any of those characteristics. Nothing about that situation was making sense.
31:31So we pushed John a little bit harder about that plastic garbage bag that Aaron was holding at the end of the driveway.
31:37If he had ever looked inside the bag, if he knew the contents of the bag.
31:40It does appear that it is your wife.
31:42Um, so I think you now maybe can understand a little bit why we're treating this the way that we are and why we're trying to get as much information from you as we possibly can.
31:58Because whatever your son had in that bag, we now have.
32:05Oh, Jesus.
32:09So if there's anything that you aren't telling us that you don't know, that we haven't talked about yet, now is the time.
32:19I had nothing from you fellas. I'm telling you all I know.
32:26We were giving him small bits of information, trying to see if John was involved in this in any way.
32:30So I'm gonna ask you again.
32:35If there's something that you're holding back, that you're not wanting to tell us, we need you to tell us.
32:42Okay?
32:44Okay.
32:46I'm not accusing you of anything.
32:47Right, right.
32:48I'm trying to find out what happened with Aaron, where Aaron is.
32:52We immediately thought that he knew more than what he was telling us.
32:55I've been trying to piece this day together.
32:58Are you guys believers?
33:00Can I ask you that?
33:01Are you Christians?
33:02Yes, sir.
33:03Yes, yes.
33:04That might help.
33:05Okay.
33:07He, I think, I'm not sure.
33:11He's not been right.
33:14And anything, God wanting to go on a walkabout.
33:19And trying to help him.
33:21People try to bring religion into interviews to try to ease their conscience if they do know something more than what they're willing to tell us.
33:29They're trying to rationalize it and even personalize it because sometimes the acts are so heinous.
33:36And this crime was particularly heinous.
33:38John did tell us that Aaron had severe mental health issues.
33:42Has he ever had any psychological health, to your knowledge?
33:44You know?
33:45Yeah.
33:46He was seeing a counselor maybe three years ago.
33:48I don't know his name.
33:49It's all confidential.
33:51He was living on his own.
33:52And I know that's not, I know that's not the truth.
33:56I mean, he's real private.
33:59John had told us that Aaron could have snapped and had a moment of a violent rage in which, in that time that he had killed Connie, that was a shifting point in this investigation for us.
34:10We had more questions than answers.
34:13We had no clear evidence.
34:15But the main thing for us was to find Aaron.
34:19Then the video surveillance from Doubletree came in and detectives combed through every frame of the video.
34:26When John and Aaron both arrived at the Doubletree to check in, we'd noticed something terrifying.
34:34When John had gone into the hotel, Aaron was seen at the bed of the truck, and he had removed what appeared to be a black garbage bag, and he had placed it into the bed of Adam's truck.
34:46The surveillance camera shows he walks to the edge of the wood line there at the hotel, and then we'd never see Aaron again.
34:53That looks like Aaron disposing of his mother's head, and that's more horrifying than we thought.
34:59All of the evidence at the time was now pointing to Aaron Goodwin.
35:02The only problem was that he is still missing.
35:04And due to our knowledge of Aaron having severe mental health issues, it was imperative that we found Aaron before he either hurt somebody else or hurt himself.
35:11At this time, we believe that Aaron was responsible for the murder of his mother, Connie Goodwin, not his father, John, and not Adam, who discovered the head in his truck.
35:29It's paramount to find him as quickly as possible because there is a severe potential for other people being killed.
35:37The search for Aaron became a full-scale, multi-state manhunt.
35:40We pushed his name and photo out to the media and urged the public to be vigilant, and the media coverage exploded.
35:47A man wanted in connection to a homicide in Missouri is believed to be in the natural state.
35:54Police are looking for a subject in connection to a Vernon County, Missouri homicide.
35:58Officials found 63-year-old woman dead in her home.
36:01Her son is now a suspect in the case, and they believe he is the one who's in Hot Springs.
36:06We got numerous calls of sightings of who they believed to be Aaron.
36:13We investigated every one of those.
36:15They were unfruitful.
36:17While searching the Goodwin home, investigators found a series of ominous voicemails left by Aaron.
36:25One message that the family received from Aaron Goodwin was particularly disturbing.
36:29Sunday 1, 43 PM.
36:32You guys have got to get out of there.
36:35Do not be home on Halloween.
36:36I'm serious.
36:38John, you've got to renounce Emmanuel as the savior.
36:41Go back to Jesus.
36:42I'm not you.
36:43The aliens are coming.
36:46When you hear it from his own voice, he's talking about aliens and things that obviously aren't true.
36:52There's a lot of concern there.
36:54Aaron's mental health was quickly deteriorating.
36:57It shifted for us to make sure that we protected the public.
37:03During the course of the investigation, we would track credit card information, try to find cell phone information.
37:12There was no activity on Aaron after he walked out of the parking lot of the hotel.
37:18We figured he was in the woods.
37:20There's ground searches conducted by Arkansas authorities throughout that wooded area, the large national forest.
37:26And here in Missouri, we continued to follow up on any leads that would come in.
37:32It was extremely frustrating and tiring to try to do the same thing over and over again and not make any headway.
37:39We were hoping just to bring it into this mystery.
37:41In March of 2021, five months after Connie's murder and Aaron's disappearance, we got the break we were looking for.
37:52A hiker stumbled across remains in a sleeping bag along with a gun in a wooded area outside of Hot Springs.
38:02The state of the body was in severe decomposition.
38:18It was mainly skeletal.
38:20The officers that responded to the scene were able to put the pieces together that this could potentially be Aaron Goodwin.
38:40There's a body and a sleeping bag.
38:42You can see the arm of the jacket.
38:44Yeah, you can see the arm of the jacket, but I don't see any arms or hands.
38:46But there's a backpack next to it.
38:47I mean, but I'm not going to touch that backpack.
38:49You know what?
38:51I wonder if it could be.
38:53I mean, this guy's been...
38:55When was that?
38:57Aaron was still out there and maybe this could be him.
39:00We were hopeful that it was him so we could put an end to this mystery.
39:05You got to get all their information.
39:06I need someone to stay with the body though.
39:08Okay.
39:09No, I mean, you don't have to stay with the body, but I mean...
39:11I'll walk out with them and get their info.
39:14Not long after the body was discovered, we were able to determine that the remains did belong to Aaron Goodwin.
39:21His death was ruled by a medical examiner to be suicide, which ended the manhunt.
39:30We were still left with more questions than answers.
39:33Why did he kill his mother and not his father?
39:36Did Aaron believe that his mother was possessed?
39:39You know, those are questions that unfortunately leave the family with a lot more questions than answers.
39:45So based on all the evidence that was collected and the interviews that were conducted and knowing that his mental health was pretty severe, I think,
39:55Aaron Goodwin had a psychotic break, was ultimately responsible for killing his mom, Connie Goodwin.
40:01Removing her head from her body, placing it in a garbage bag and then driving it to Hot Springs where it ended up in the back of Adam's truck.
40:07The thing that I miss a lot about my mom is she would always call and she would talk for hours and hours.
40:19And I would be like, Lord, she's still talking.
40:22But I miss that. I miss that.
40:25I mean, I mean hours, two, three hours.
40:28She would talk about everything.
40:29Work, her garden, other grandkids, the next visit, the next holiday, just for hours and hours.
40:36And I miss those phone calls.
40:38She always had this way of knowing if I was sick or sad and I would just get a phone call and she would say, you're on my heart.
40:50We'll never know what truly happened in the moment.
40:55And we'll never truly know why.
40:59There just won't ever be answers.
41:01And that's probably the hardest part.
41:03Like, how does this happen?
41:05Why does this happen to two perfectly loving people in a family for seemingly no reason?
41:14And then how do you prevent it from happening in the future if you don't know why it happened at all?
41:19I've also thought a lot about what I would say to Erin.
41:24Honestly, I think I would just say I forgive you and I love you.
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