If the reports are true that his story does not match up with the GPS data in terms of where he was, is that enough probable cause for an arrest?

I think it's enough probable cause for arrest.

I don't think they have enough yet to build a case beyond a reasonable doubt.

There's obviously, you know, there's differences between those two things.

I think in this case, they likely have probable cause.

What I'd want to know is, do the police or the prosecutors have any information that is inconsistent with his guilt? That's important because that's something that is not usually given out publicly.

And I would want, as a prosecutor, before I signed off on a warrant for an arrest, I'd want to know that.

If they come up with nothing, is that a big problem in terms of prosecution?

Do they need to find the body?

So what I would say is I have spent the last 20 years hopefully educating police and prosecutors on how to bring no body murder cases to trial.

That said, it is always, always better to have a body, without a doubt, because even, you know, if you get remains, it tells you this person left these remains here.

These remains are from this long ago, which is less of an issue here, because we know the lapse of time is four months, but you may be abo- able to tell how long ago was the body deposited here.

Was it deposited four months ago, or was it deposited two months ago? So there is so much in, on top of how did she die? Did she die of natural causes because of her medical issues? And I don't mean that she walked away and died.

I mean someone kidnapped her and then all of a sudden she passed away, and it's like, oof, okay, this happened.

Um, still a crime.

[laughs]

What do you f- I mean, they, they must have some probable cause or something, right, to, to actually take his boat from him to search and just be holding it? Like, what, what, what had to happen for them to be able to do that?

Well, I think, and i- what I'm gonna say is only based on sort of what I've read publicly and what I've been told.

I haven't spoken to the police, but it seems to me the probable cause in this case is, you know, by his own story, they're coming from, um ...

They're, they're coming from land in a dinghy back to their boat, which is significantly larger than this eight-foot dinghy, and she falls overboard.

That's the story that he's told publicly, but what we also know is both his GPS and his onboard ship navigation, which I think is called AIS, both of those things don't match the story that he told.

The GPS doesn't seem to match where he told, um, the police or the Bohemian authorities where he was, and the AIS was actually turned off from the night of the f- April 4th all the way to the morning of April 5th.

So those things right there, in my mind, if I was a prosecutor on the case and someone presented that to me, I'd say, "Well, that's enough probable cause to say let's go get this boat and see whether anything actually happened on the boat, not on the dinghy." Because if you're gonna have some ...

But if they come up with nothing, is that a big problem in terms of a prosecution?

[laughs]

I, I... to this day, it's not an Excel chart, it's a Word table.

And started digging into more and more of the cases, but at the time I was still with the Department of Justice at the US Attorney's office, so I couldn't use my own name 'cause I didn't wanna go through the approval process.

So I came up with the no body guy, started posting as that anonymously, and then when I left the department, I went into private practice for a few years before I went to my current job.

And I kinda came out of the open at that point and started listing cases, blogging about them, and started getting an enormous number of calls, both from reporters who were interested in the cases, but also from police and prosecutors who wanted to talk about, well, how do you solve these cases? And because I had started to keep track of them in sort of a more methodical way, ultimately I wrote a book.

The first edition came out in 2014, and it was both a combination of these are the investigative tips I think you can use to solve these cases and to prosecute them, and then the back two-thirds of the book was a case summary of every single case I could find because I wanted detectives to be able to go look at either cases from their state, because the law varies from state to state, as you know, and be able to say, "Oh, yeah, my state has made these cases." And then I tried to categorize the cases by what I call the quantum of evidence.

Like, what evidence did the police and prosecutors have in this case that led to ultimately, you know, conviction, some acquittals? Because I felt like that would be helpful.

And so now this is kind of going away from what I know and beyond my area of expertise, but when you take a case like this into court, and I, I know, I'm s- I'm sure every case is slightly different, but is there a way that it should be presented to a jury? Is there, you know, start with this and tell the story in this format that it, you think is the best way to get the jury to understand this case not having a body?