On November 21, 2014, 33 year old Jessica Padgett left her job as a daycare assistant and drove to her mom and stepdad’s home to use their fax machine. She never returned to work. Her coworkers became alarmed because she never missed work and her youngest child was there at the daycare, so they called her husband Mica. All phone calls went straight to her voicemail. He called her mom who was in Florida on business. She booked a flight home immediately. Stepdad Greg Graf claimed she never came by to use the fax, so Mica calls the police and reports her missing.
Police ping her phone and put out a BOLO on her white Subaru station wagon. They find her car unlocked with her phone inside at a mini mall parking lot. Also inside are her purse, keys, and credit cards.
Police scour the neighborhood for CCTV footage and find a store across the street that has cameras pointing at that lot. At 1:13 pm her car is parked. One person appears and walks down the alley. Police call in the state Police when it becomes clear this is an abduction.
Police question Graf who calls Mica a loser and claims the fax machine is broken. Mica has an ironclad alibi. He was at work with several coworkers. And his truck is in the shop, so he had a ride to work early that morning.
Police return to the CCTV footage along the route she would have taken from the daycare to her mom and stepdad’s house. At 12:50 pm Jess leaves work. At 12:56 pm she is seen on Exxon CCTV as she drives thru the Exxon parking lot, goes left, and then an immediate right like she couldn’t wait for the red light. This is very unlike Jess who is a cautious driver as a mother of three young children. Police realize this is not Jess driving the car. It’s her killer.
Police closely view the CCTV footage of the car being parked. This is a man, 6’2″ tall. Jessica is only 5’2″. Then the driver pushes the seat forward so no one would think someone taller drove and parked the car. And he walks down the alley. A few minutes later, Graf’s truck comes down the street. He has a distinctive stripe along the bottom of his pickup.
Greg Graf is brought in for questioning. He claims from 1:00 to 3:00 pm he was handing out paychecks to his employees. Claims he was going to get his pickup fixed in shop, but changed his mind and went to get his pickup. Stopped at Exxon for food. He claims his neighbor gave him a lift to get his pickup. His neighbor denies this. And the Exxon CCTV shows that Graf never went there for food. That’s two more lies.
Police search Graf’s house. The fax machine is not broken and shows that Jess sent a fax at 1:04 pm. There’s a tissue with blood on it in the basement garbage.
They arrest Greg Graf and he confesses. He’s a necrophiliac, someone who enjoys sex with dead bodies. He’s been fantasizing about killing Jessica and raping her dead body for years. He finally acted on that impulse. While she faxed her document, he shot her in the back of the head. He took her car to the mini mall parking lot and parked it. Then he came home in his own pickup. He handed out employee paychecks for the next 2 hours the locked the doors and videotaped himself raping Jess’s body for hours. Then he dumped her body in a ravine.
Greg Graf, 55 yo, is sentenced to life without parole. The jury took only 6 minutes to deliberate.
Bibliography
See No Evil, S3E3: Vanished at Noon, air date: Feb 28, 2017.
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