When the family of a beloved high school teacher is brutally killed, investigators race to make sense of a chaotic crime scene that defies simple explanation. They find themselves asking: was the whole thing staged? And if so, who staged it and why?We highly recommend listening to season 2 Anne Roderique-Jones’ podcast, Ozarks True Crime. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts! Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-the-feeney-family/Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit crimejunkie.app/library/ to view the current membership options and policies.The Crime Junkie Merch Store is NOW OPEN! Shop the exclusive Life Rule #10 Tour collection before it’s gone for good! Don’t miss your chance - visit the store now! Don’t miss out on all things Crime Junkie!Instagram: @crimejunkiepodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @CrimeJunkiePod | @audiochuckTikTok: @crimejunkiepodcastFacebook: /CrimeJunkiePodcast | /audiochuckllcCrime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. Instagram: @ashleyflowers | @britprawatTwitter: @Ash_Flowers | @britprawatTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: What happened to the Feeney family?
Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And back by popular demand, we have Chuck in the studio today for our YouTube audience, who apparently he's their favorite. Of course. It's a good thing he can't talk or we'd be out of a job. But the story I have for you today is one...
That honestly has me twisted up in knots because like one minute it's like fetch me a pitchfork and like rally the troops. This guy needs to be buried under the courthouse. But then like the very next minute, I'm like, oh, my God, maybe he's a victim, too. And then I feel bad for ever thinking such a thing. So pitchforks or no pitchforks, that will be for crime junkies to decide.
This is the story of the Feeney family. So when John Feeney gets back to his room at Tanterra Resort around 9 a.m. on the morning of Monday, February 27th, 1995, he sees that he missed a call from the high school where he teaches science in Springfield, Missouri. Now, he's been up here at this Lake of the Ozarks resort for a teacher's conference since 2009. Saturday.
Wait, can we, as millennials, just real quick acknowledge that this is a teacher named Mr. Feeney? Oh, my, like, Boy Meets World heart? Yeah.
Honestly, I didn't think about that the whole time I was working on this story. It's all I can think about. I had to say something. Mr. Feeney. Not that Mr. Feeney. Got it. Anyways, the school knows where he's at and why, so it's strange that they're calling.
So immediate bad vibes that just get worse when he calls them back and finds out that they called because they had gotten a call that morning from a medical center where his wife Cheryl works as an RN. She's the team lead for the gynecological surgical division, which is like an important role, but she just hadn't shown up for work that day.
So by the time John's on the phone, people had already called over to the kid's babysitter, but they apparently never got dropped off there. And no matter how many times or who called the Feeney house, no one has picked up there either. John is rattled by this because he hadn't talked to Cheryl since Saturday night.
Like he had called a few times on Sunday, even left a couple of messages when he couldn't get through, mostly like, Chalking that up to the craziness of like taking care of their six-year-old son Tyler, their 18-month-old daughter Jennifer, like she's doing this on her own. But now he's not so sure that something isn't wrong.
So he hangs up, calls the Greene County Sheriff's Office asking them to perform a welfare check. What John doesn't know is that he's not the only person raising the alarm. Around the same time that he calls, the sheriff's office is also fielding a call from a woman named Teresa.
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Chapter 2: What were the initial signs of a crime at the Feeney home?
And that hasn't been like that. No. And even more concerning was the fact that the door was unlocked. So fearing something was wrong, she let herself in only to find that the house had been totally ransacked. But like in the weirdest way imaginable. So like example, on the first floor where she's at, the Feeney's kitchen has this door that leads into the attached garage.
Well, that door was like wide open. So she could see Cheryl's car in the garage and the car hood was popped and there was all this like random stuff piled on top of it, including like a TV. So stuff doesn't just feel taken like run of the mill burglary. It also feels moved. I mean, it's weird, like full body chills weird. So she's not going to snoop around. She knows that police are in route.
So she's just going to like wait for them. Now, season two of the podcast, Ozark's True Crime, is about this case. And Teresa actually tells journalist Ann Roderick-Jones that it takes like 20 minutes for a solo cop to show up. Now, FYI, some reporting indicates that John's mom got there around the same time, but it's a little bit confusing because Teresa doesn't mention her at all.
But either way, Teresa gives the officer a quick rundown and then follows him in, pointing out all the alarming things that she had noticed before. Items that aren't where they should be or are where they shouldn't be. Drawers and cabinets that have been left wide open. I mean, Cheryl's purse is on the kitchen table looking rifled through.
And then in the living room, I didn't mention this, but there are shoe prints everywhere. All over the carpet, seemingly like made from some kind of light colored liquid. So this cop, what he does is he pulls out his radio. He knows that he's going to need some backup. Like this is as weird as she thinks it is. And Teresa kind of hangs back a little while this officer heads to the primary bedroom.
And when he turns on the bedroom light, she asks him a question, but he is just like staring straight forward in stunned shock. Doesn't even hear her, so she has to repeat herself. She's dead, isn't she? And the best answer that this guy can muster is look and see. Not his finest moment, no question, but part of me feels sorry for the guy because what he sees is horrific.
There's a woman, presumably Cheryl, lying face down on the bed and her head and neck are just covered in wounds. Her face is aimed away from the door, kind of like almost hidden by her hair in a way that looks unnatural, maybe intentional because to Teresa she looks posed.
And then it gets worse because in the next bedroom is a little boy laying in the bed on his back with a pillow covering his face and blood visible around him. And then in the third bedroom, there is a toddler in a crib like curled up tight, her face buried in the mattress and a cord wrapped tight around her neck. So within minutes, the house is crawling with officers from the sheriff's office.
I mean, considering the magnitude of this crime, a multi-agency task force called the South Central Missouri Major Case Squad steps in. But it's up to the sheriff's office to preserve the crime scene until they can get up to speed. And to do that, the Major Case Squad investigators converge at the Missouri State Highway Patrol outpost.
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Chapter 3: What were the autopsy findings of the victims?
And Rita says at this point, this like smug smile takes over John's face and he looks her dead in the eye and says, quote, Well, you know, I once had a very wise person tell me that the best way to stay out of prison is to never talk to the police.
I can't say he's wrong. Again, always get a lawyer.
But woof. Yeah. In that moment, Rita says any doubt that she had about his guilt just evaporates. And she is hit with the realization that John Maywell had been plotting to kill his family even back when she was in his night class. And he had all those questions about the case that she was investigating.
What?
Yeah. And like so many people have issue with this because they're like, this is where your entire family, in all three bedrooms, like your family was taken out. There's signs of this everywhere. And sure, it gets cleaned up or whatever. But like, you know, he said that that's just where he had the memories of his family.
It's like where he remembers the good times and that's what he's choosing to remember. I don't think I could... I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I couldn't sleep at night there. But like also could you sleep at night if you were the one who did it? I mean, again, you have to be a true monster to have to. I don't know. It's just like it's something that everyone takes issue with.
But he says like the other thing I'll say is like, again, they weren't like in debt or anything, but like I don't know their financial situation. I don't know if he could. Yeah, like just getting another house or like living in a hotel. Like that's not a financial option for like most of the world.
Right.
So there's that. But while he moves back in and everyone's looking at him, like investigators are losing it because they feel like the truth is right in front of them. They just can't prove it. Again, they still don't even have a motive. Right. They can't go to a jury with no what and how and no why.
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Chapter 4: What evidence suggested staging in the crime scene?
You can count them on one hand. Like the reddish brown hair, there was like, I think there's one of them on the nightgown. There was like a few of the gray ones. So barely any. Okay. Now, they do end up getting a hit with the semen on the bedspread. That belongs to John. It's his bed. His semen, his bed. Yeah, it certainly doesn't prove anything.
Investigators, though, would tell you context is everything because investigators say that they end up learning Cheryl had a habit of washing the comforter on Saturdays. So if she was killed Saturday night, they allege that this puts him in the house when he says he wasn't. Does it, though?
If he was home Saturday and all of this could have happened after she washed the comforter, but before he left, like that doesn't it doesn't feel definitive to me.
It's well, them being like intimate or anything like that's never part of his story.
And do we know for sure she even washed the comforter that week, though? Like she's running errands. She has a sick kid. Her husband's going out of town for a conference. Like I could see that being something that doesn't happen this week.
I agree. We don't know. There's nobody that I've seen that's been able to confirm like she for sure washed it that day. No.
And like another thing I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is the motive. Like, does one actually exist?
I know.
Murdering your wife and kids doesn't feel like a sexually motivated crime. So where does that play into this theory?
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Chapter 5: Why was John Feeney considered a person of interest?
Like, it does not make sense. But I think the details matter less because they think they've got their guy. And... You know, this gets like I think this feeling gets bolstered a little bit when investigators start realizing that John Feeney, the teacher, dad, husband, may be more of a mask than an identity. Because he is a man with a lot of needs surrounding sex and female attention.
Almost like to a compulsive degree and not always within his marriage, it turns out. Here we go. Yes.
OK, I thought it was weird that he was driving around going dinner with another woman solo while he's out of town and his wife and kids are back at home. Dude, I was like, I don't know, maybe it's me. I know. That's kind of weird, right?
I thought so, too. And I was like, yes, I thought so, too. Actually, believe it or not, though, Pam tells investigators like that dinner thing wasn't a date. And, like, again, remember this whole time, John has been adamant to investigators that he was faithful to Cheryl. Which, of course, is a big fat lie.
Because date or no date, this time, like this night, it turns out Pam and John definitely had an affair. Like, she eventually admits to that. But she said it was very brief, happened like three or four times. They ended things the prior November. And... When they were doing this, like their rendezvous were always at, you guessed it, teachers' conferences.
And interestingly, Pam makes sure to clarify that it hadn't even involved sex sex, just what she calls like intimate relations, which like, I don't know, it sounds the same to me. Like, it sounds like when like super conservative people are like, well, it didn't go in there. And I'm like, my friends, like, a hole is a hole. Like, Jesus made our bodies. A hole is a hole. That's how I feel.
Truly, truly. Anyways, so... It's not just Pam that they find. Another one of the affairs that they find out about was with this woman who claims that John used, quote, unquote, mind control on her, which is like, what? Your guess is as good as mine. I don't know if she means literally, figuratively, or what.
Like, there's no one else who's saying that John, like, does witchcraft or anything wild like that. Like, so... I don't know. But she goes into detail about some of their encounters, including an especially racy one that took place on a boat involving John and her and two other men. And this was also at a teacher's conference? No, no, no, no.
So it seems like teacher's conferences are his, like, hunting grounds. But what happens at teacher's conferences... does not always stay at teachers conferences. So he takes that stuff right on home with him and like continues to act in some pretty objectionable ways.
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Chapter 6: What clues pointed to someone familiar with the family?
And we know this because the podcaster and Roderick Jones, she says her own aunt was a teacher in the area around this time. And she remembers it. So maybe that's the reason that the coverage got up at that time. Like a lot of teachers were doing the same thing.
But all of this just has me even more upside down on what to think about this one. There is like a lot of not great stuff here, but like nothing is flashing lights guilty to me. On the other hand, nothing is like totally innocent either. I truly don't know where I stand.
It's all circumstantial, right? Which is why it is a huge deal when months into the investigation, investigators find a witness. or maybe settle on a witness. It's this gas station worker from near Springfield who says that he remembers John stopping to get gas in the wee hours of that Sunday morning after the murders.
And this guy's actually been on investigators' radar for a while, but his original stories to police weren't super helpful timing-wise because they placed John in Springfield at a time that he couldn't have been there, which investigators knew because of the McDonald's receipt that they found in his car. But then the worker's time changed by like a good three or four hours.
And like presto change-o, we've got ourselves an eyewitness who's going to be like the star of the show. Cool, cool, cool. So he's kind of useless.
A halfway decent defense attorney will rip his story to shreds.
They're willing to take the chance because in January of 1996, they put this case before a grand jury, which John pleaded the fifth before, FYI. And by April, the grand jury has returned three indictments for first-degree murder. So while there might be some holes to fill in their story and their theory and their case, clearly these grand jurors see what the police see.
And the police are thinking that they're going to have time to, like, shore things up before the trial. They'll, like, you know, just take their time, push it out, maybe even years. Mm-hmm. Problem is, we have this little thing called a right to a speedy trial. And John's lawyers take full advantage. You want to charge him? Let's go and let's go now.
So all of a sudden, the prosecution finds itself scrambling. And it sure doesn't help that the one eyewitness they have doesn't just have a questionable story that's going to leave the jury wondering... Was it right the first time or the second time? The defense is not playing those games. They get their hands on the gas station attendant's time cards.
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