This mystery is deepening by the minute. Every day there’s a lack of information from police, and yet the true crime community keeps uncovering new details that make the whole thing even stranger.

It’s been nine days since the murders—I’m recording this on January 8th—and now we’ve learned about *another* 911 call.

This one wasn’t from the Teepe home. We’ve already talked about multiple 911 calls to and from that house on the morning their bodies were discovered.

But this new call came from *down the street*, eleven days before the murders, right in the middle of the night, and around the same time frame when Spencer and Monnique were ultimately killed.

Someone was smashing and banging on a neighbor’s front door at 2:30 a.m., terrifying them enough to call 911.

I’ll get into that. But there’s something else that’s been weighing heavily on me: the two little kids left behind in that house with their murdered parents.

 

One of those children is about a year old. A child that age isn’t going to provide many investigative clues—language is limited, comprehension is minimal.

But the four‑year‑old? That child *could* help. I know it might sound surprising, but there is such a thing as forensic interviewing for very young children.

It’s a unique discipline. It’s highly specialized. And properly conducted forensic interviews with kids have helped secure convictions in past cases.

You’re going to see an example of that tonight. Get your Kleenex—it will likely make you cry.

Years ago, I covered a heartbreaking case where a six‑year‑old boy witnessed his sister’s death and, at age seven, testified against his own mother in court.

 

Forensic interviews of children focus on what they saw, what they remember, and how reliably they can communicate it.

Experts have to consider: Do they know the difference between truth and a lie? How suggestible are they? Have adults influenced what they say?

All of this is crucial in the Teepe case, especially with that four‑year‑old. I am fascinated—and frankly, deeply concerned—about what might be happening with that child right now.

According to their uncle, the kids are in the care of family members.

He himself watched them for a while, and relatives are now their legal guardians. That means they control access to the children.

 

If the guardians don’t want police to interview the children, then police *don’t* get to interview the children.

If, however, they do consent—particularly for the four‑year‑old—that’s when the true specialists need to step in.

This is not something an average detective should handle. In fact, we know from past cases that poorly conducted interviews can do immense damage.

For many years, investigators didn’t fully appreciate how crucial child psychology is to forensic interviewing.

Children want to please adults. They will say what they think you want to hear.

They are also extremely suggestible—ask a leading question, and they will often “go with it,” whether it’s true or not.

 

Because of that, child forensics has become a refined craft.

To explore this properly, I’ll be speaking with someone who worked with Jaycee Dugard. If you’re in the true crime world, you know her story.

Jaycee was abducted on her way to a school bus stop at age 11 and spent 18 years in captivity, during which she was repeatedly raped and gave birth to two children.

My guest is the psychologist who worked with Jaycee, her family, and her kids.

You’ll hear from her about how experts carefully and ethically interview small children to extract accurate information without further traumatizing them.

 

In addition to that, I’m going to walk you through the Teepe neighborhood.

Just like in the Idaho student murders, understanding the geography of the crime scene can be critical.

In the Idaho case, we examined how Bryan Kohberger may have stalked the victims—possibly from the woods behind the house and by circling in his car.

Here in Columbus, I’ll give you a feel for the Teepe home on North Fourth Street: the front, the back, the alley, and how someone could approach that house.

They lived just off the corner of 8th Avenue and North Fourth—one house in from the intersection.

We’re going to drive that back alley together so you can see how a killer might have accessed the residence.

 

I’m also going to show you what I call the “camera tour.”

Because, as it turns out, there are cameras *everywhere*.

One neighboring house is practically covered in them—like a case of camera measles.

There are devices on every side of that house, plus what looks like a police camera mounted on a utility pole near the corner.

If these cameras were functioning, they could have captured crucial imagery: a suspect, a vehicle, someone entering or leaving the alley.

Maybe police already have that footage and are simply not releasing it. Maybe they don’t. We don’t know.

 

There is also something else that’s been bothering me, and I’m guessing it may bother you too.

In one of the 911 calls, a witness says, “Oh my God, I see a body. It’s Spencer. He’s off the bed. There’s blood everywhere.”

But police have said the bodies were found on the *second floor*.

If you look at the house, it’s not exactly easy to see in those second‑story windows from ground level.

So how did this caller see what he claims to have seen?

I’m going to walk you around the house virtually: show you the basement windows, the front elevation, and where someone might have physically positioned themselves to peer inside.

 

It is possible that the caller climbed or boosted himself to see through a second‑floor window—but that’s not very plausible, especially while dialing 911 and staying on the line.

It’s also possible that the police description of the bodies’ location wasn’t entirely precise, or that the caller stepped inside the house briefly, even if he didn’t explicitly say so.

He tells dispatch he “can’t get closer” to see more detail, which sounds like he’s at some distance from the body—but we don’t know if that distance is across a room or across a yard.

We’ll dig into all of that. There is a lot to unpack, and I will break it down piece by piece.

But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

 

We’re talking about a double murder on what was, until recently, a quiet block in Columbus, Ohio.

The Teepe home at 1411 North Fourth Street was part of a row of relatively new townhomes.

Spencer and Monnique lived there with their two small children.

In the early morning hours of December 30th, both parents were shot to death—reportedly in or near their bedroom.

Their children and the family’s golden doodle were left unharmed.

 

Yes, you heard that right—a golden doodle.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho, also had a golden doodle present when four students were murdered there.

The parallels are chilling, even if purely coincidental.

The Columbus case has many hallmarks of a classic “whodunnit.”

There were no clear signs of forced entry. No murder weapon was found at the scene.

That fact alone effectively rules out a murder‑suicide scenario between the spouses.

 

If you watched or listened to my previous episode on this case, you’ll remember the disturbing 911 call from eight months earlier.

That call pinged at 1411 North Fourth Street—the same address that would later become the double‑murder scene.

A woman, who sounded intoxicated and distraught, called 911 in the middle of the night, then panicked and hung up.

As per protocol, dispatch called back.

Here’s how that conversation went:

> “Hi, this is 911. We just got a hang‑up call. Is everything okay?”
> “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m okay.”
> “Are you sure? It sounds like you’re crying. Do you need police or paramedics?”
> “No, I’m okay. I promise. I’m just emotional. I don’t need anything.”

 

When the dispatcher asked why she had called 911 in the first place, the woman said she had “got into it” with her man.

She insisted nothing physical had happened and that they were just arguing.

The dispatcher canceled the police response.

We still do not know who that woman was, officially.

But one family member says he knows who it *wasn’t*: it was not Monnique.

He says the voice doesn’t match, nor does the phrase “I got into it with my man”—that’s not how she talked, he says.

 

Initially, this same relative told us the family had been hosting a party that night, and that the caller was likely a partygoer.

But he’s since walked that back, saying he checked his dates and realized they weren’t hosting a party that night after all.

So now we’re left with even more questions.

Who was that woman? Why was she at 1411 North Fourth Street in the middle of the night?

And does that call have anything at all to do with what happened months later?

We simply don’t know.

 

Fast forward to the morning of December 30th, the day the bodies were discovered.

What you hear next is a cascade of 911 calls, beginning when Spencer didn’t show up for work at his dental practice.

His boss—who was on vacation in Florida at the time—called 911, alarmed that Spencer had failed to arrive and wasn’t answering his phone.

Spencer was known as incredibly reliable. His boss told dispatchers this was entirely out of character.

He also mentioned that Spencer ran the office and that no one had been able to reach his wife or anyone in the household.

 

Just minutes after that call, another 911 call came in from a friend who had driven over to the Teepe home to check on them in person.

By then, according to police, officers had already made a welfare check—but at the wrong address.

They had gone to a different house on a parallel street, knocked, looked through a window, and seeing nothing unusual, left.

The friend, unaware of this mistake, arrived at the real Teepe residence.

He told 911 he could hear the children inside and thought one of them was yelling, but he couldn’t get into the house.

 

Dispatch confirmed that an officer had “already been out there,” though, again, that turned out not to be accurate for the Teepe address.

They promised to send police back out.

Shortly thereafter, more calls came in—including one from another person connected to Spencer’s workplace, reiterating that he hadn’t shown up and that staff could hear someone inside.

Then came the call from the friend who said he could see a body.

He told dispatch, “There’s a body inside. Our friend wasn’t answering his phone. We came to do a welfare check. He appears dead.”

 

He described seeing Spencer lying next to the bed, “off the bed,” with blood visible around him.

He said he couldn’t get closer, couldn’t see more, and that he couldn’t bear to look.

If Spencer and Monnique were indeed found in an upstairs bedroom, as police later stated, this raises obvious questions about how the caller saw what he described.

Was he inside the house but staying at the doorway of the bedroom?

Was he outside, peeking through a ground‑level or basement window into a room located beneath the bedroom?

Or did police miscommunicate or oversimplify the phrase “second floor” when describing where the bodies were?

 

Without floor plans and exact body locations, we’re left to speculate.

What seems clear is that by the time the last 911 caller got through, the children were awake and crying.

You can hear them in the background.

It’s gut‑wrenching when you realize they were in the house during the shootings and remained there, alone, until adults arrived hours later.

So how did the killer get in?

That brings us back to the physical layout of the property and the alley behind it.

 

The Teepe home faces North Fourth Street, but their garage is detached and accessed from an alley running behind the row of townhomes.

If a killer wanted to avoid being seen on the main street—or by a front‑facing doorbell camera—the alley would be the logical approach.

From there, they could enter through the garage, a back door, or possibly a basement window.

We’ve seen photos of a basement‑level window at the rear of the house that appears to belong to a downstairs bedroom.

Police, however, have said the bodies were found on the second floor, not in that lower room.

 

Which brings us back to that other 911 call, the one from December 19th.

Eleven days before the murders, a nearby neighbor phoned 911 around 2:31 a.m.—right in the time range when Spencer and Monnique would later be killed.

She told dispatch someone was banging and smashing violently on her front door and wouldn’t leave.

According to dispatch logs, the “problem” left around 2:44 a.m.

That means she endured roughly 13 minutes of sheer terror, alone in her home with someone trying aggressively to get in.

Her address is reported to be just a three‑minute walk away on the same street.

 

No one in authority has publicly linked that incident to the Teepe murder case, and it may be a total coincidence.

Still, the timing and proximity are unnerving.

Meanwhile, police have stayed largely silent for nine days.

They’ve released a short, grainy surveillance clip of a person of interest walking in the alley behind the Teepe home, but they haven’t identified a suspect publicly.

They also haven’t said whether the person in that video has come forward—or been ruled out.

It’s reminiscent of the early days of the Idaho case, when police urged calm and suggested the community wasn’t at risk, despite a brutal quadruple homicide.

 

We all remember how that turned out.

For weeks, the suspect, Bryan Kohberger, moved freely in the community, shopping at stores and going about his life, while investigators quietly built a case.

So in Columbus, we’re left wondering:

Is this situation similar? Are police working solid leads behind the scenes while deliberately limiting what they share publicly?

Or are they still in the dark, hoping the public and surveillance footage can fill in the blanks?

We know there were no signs of obvious forced entry.

We know no murder weapon was found at the scene.

We know 9mm shell casings were recovered.

 

That alone can tell investigators quite a bit.

Shell casings can provide information about the type of weapon, potential ballistic markings, and, if they’re lucky, even touch DNA.

Earlier on my NewsNation show, I spoke with retired FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer about these evidence points.

She has used open‑source tools like Google Trends in other cases, including the Kohberger investigation, to see who or what people were searching for online before suspects were publicly named.

In this case, she noticed an unusual spike in Google searches related to “1411 North 4th Street” *before* the murders, including a peak on December 5th.

 

She also found an unusually high volume of searches for “Dr. Tep” on November 30th.

Coffindaffer’s point is that law enforcement can and should be looking at who was making those searches.

If someone was planning this crime—or helping to plan it—they might have Googled the address, the victim, or related topics extensively beforehand.

She emphasizes that spikes before known events can sometimes be more revealing than spikes afterward.

We also discussed that December 19th 911 call and whether it might suggest a pattern of late‑night prowling or attempted break‑ins on that block.

Her professional opinion: it’s likely being examined, but may not be directly related.

 

The neighborhood itself is in a transitional area.

There’s revitalization and an influx of young professionals, but it’s also close to some higher‑crime zones, with gang and drug activity.

That raises the question of whether this could have been a mistaken identity or wrong‑house scenario—someone targeting a perceived rival and hitting the wrong address.

Coffindaffer finds that unlikely.

In her experience, gang‑related hits are typically loud, chaotic, and involve multiple shooters or “spray‑and‑pray” tactics.

The apparent precision and limited number of shots here—combined with no obvious ransacking—suggest something more personal and targeted.

 

There’s also the dog.

A golden doodle, known to bark at strangers, reportedly didn’t alert neighbors with frantic barking that night.

That could indicate the killer was someone familiar to the dog.

Someone who belonged in that space, at least in the animal’s mind.

And then there are those 9mm casings.

If a sophisticated professional had carried out the hit, they might have collected their casings to avoid leaving behind ballistics evidence.

The fact that casings were left behind suggests haste—or that the shooter, while comfortable with firearms, wasn’t thinking at a professional hit‑man level.

 

Coffindaffer believes all these factors point toward someone the victims knew, someone familiar with the house and its layout.

She also notes the likely number of people who knew the code to the keyless entry, or had access via the many parties and gatherings hosted at the house.

That brings us back to the children.

Four years old is young, but not *too* young to remember sounds, voices, or sequences of events.

If police—and the guardians—allow for a forensic interview, that child might be able to say whether someone came into the home quietly, whether there was shouting, or whether a familiar voice was present.

All of that has to be approached with extreme care.

 

On my show, I spoke with psychologist Dr. Rebecca Bailey, who has extensive experience in childhood trauma and has worked with Jaycee Dugard and her children.

She explained that forensic interviews with young children follow strict protocols designed to avoid retraumatization and contamination of memory.

They’re conducted by specially trained professionals, not regular detectives or well‑meaning relatives.

Interviewers stick to non‑leading questions, avoid multiple repeated sessions if possible, and create child‑friendly environments away from intimidating settings like police stations.

They look for child‑centered language—concrete, age‑appropriate words—and consistency over time, with minimal “fantastical” elaboration.

 

They also remain alert to “loyalty binds.”

If the child believes the person responsible is someone they love—a parent, relative, or trusted adult—they may resist sharing the truth or shut down mid‑statement.

We saw a version of that in the Amanda Lewis case, where her son AJ testified that he saw his mother drown his sister as punishment.

His testimony was powerful, but his suggestibility and the influence of various adults in his life were hotly debated.

In the Teepe case, if the four‑year‑old knows or suspects who did this, that child is in an impossible position emotionally.

Which is why any interview must be done with extraordinary care and expertise.

 

After examining the human side, we pivot back to the physical side of the case.

The alley behind the Teepe home is likely critical.

From Fourth Street, you can turn onto 8th Avenue and then into the alley that runs behind the row of townhomes.

If the killer wanted to avoid street traffic, doorbell cams, and prying eyes, this is where they would likely come and go.

Photos from the back show the detached garage, a fenced yard, and the rear façade of the house.

It’s entirely plausible that a killer slipped in via the alley, through the garage, or through a back or basement entry point.

 

A basement‑level window on the back of the house appears to correspond to a downstairs bedroom.

While police say the victims were found upstairs, a killer could have entered there and then moved through the house to the second floor.

There’s also the matter of cameras.

The Teepe home appears to have a Ring‑style doorbell camera at the front.

Their neighbor’s home has multiple cameras on the front, side, and rear—including two devices aimed squarely at the alley and garages.

In addition, local media have reported a city‑owned police camera mounted on a nearby utility pole, only about 150 feet away.

 

If all of those were functioning and recording, there could be a trove of visual data.

We don’t know whether police have collected footage from all those devices—but it would be shocking if they hadn’t.

Then there’s the person of interest in the alley.

Even though the video is grainy, his posture, walk, and clothing might be recognizable to someone: gray pants, black coat, head down, walking alone in the freezing early‑morning hours.

If he is innocent, he still needs to be identified and interviewed.

If he is not, this could be the most important image in the case.

 

So where does that leave us?

In a case like this, possibilities range widely:

– A targeted killing by someone close.
– A crime of passion or jealousy.
– A financial or professional motive.
– A stalker or obsessed acquaintance.
– A random stranger—unlikely, but not impossible.

We’ve seen seemingly “random” strangers before.

Amanda Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher, was murdered by an intruder, Rudy Guede, whose DNA proved he was the killer.

Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped by a man her family barely knew, who had done odd jobs outside their home.

Sometimes the boogeyman is real—and not part of the inner circle at all.

 

In Columbus, for now, we just don’t know.

We do know this: two young parents are dead. Two small children are orphaned. A community is shaken.

Police say little publicly, but that doesn’t mean nothing is happening behind the scenes.

We will be watching this case very closely.

Make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube or to the podcast so you don’t miss a single update as we follow developments in real time.

Thank you so much for watching and listening.

I’m Ashley Banfield—and remember, the truth isn’t just serious. It’s *drop dead* serious.