Call Me Shelly (7): A Missing Mother’s Son

Okay.

At the top of this episode, I mentioned to you that Kevin Woodward more or less stormed out of an interview with Bismarck PD in 2019.

I also said that I would have done the same thing.

We'll get back to Jayden in a minute, but I wanna dive into this now as it all relates to what Jayden just said.

And what did Jayden just say? He said that law enforcement told him that his father and grandfather reported his mother missing later the same day she dropped off Jayden and vanished.

The reason investigators focused on this, and curiously they still focus on it to this day, is that it is felt that to report Michelle Shelly Julson as missing just hours after she was expected home would be far too early because Shelly was routinely late.

Reporting her early like this would be suspicious, they feel.

And in this case, I have to agree.

Knowing what we've learned about Shelly, it would be a bit early, and perhaps it would be suspicious to report her missing just six hours after she was expected to return.

But here's the thing: It's not true.

They didn't report her missing six hours after she was expected back.

They reported her missing the next day, in fact, the next evening, some 33 hours after she dropped off Jayden at his paternal grandparents.

That is according to all the initial investigative work done by Detective Walls, Cliff Emmert, Julie Thompson, Lieutenant Hinley, Officer Shibly, and others, all documented in the original police reports, in newspaper articles, and even in the original missing persons report itself.

It's all laid out clearly in Shelly's file.

According to the original police reporting, Shelly dropped off Jayden on Tuesday, August 2nd at 12:30 PM.

Then Kevin and his father reported her missing on Wednesday, August 3rd at about 9 PM in the evening.

Last seen Tuesday, reported missing Wednesday.

Not six hours, 33 hours later.

But that's not what investigators told Jayden in recent years.

No, they basically said something along the lines of, "Hey, your dad reported your mom missing just hours after she was expected home.

That's suspicious." And that's what investigators threw in front of Kevin Woodward's face during a long interview in 2019 just before he stormed out in frustration.

This also documented in Shelly's cold case file.

Now granted, in that 2019 interview, there were many other things they wanted to talk to Kevin about first.

And in that interview, before they bring this up, Kevin acknowledges, in fact, he tells them his memory is very fuzzy.

They're talking about events that happened some 27 years earlier.