0:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Listener, welcome back. 0:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Before we move on, I wanna do a quick recap for those that don't have Patreon and need a brief refresh. 0:09 [SPEAKER_01]: At 1206 in the morning, on July 7th, 2024, a 16 year old named Julia Grace Eggler, called 911 from her home on Bachelore Road and Northwest, in Palm Bay, Florida. 0:21 [SPEAKER_01]: She told the dispatcher a man had broken in. 0:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Five feet eight, a hammer from the backyard, a smash back door. 0:29 [SPEAKER_01]: She said she had hidden in her bedroom with her two dogs. 0:32 [SPEAKER_01]: You remember the story by now, don't you? 0:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Today, you are going to hear the interrogation as well as further details, and you're going to get the actual audio. 0:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The voice of a 16-year-old sitting across from Palm Bay Police Department of Investigators, holding an narrative together, the best she can. 0:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, let's get on with it. 0:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome, listener. 0:56 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you're here. 0:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Take a seat. 0:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Next to the fire. 1:03 [SPEAKER_08]: Welcome to Obscura, where we shine a light on the dark. 1:30 [SPEAKER_02]: I just informed you that you likes for my dress, was I accurate, because I don't want to, you know. 1:39 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and what are your pronouns, you know what I'm asking? 1:43 [SPEAKER_05]: I usually go by a suit. 1:44 [SPEAKER_02]: He's okay. 1:46 [SPEAKER_02]: So obviously it's been a couple of hours, so you've been with us, so I gotta read you this thing. 1:51 [SPEAKER_02]: Your rights first, and then we should go through everything with you, figure out what's going on. 1:57 [SPEAKER_01]: A crime scene is a document, and is a stack of small, quiet statements, written in glass, and fabric in the souls of shoes, and the angles of a fallen body, in spatter on a wall. 2:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Detectives read it the way an editor reads a manuscript, listen her. 2:15 [SPEAKER_01]: They look for places where the writing contradicts itself. 2:19 [SPEAKER_01]: They look for the sentences that do not belong. 2:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The first sentence that did not belong was the back door. 2:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The sliding glass door at the rear of the home had been shattered. 2:29 [SPEAKER_01]: In the shattering, fit Julia's story at first glance at least, a hammer in the yard and intruder, forced entry. 2:36 [SPEAKER_01]: But when investigators examine the pattern of the glass on the floor, something was off. 2:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The distribution suggested the door had been broken outward or from inside, not from the outside, and that it had been broken after violence had already moved through the rest of the house, not before. 2:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Glass sitting on top of dried blood instead of underneath it, you get the idea. 3:00 [SPEAKER_01]: That is a small detail in a courtroom, a small detail fires off like a cannon. 3:06 [SPEAKER_04]: Do you know what our room is reference? 3:11 [SPEAKER_04]: She didn't mind me about it. 3:13 [SPEAKER_04]: That was matter her for just going without me. 3:16 [SPEAKER_04]: I think some along those lines. 3:18 [SPEAKER_07]: But you wanted to be, you wanted to go out and have a good time to go. 3:21 [SPEAKER_07]: It was like a birthday party. 3:22 [SPEAKER_02]: I think so. 3:23 [SPEAKER_02]: Something like that. 3:24 [SPEAKER_02]: So she comes home with him. 3:26 [SPEAKER_02]: And you wake up. 3:30 [SPEAKER_02]: And you guys get to a little bit of a disagree. 3:32 [SPEAKER_02]: Man, you're expressing your frustrations, rightfully so. 3:34 [SPEAKER_02]: You wanted to go to this party. 3:37 [SPEAKER_02]: And she's expressing her frustrations back. 3:40 [SPEAKER_02]: What is she saying back to you? 3:43 [SPEAKER_04]: Just this back report of I didn't tell you, you know, you didn't end the plans. 3:49 [SPEAKER_04]: So what came with that? 3:50 [SPEAKER_04]: I think she took my iPod and my phone, but before she left again, she gave it back. 3:56 [SPEAKER_04]: So I'm being able to text her. 3:57 [SPEAKER_04]: Only in her would have. 3:59 [SPEAKER_04]: a lot of arguments about things, especially over like maybe in trans. 4:03 [SPEAKER_04]: She'd be like, okay, you're not a real boy and a little boy and all, you know, the whole feel of transphobic stuff. 4:10 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay. 4:10 [SPEAKER_06]: She doesn't approve of your lifestyle that you're, she doesn't approve of that. 4:15 [SPEAKER_04]: Would you say she was like trying to kind of meet me in the middle, but it wasn't really working on that well all the time. 4:23 [SPEAKER_04]: She was trying to call me child instead of 4:26 [SPEAKER_04]: because it's more like gender-neutral rather than kind of meeting in the middle, like us. 4:31 [SPEAKER_01]: The second sentence was the footprints. 4:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Bloody footprints moved through the living room and down the hallway toward the bathroom. 4:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Investigators compared the pattern in the size to the shoes that Kelly had worn. 4:43 [SPEAKER_01]: That evening, no match. 4:46 [SPEAKER_01]: They compared it to the shoes of Matthew had been wearing. 4:49 [SPEAKER_01]: No match. 4:50 [SPEAKER_01]: They compared it to the pair of shoes belonging to Julia. 4:53 [SPEAKER_01]: You guessed it. 4:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Match. 4:55 [SPEAKER_01]: The third sentence was the firearm. 4:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The weapon used in the killing was a 38 caliber special revolver. 5:02 [SPEAKER_01]: It had not been brought into the home. 5:05 [SPEAKER_01]: It had been in the home all along. 5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: It belonged to Kelly McCollum. 5:08 [SPEAKER_01]: She kept it in her bedroom and intruder. 5:11 [SPEAKER_01]: In order to use that weapon, 5:13 [SPEAKER_01]: would have had to enter the home where a 16-year-old girl in two dogs were allegedly still awake, okay in adult's bedroom, find the revolver inside that room, load it, and then wait around for the home owners to arrive. 5:27 [SPEAKER_01]: That is not how home invasions generally work. 5:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Home invaders tend to bring their own tools. 5:34 [SPEAKER_01]: They don't typically rely on the victims to provide them. 5:37 [SPEAKER_02]: Is she misjuring you? 5:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 5:40 [SPEAKER_02]: So when you guys are arguing, 5:43 [SPEAKER_04]: you know calling you she or not using the appropriate pronouns or not referring to as Jasper and referring to Julia and like actually kind of being like this is going to be kind of a little girl but she'd be like oh you have breasts in a vagina and all that you know all that kind of showing in my face and I'm yelling back I know you don't think I know that because obviously it's kind of painful because she would always 6:09 [SPEAKER_04]: say that all they're dumb and stupid like that. 6:12 [SPEAKER_04]: No, it's not real. 6:13 [SPEAKER_04]: Even if you get the surgeries, it's not real and things like that. 6:17 [SPEAKER_04]: That's something you guys have discussed, getting surgeries and whatnot. 6:21 [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, and she'd be like, oh, I don't want you to so want to fake 6:25 [SPEAKER_04]: like that. 6:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The fourth sentence was the weapon's location after the fact. 6:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The revolver was eventually recovered in the backyard, you see. 6:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Lying in the grass. 6:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Specifically, it was found directly beneath the window of Julia's bedroom, a stranger who committed two murders and then fled through a back door would not logically double back and drop the weapon under the window of the surviving resident. 6:49 [SPEAKER_01]: The physical geography of that evidence was pointing inward, not outward. 6:54 [SPEAKER_04]: Me and him didn't really talk a lot, so we like, we're like kind of peaceful, but like, coexisting, coexisting, us weren't, we weren't friends, but like, we weren't necessarily enemies either. 7:07 [SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of just whatever, okay. 7:09 [SPEAKER_07]: He's just a couple years old in the year, right? 7:11 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. 7:11 [SPEAKER_04]: How do you feel about that? 7:14 [SPEAKER_04]: No, I didn't like it. 7:17 [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, that's, I don't really support their relationships with the things. 7:21 [SPEAKER_04]: So I think that's the only kind of like tension that there was between us because it would always be kind of awkward when it was just me and him in the house because we wouldn't say no each other because it's kind of like, I don't really want you here when it was kind of obvious because I didn't support their relationship at all. 7:38 [SPEAKER_02]: So circling back to, um... 7:41 [SPEAKER_02]: The argument that you had today should taste the iPod away and the phone she ends up giving you a back before she leaves where is she going every day rather. 7:49 [SPEAKER_04]: And they went to go get a pet frame part of it because she got tired of it being on the floor. 7:55 [SPEAKER_07]: So what are you here and they accepted it? 7:58 [SPEAKER_04]: Oh my, I'm just sitting there hiding the dogs are working in my. 8:04 [SPEAKER_04]: And then I hear the glass shatter and come in so I do that. 8:09 [SPEAKER_04]: It's probably him coming in. 8:12 [SPEAKER_01]: The fifth sentence was the security footage. 8:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The property had cameras, detectives pulled the footage. 8:18 [SPEAKER_01]: They watched the hours leading up to the 911 call. 8:21 [SPEAKER_01]: They watched the minutes, and they watched the seconds. 8:24 [SPEAKER_01]: They were looking for a man approaching the house, a figure cutting across the yard, a vehicle slowing down near the driveway. 8:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Any trace of another person coming or going. 8:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The footage showed nothing. 8:35 [SPEAKER_01]: No approach, no stranger. 8:37 [SPEAKER_01]: The only motions recorded on those cameras 8:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Came from emergency vehicles arriving at the property after 9-1-1 was called. 8:46 [SPEAKER_06]: What happened to your hand? 8:48 [SPEAKER_05]: Oh, it's just an old scar. 8:50 [SPEAKER_06]: You can't do an accident or something? 8:53 [SPEAKER_05]: One day I'd come home from doing whatever I was doing and forgot my key and models' homes. 9:02 [SPEAKER_05]: Spark my window and that in. 9:04 [SPEAKER_06]: You punched the window? 9:06 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a rock, sir, anything else, I didn't? 9:13 [SPEAKER_04]: It's not like it's like hurting or anything, it's just still covering us. 9:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The sixth sentence was the knife, a chef's knife from the kitchen had been used on Matthew, not a knife and intruder had brought with him. 9:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The same way the gun had been the family's own gun. 9:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Every weapon at the scene had come from inside the home. 9:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Listener, I want you to imagine being one of those detectives. 9:40 [SPEAKER_01]: You have a sobbing teenage girl on a driveway, giving you a specific story, a man, a hammer, a back door. 9:48 [SPEAKER_01]: I walked bedroom and every single thing in the house around you is telling you a completely different story. 9:55 [SPEAKER_01]: At first nobody said any of this out loud. 9:58 [SPEAKER_01]: You do not. 9:59 [SPEAKER_01]: When a girl in the driveway is crying and saying that her mother is dead. 10:02 [SPEAKER_01]: You keep her separated. 10:05 [SPEAKER_01]: You let her talk. 10:06 [SPEAKER_01]: You let her give you the story you should want you to have. 10:09 [SPEAKER_01]: And then you read the sentences, the house reads aloud to you because the house cannot lie. 10:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The house is made of material facts. 10:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The house tells you in glass and blood and lens footage exactly what it remembers. 10:24 [SPEAKER_04]: After a while, he's walking around. 10:26 [SPEAKER_04]: I can hear doing something, but there's a lot of banging. 10:38 [SPEAKER_04]: would cracking and stuff. 10:40 [SPEAKER_04]: I think he, I think he kicked down the door to my mom's room. 10:44 [SPEAKER_02]: How did you know it was them walking to the door? 10:46 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, I guess I understood soon. 10:51 [SPEAKER_04]: Cause I think I heard their voices or kind of, I couldn't say, like tell what they were saying, but it sounded like kind of sounding like them. 11:03 [SPEAKER_04]: So I assumed it was them. 11:04 [SPEAKER_04]: And that's what I heard a loud, like, 11:08 [SPEAKER_04]: thinking that I assumed it was like young shots or something and yelling. 11:13 [SPEAKER_07]: What would you like? 11:17 [SPEAKER_04]: I think Matthew was yelling. 11:19 [SPEAKER_04]: And what was he yelling? 11:21 [SPEAKER_04]: I think it was something along the lines of like stock or something. 11:25 [SPEAKER_07]: We were going shots before and did his sound like... You guys are going shots to you? 11:31 [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah. 11:31 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 11:32 [SPEAKER_07]: And how many gunshots do you think you heard? 11:38 [SPEAKER_04]: Five, six, six, maybe. 11:40 [SPEAKER_04]: When I actually came out, first thing I saw was blood on the crown. 11:51 [SPEAKER_07]: How sad you be at home, Dora? 11:56 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 11:56 [SPEAKER_07]: Then what did you see next? 12:04 [SPEAKER_03]: I look to the left hand. 12:07 [SPEAKER_03]: That's when I saw Matthew on the ground. 12:12 [SPEAKER_07]: If you look like he was breathing when you looked at her bathroom, Matt. 12:17 [SPEAKER_04]: I think I could hear him faintly. 12:20 [SPEAKER_04]: It's like girl-gulling. 12:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Great. 12:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, outside the perimeter, the community was already grieving, news had spread fast through the neighborhood in across social media, visuals appeared near the home. 12:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Flowers were placed at the curb, handwritten notes, candles, the story as it had traveled out, still helped Julia as a surviving victim. 12:44 [SPEAKER_01]: People spoke about her as a girl who had hidden in a bedroom with her dogs while stranger killed her mother down the home. 12:50 [SPEAKER_01]: That was the shape of the story that had taken place in the mind of the public. 12:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Inside the investigation, though, the shape of the story continued to change. 12:59 [SPEAKER_01]: The house had already answered detective's questions. 13:02 [SPEAKER_01]: The remaining question was, whether Julia would answer it too. 13:06 [SPEAKER_01]: She was brought in for further interviews. 13:09 [SPEAKER_01]: At first, she held to her story. 13:11 [SPEAKER_01]: She repeated the intruder she repeated the hammer. 13:13 [SPEAKER_01]: She repeated the bedroom door. 13:15 [SPEAKER_01]: She adjusted small details under pressure. 13:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The way a story adjusts when it's not tethered to anything underneath. 13:22 [SPEAKER_04]: And I remember at some point I went into my mom's room and saw that the door had been like, 13:32 [SPEAKER_04]: But like it had been like busted in. 13:34 [SPEAKER_04]: Again, I was checking to see if anything had been stolen. 13:37 [SPEAKER_04]: And I saw the lockbox where I assumed my mom kept my most of my devices when she took them. 13:46 [SPEAKER_04]: And again, my sister expensive. 13:49 [SPEAKER_04]: Such as, like, like, like my iPod or my phone that my dad had shut off, things like that. 14:00 [SPEAKER_02]: So you saw those in there, so they hadn't been stolen. 14:03 [SPEAKER_02]: Are these your iPods? 14:05 [SPEAKER_07]: And that gun that your mom has to, the one that was missing. 14:11 [SPEAKER_07]: Have you ever touched that gun before? 14:14 [SPEAKER_04]: That's why I used to get trained for mine. 14:19 [SPEAKER_04]: Guns are typically good. 14:20 [SPEAKER_01]: The interviews went on for hours. 14:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Detectives began laying out findings piece by piece. 14:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The absence of an intruder on the security footage, the footprints matching, etc. 14:31 [SPEAKER_01]: And eventually, the story Julia Eggler had told from that driveway, began to come apart. 14:37 [SPEAKER_01]: To be quite honest with you, we don't believe that 14:42 [SPEAKER_07]: We've looked over this crime scene and this things in this crime scene that's not had enough or what you're saying, okay? 14:50 [SPEAKER_07]: Because I don't believe the story of someone coming into the house. 14:55 [SPEAKER_07]: We looked at you surveillance camera, okay? 14:59 [SPEAKER_07]: We don't see nobody coming through that back door. 15:01 [SPEAKER_07]: We see your parents coming home through the front door. 15:05 [SPEAKER_07]: We see bloody footprints inside the 15:09 [SPEAKER_07]: The dining room there, in front of the rear sliding glass door, underneath the glass, that blood should be on top of the glass. 15:16 [SPEAKER_07]: Man, you straight up, okay? 15:19 [SPEAKER_07]: Are you the reason why did you hurt your parents today? 15:22 [SPEAKER_07]: Your mom and Matthew. 15:23 [SPEAKER_07]: And if you did, was there reason why you had to do it? 15:27 [SPEAKER_04]: Fear, ridiculous speaking. 15:29 [SPEAKER_04]: Let's say what you're saying, that it was theoretically speaking. 15:33 [SPEAKER_04]: Let's say that it was me, right? 15:37 [SPEAKER_02]: It's not really theoretical at this point. 15:42 [SPEAKER_02]: Everything you see to you is telling us that something happened that you're not telling us. 15:49 [SPEAKER_07]: And you was just about to say, what if it was you that did that? 15:53 [SPEAKER_04]: I was saying that you're right. 15:55 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay. 15:55 [SPEAKER_04]: You're radically what? 15:56 [SPEAKER_04]: What? 15:58 [SPEAKER_04]: You said that giving off your chest and whatever, but it's like, 16:01 [SPEAKER_04]: that just that's not how that works. 16:03 [SPEAKER_07]: It's of course. 16:05 [SPEAKER_07]: Of course, of course, it's not good. 16:06 [SPEAKER_07]: It's not going to go away that quick. 16:08 [SPEAKER_07]: It's not. 16:09 [SPEAKER_07]: But you give us some reasons. 16:11 [SPEAKER_07]: Other people going to look at this interview. 16:14 [SPEAKER_07]: And they're going to want to know, is this a monster over here? 16:17 [SPEAKER_07]: Or is this somebody who made a terrible mistake? 16:19 [SPEAKER_07]: Did you shoot your mom and matter today? 16:25 [SPEAKER_04]: You're basically saying that I did so that you even need my answer. 16:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Listener, this is the part of the episode where I tell you actually what happened inside that house. 16:35 [SPEAKER_01]: What has been going on? 16:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Not what was reported on the 911 one call, not what was sobbed to a detective in the driveway. 16:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Not even what was pieced together by the evidence in the house. 16:46 [SPEAKER_01]: The full story. 16:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Wait, in the evening of July 6th, while Kelly and Matthew were out of the house. 16:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Julia Eggler went to her mother's bedroom. 16:56 [SPEAKER_01]: She took the 38 caliber special revolver. 16:58 [SPEAKER_01]: She loaded it. 17:00 [SPEAKER_01]: She also went into the kitchen and took a chef's knife. 17:03 [SPEAKER_01]: She put the knife in her pocket. 17:04 [SPEAKER_01]: She put the gun in her hand, and then she waited for her mother and her mother's boyfriend to come home. 17:10 [SPEAKER_01]: When Kelly and Matthew walk through the door, 17:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Julia greeted them in the kitchen. 17:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The words she used was, welcome home. 17:17 [SPEAKER_01]: She opened fire on her mother first. 17:20 [SPEAKER_01]: She shot Kelly McCollum, multiple times in the living room area. 17:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Of their own house, the woman who had raised her, the 38-year-old single mother, who had spent most of her adult life keeping the whites on in the pantry stock, shot by her own child with her own gun, her own home. 17:37 [SPEAKER_01]: She then turned the 17:39 [SPEAKER_01]: She shot him too, but he did not die immediately. 17:42 [SPEAKER_01]: He moved bleeding down the hallway, trying to get away from her in desperation. 17:47 [SPEAKER_01]: He made it as far as the bathroom. 17:49 [SPEAKER_01]: She followed him. 17:51 [SPEAKER_01]: When the revolver ran out of ammunition, she drew the chef's knife from her pocket and stabbed him. 17:56 [SPEAKER_01]: She stabbed him repeatedly. 17:58 [SPEAKER_01]: According to the account she gave later, Matthew at that point, essentially asked her to end it. 18:03 [SPEAKER_01]: A man 22 years old, bleeding in a bathroom four, understanding what was going to happen next. 18:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Julia left the bathroom. 18:11 [SPEAKER_01]: She walked back to her mother's bedroom. 18:13 [SPEAKER_01]: She loaded one more round into the river. 18:16 [SPEAKER_01]: She returned to the bathroom and she shy him in the head. 18:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Then she went to work on the scene. 18:21 [SPEAKER_01]: She took the hammer from the backyard. 18:24 [SPEAKER_01]: She went to the back sliding glass door. 18:25 [SPEAKER_01]: She shattered it from the inside, she scattered glass. 18:30 [SPEAKER_01]: She moved around the house in a way that would later leave her bloody footprints, all through the living room, and down the hallway. 18:37 [SPEAKER_01]: She took the revolver she had just used to kill two people, and she carried it to the backyard. 18:42 [SPEAKER_01]: And she dropped it in the grass, under her own bedroom window. 18:45 [SPEAKER_01]: She put the chef's knife on the kitchen counter, almost as though she were done cooking dinner. 18:50 [SPEAKER_01]: And then at 12.06 in the morning, she called 911. 18:54 [SPEAKER_01]: She gave the dispatcher a 5 foot 8 male, a hammer, the whole story. 18:59 [SPEAKER_01]: She kept it up when the officers arrived. 19:02 [SPEAKER_01]: She kept it up in the driveway. 19:04 [SPEAKER_01]: She kept it up for hours inside of the interview room. 19:07 [SPEAKER_01]: She adjusted small details under question. 19:09 [SPEAKER_01]: When the officers started walking her through the evidence, the story finally broke. 19:14 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had taken the revolver from her mother's bedroom. 19:17 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had taken the knife from the kitchen. 19:20 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had waited for them to come home. 19:23 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had greeted them with those two words. 19:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome home. 19:27 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had shot her mother first. 19:29 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had shot Matthew. 19:31 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted she had followed him into the bathroom. 19:34 [SPEAKER_01]: She admitted the stabbing, the reloading, the final shot, breaking the glass, staging the scene, calling 911 and playing the par of a terrified girl in victim. 19:45 [SPEAKER_01]: And then, listener, came the why. 19:48 [SPEAKER_01]: This is the part of the story where I need to ask you to slow down, because the tensions I had built inside that home are not going to be simple, and I do not want to reduce them to slow guns. 19:59 [SPEAKER_01]: In the weeks leading up to July, 2024, 20:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Conversations between Kelly and Julia had been going badly. 20:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Julia was exploring her gender identity at times using the name Jasper, who was asking to be understood as a boy. 20:14 [SPEAKER_01]: Kelly had struggled with this. 20:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Her responses by most accounts had been hesitation and pushback. 20:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Those conversations did not end cleanly. 20:24 [SPEAKER_01]: They led to raised voices, followed by stretches of silence that filled the house like a second kind of weather. 20:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Listen, I have to address something now, because I've read mixed accounts online, some saying that Julia still identifies as a boy, some saying that she doesn't. 20:43 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to keep it simple for the sake of clarity and refer to Julia as her. 20:49 [SPEAKER_01]: This is not some sort of political statement. 20:52 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just that I couldn't get down to brass tax on that. 20:56 [SPEAKER_01]: And so, either way, don't take it as a statement, please. 21:00 [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, Julia had been deeply opposed to her mother's relationship with Matthew. 21:06 [SPEAKER_01]: A 38-year-old woman dating a 22-year-old man is a scenario most teenagers will have something to say about. 21:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Arguments echoed through the living room, she told her mom that the man's age gap was as old as her, words spoken that did not settle easily afterwards. 21:29 [SPEAKER_01]: This was the pressure Julie appointed to when investigators asked her why. 21:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The arguments over her identity, arguments over Matthew. 21:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Her mother's refusal to accept her as a boy, her disapproval of her mother's relationship. 21:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The resentment that had been climbing one degree at a time, week by week, until it crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed. 21:51 [SPEAKER_01]: At one point, during the questioning, captured on officers' body cameras, Julia said something that I suspect is going to stay with me for a while. 21:59 [SPEAKER_01]: She said, quote, me and my mom used to argue a lot. 22:03 [SPEAKER_01]: I should have told her I loved her. 22:05 [SPEAKER_01]: I want to pause here a listener, and this is going to be a delicate line to balance on. 22:11 [SPEAKER_01]: I'll just say this, the hurt Julia was carrying around her identity was real hurt. 22:17 [SPEAKER_01]: A teenager who is not being accepted at home is painful. 22:21 [SPEAKER_01]: not being taken serious that way being treated as a child that can make tough decisions when you're a bit older can be extremely painful. 22:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, at the same time, when I am not going to do, and what I am always going to do on this show, is refuse to let any of that serve as a pretext for what happened in that kitchen. 22:40 [SPEAKER_01]: Cultural temperature around this case tends to push people to hit teams the moment they hear the word identity, and I'm not going to let that happen here. 22:49 [SPEAKER_01]: The her Julia was carrying around for being misgendered and misunderstood by her mother was real, but that does not mean her mother deserved what happened in that kitchen. 22:59 [SPEAKER_01]: There is no ledger in which a parent's failure to use the right pronoun, balances against being shot to death in her own living room. 23:06 [SPEAKER_01]: That is not a balance, that is not a scam. 23:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of families have fights, lots of teenagers disapprove of their parents' dating choices, almost none of those situations, and the way this one did, and the exceptions are not exceptions because of the tension. 23:23 [SPEAKER_01]: They're exceptions because of a choice that one person made at a specific hour of a specific night. 23:29 [SPEAKER_01]: While everyone else in the house was still alive, Kelly McCollum did not get a chance to grow into a better understanding of Julia. 23:37 [SPEAKER_01]: She did not get the next 10 years. 23:39 [SPEAKER_01]: She did not get to apologize for doing anything wrong. 23:42 [SPEAKER_01]: or to be apologized to, for the hurtful words Julia said to her. 23:47 [SPEAKER_01]: She was erased from the rest of her life by a teenager who spent the evening planning how to do it, and the next hour lying to the police about who had done it. 23:56 [SPEAKER_01]: And let's talk Matthew Scheinrock, 22 years old, dating an older woman, a man who's involved in the house was recent enough that he did not have a deep role in any of the arguments the killer would later cite as her response, a man who, 24:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Bleeding in a bathroom still found the voice to ask his killer for mercy. 24:17 [SPEAKER_01]: He got stabbed with a chef's knife and shot in the head by a 16-year-old who walked back to her mother's bedroom, opened the cylinder of a revolver, put one round into it and walked back down the hallway to finish what she started. 24:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Bad is not the description of a person whashing out in a moment of chaos. 24:35 [SPEAKER_01]: That is the description of a person making a decision and executing a bystander to an argument 24:41 [SPEAKER_01]: He had no standing in. 24:42 [SPEAKER_01]: I have said this before on the show and I will say it again. 24:46 [SPEAKER_01]: I know what it is to carry real hurt. 24:49 [SPEAKER_01]: I know what it is to grow up in a house where the person who was supposed to protect you did not. 24:53 [SPEAKER_01]: I know that none of that gives a person the right to pick up a gun and empty it into the people around them. 24:59 [SPEAKER_01]: The line between pain and violence is a line that every human being crosses or does not cross on their own. 25:06 [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of teenagers have parents who do not accept them. 25:10 [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of teenagers have parents who's new partners they hate. 25:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The vast majority of those teenagers go through all of it. 25:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Without ever going into their mother's bedroom for a loaded revolver, that is not an accident. 25:22 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a choice. 25:23 [SPEAKER_01]: In Julia made a different choice. 25:25 [SPEAKER_01]: She made it in full. 25:27 [SPEAKER_01]: She made it with planning. 25:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And she made that choice twice. 25:32 [SPEAKER_01]: The legal process moved quickly. 25:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The 18 judicial circus state attorneys office announced that it would pursue prosecution of Julia Eggler as an adult. 25:42 [SPEAKER_01]: A private county grand jury returned in a diamond on two counts of first degree pre-meditated murder. 25:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Under 4 to 1, an under a ruling from the United States Supreme Court, Julia is not eligible for the death penalty, because of her age at the time of the crime. 25:57 [SPEAKER_01]: She was transferred from the juvenile detention center to the Bervard County jail, where she waits further preceding. 26:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And so yes, the case remains active. 26:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Julia Grace Aglar is in custody. 26:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The courts will continue to weigh her actions, her age, her statements, her motive, her staging, her confession. 26:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Whenever the outcome, two people are not coming back. 26:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The house on Benchel Road will keep standing. 26:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The palm trees will keep leaning. 26:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Interstate 95 still homes in the distance. 26:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Life on that street will move forward. 26:27 [SPEAKER_01]: But the address is marked now. 26:29 [SPEAKER_01]: For anyone who knows the story. 26:31 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just another home. 26:32 [SPEAKER_01]: It's the place where a teenager said, welcome home. 26:36 [SPEAKER_01]: And then erase two people from the rest of the world. 26:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Kelly McCollum was 38 years old. 26:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Matthew Scheinrock was 22 years old. 26:45 [SPEAKER_01]: the name of the person who took their wives can come second. 26:48 [SPEAKER_01]: That is how it should always be on a show like this one. 26:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening, and keep the fire burning.
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