Bettersten Wade searched for her missing 37-year-old son for nearly six months. Then she found out that the police knew where he was the whole time. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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I had three kids. The Tanya, she was very smart. She was always smart. She was one of my smartest kids.
This is Betterstein Wade.
And Amalia, Amalia was just such a pretty little girl. She just was pretty, and she was just outgoing. And Dexter, he was the same way. Dexter loved to talk to everybody. Dexter just had himself a ball. He always loved talking to older people. He was just a person that loved the older people. Then he loved, like, playing games. You know, they was offering all them games and computers.
Dexter was real smart on the computer. He used to love his teacher. He used to say, I'll let him run my class in the computer because he's just so good at it. He just know everything to do. So he loved the computers.
Betterstein-Wade raised her children in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, where her mother and brother George also lived. And what was life for you like? Tell me a little bit about what was going on in your life.
Well, what was going on in my life, I was sort of trying to, you know, have me a career and trying to have money so we could help with my mom and help my mom do things. And we always tried to help the family as much as we can. So we just stuck together and just tried to make money and tried to make our family be better, try to make the next generation be better. That was our thing always.
Every generation needs to be better than... The first generation, the next generation, every generation we had, we tried to make them better.
For a while, Betterstein worked as an aluminum welder. Then she says she got a job doing security. She worked night shifts, which meant she didn't get to see her kids as often. She remembers that as her son Dexter got older, he and his friends could be hard to track down.
As he got older, you know, up in his teens, 15, 16, you know, he got, you know, with a bunch of little boys, and they started doing things all from home. Then he started staying out from home. And, you know, the parents would be trying to find him about half of the time. I couldn't find him because I didn't, you know, actually know where he would be because he had friends that I didn't know.
And so it was hard, but he always called. He always called and said, Mom, I'm so-and-so-and-so. He always let me know where he were. He never did go off and just not let me know where he were.
After high school, Dexter stayed in Jackson. He and his girlfriend had two daughters, Janelle and Jocelyn. And then, when he was in his mid-20s, Dexter went to prison.
He got mixed up with a little group of young men, and they say he robbed someone. He went on and he served a time, you know, spending six. He spent six years in jail, and he got out, and, you know, he was trying to live as best as he could.
Dexter had married his girlfriend while he was in prison. A few years after he got out, they got divorced, and Dexter moved home with Betterstein. He still saw his daughters often.
Dexter was good as a father. Dexter's kids, when they come there, he just loved to just lay in their bed and talk to them and stuff. And, you know, he was always good to his kids. Anything he had, I didn't care if he didn't get a hotel or nothing, but $10, he was going to give each one of them $5 a piece.
He was released from prison in 2017 at age 31. Betterstein says he wasn't really the same.
Yeah, a prison affected Dixon bad. And I started taking him to mental health. We was trying to get help for him. And they finally got him connected with the mental health and got him to go into mental health. And he struggled for a while. He struggled with that for a while. And... So he had started going, taking his medicine.
The last two years, he had got to the point to where he was not leaving the home. He was just staying at home, being around the house, taking care of the house. And he just wasn't going anywhere.
He was just at home.
One day, Betterstein noticed a window in their house had a crack in the glass. She asked Dexter if he could fix it, and she went to work. When she got home, she saw that Dexter had removed the entire window, leaving a big hole in the side of the house. She says that upset her, and she and Dexter fought about it.
And I said, boy, you better get out there and put my window back in. I said, you done tore my whole window out. So he said, oh, I'm not putting nothing back in because you got an attitude. I said, no, you need to put my window back in. So then a friend guy of his was there, and they came on out the house and went on down the street. And so I said, well, you know, he'll be back in a few.
You know, I went to the store and got him a pack of cigarettes, and I came on back to the house, and I went and got the window. to go back in the window and me and my friend put the window back in. And I didn't think nothing of it. You know, I figured, I said, well, he'll be back. You know, he'll blow off a little steam. He'll be back. And so, you know, that night went by. He didn't call.
I said, oh, it's unusual for Dexter not to call me and tell me where he at.
A couple of days went by.
And then my sister called. My sister said, it ain't like Dexter to go nowhere and nobody heard from him. I said, because normally he'll call me and say, Auntie, let me tell you what your old crazy sister did. Everybody was saying it was unusual for Dexter. So, you know, I waited. I said, well, I'm going to wait. I waited. That Sunday he didn't show up. That Monday he didn't show up.
Nine days went by. Betterstein says at first she didn't want to call the police. Four years earlier, her brother George was beaten by a police officer and later died.
That was my birthday on January 13th in 2019. George, I was waiting on George to come over there because he knew I'm going to come over there for my birthday and me and him sit down and have a few drinks or something like that. But I was waiting on him to get over there. And so next thing I heard, they said the police had him hemmed up.
So the neighbors, from what the neighbors said, the neighbors said George had went to the store And he had come back from the store, said he came back to his house, and he was parked in front of the house around about 6 o'clock.
The police had been talking to people in George's neighborhood because earlier that day, a pastor had been killed at a church nearby. Three officers approached George sitting in his car in his driveway. One of the officers was a man named Anthony Foxx.
Anthony Fox said he saw George make a drug transaction.
Anthony Fox said he told George to get out of the car and that he saw George reach for something between the seat and center console. He said he told George to, quote, stop reaching. George said he was trying to unbuckle his seatbelt. Witnesses said they heard George tell Anthony Fox he was struggling to get out of the car because he was recovering from a stroke. He was 62.
And saying Anthony hit him in the head with a flashlight a couple times on his head. Saying then George was trying to unbuckle the seat. So George had took the left hand and was trying to unbuckle the seat and saying Anthony Fox was starting to give him, get out. get out, get out the car, get out the car, you know, giving him a domain. And he said, hold up.
He said, I'm just trying to, you know, get out the car. I'm trying to unbuckle my seatbelt. He said, Anthony Fox just kept on, you know, and said, finally, I guess when George unbuckled his seatbelt, finally, he just grabbed George and was trying to pull him out the car. And they slammed him down on the ground. And they was kicking him all in his side and his head.
An ambulance was called to the scene. Paramedics bandaged his head. He was given a citation for failing to obey and resisting arrest and was released. That night, Georgia's girlfriend found him unconscious and called an ambulance.
And when I got there, when I got there, they said they was rushing him into surgery to try to let some of the pressure off his brain.
He died two days later, on January 15, 2019. The county coroner ruled George's death a homicide, saying he died from blunt force trauma to the head. The officers involved in his death were initially placed on paid leave, but the Jackson police conducted an internal investigation and cleared all three of wrongdoing.
The mayor of Jackson announced that the district attorney would conduct a separate investigation into George's death. A grand jury was convened, and all three police officers were indicted and charged with second-degree murder. In the end, only one of the officers, Anthony Fox, was convicted. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
But then, in the summer of 2023, the Mississippi State Attorney General started working to overturn the conviction. Bederstein says the whole thing was all terrible for the family. And then, in the midst of it all, her son Dexter went missing. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back.
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Betterstein Wade's family had an active lawsuit against the city of Jackson and the three police officers involved in her brother George's death when her son Dexter went missing. Betterstein's mother didn't want her to call the police.
But I was thinking, like I told my mom, my mom said, you going to call the police and they done killed your— I said, well, Mom, they don't kill everybody. That was my attitude. I said, well, they ain't going to kill everybody. I said, I don't know nothing else to do but to call the police. So I called for a missing person report. I called them. I put in a missing person report.
I gave them all the information to them.
Betterstein sent the Jackson police a photo of Dexter, and they told her they'd put out a civil alert. Weeks went by with no news.
I'd be trying to think of where could you be, boy. I said, what? I put it on Facebook everywhere. Please call me. You don't have to come home if you don't want to come home. Just call me and let me know you all right. I mean, it was just, it was devastating to me.
In one Facebook post, Betterstein wrote, By Father's Day, Dexter was still missing. It had been just over three months. That day, Betterstein posted, Please come home.
I was constantly calling the police. I was constantly calling them. Every time I found out something that maybe led to him, I would call them and tell them about it, call them to check him out. I told them the dude that left the house with Dexter, I told them his name to try to get in touch with him to see did he know what happened to Dexter. They didn't even do that.
I got to the point where my mama told me, my mama said, girl, them folks ain't going to do nothing for you because they done killed George and they ain't thinking about you. And you down here trying to get them convicted and stuff. So them folks ain't thinking about you. I said, well, mama, that's they duty. I said, that's they duty. And I just kept telling her that.
I said, that's they duty to, you know, see what happened to my son. My mama had a dream. My mama came to me one day, she said, Betty, she said, the police done killed Dexter. I said, mama, just because they killed your son don't mean they gonna kill my son. And I left it at that. I drove around. I went up in abandoned houses. I was all up in abandoned houses. I got my friend of mine.
Me and him went all in all the abandoned houses around there in my area. Searched all around there in the weeds. Because I figured, I said, well, they can't take him dead for. Ain't nobody, if somebody kills him, somebody wasn't going to take him dead for.
So at this point, you figured that he was dead?
Yeah, I started in my mind, I started saying, well, and my sister-in-law said, well, Betty, you just must face it. Dexter's not going to be alive when you find him. And then I started trying to get myself prepared for that.
Near the end of the summer, Betterstein got a phone call from the investigator assigned to Dexter's missing person case. But the only news he had was that he was retiring. He'd be passing the case on to someone new.
So this lady called me on August the 14th. She called me. She said, I am taking over Dexter Cave, and I will help you find your son, Ms. Wade. I said, thank you. I said, maybe somebody. I said, since you a woman, you know how I feel for my son. She called back 10 days later. August the 24th, she called me. She said, Ms. Wade, we found your son. I said, where is Dexter?
She said, I sent somebody out there to talk to you.
172 days had passed since Dexter went missing. An officer came to meet her.
He came out there. He said, I'm sorry for your loss. I broke down and started crying. My mama was sitting on the porch. She said, tell me what happened to my grandson. He said a police cruiser hit him on the freeway. He was trying to cross the freeway, and a police cruiser hit him. I said a police cruiser hit him. I said y'all couldn't find out who he were. Y'all couldn't take his handprint.
Y'all didn't do anything.
The officer told Betterstein if she wanted to know more, she should contact the coroner. She called the coroner, asking why no one had told her any of this sooner.
I was going off on the corner. I said, you mean to tell me you had my son down there all that time and y'all couldn't just run him through the system when he'd been at this address 23 years and y'all couldn't find him? He said, hold up, Ms. Wade. Hold up, Ms. Wade. Kept saying, hold up, Ms. Wade. He said, I did not have to search for Dexter.
He said, I knew who Dexter was the night that he was killed.
The investigator from the coroner's office said that he had found a pill bottle in Dexter's pocket, so he had Dexter's name right away. He said he'd also gotten Betterstein's name and information.
He said, I got your name, your address, your phone number, and I gave it to JPD. And I said, you gave it to JPD? He said, yes, ma'am. He said, and I got a record where I called JPD about nine times to ask, have they found Dexter? When I called on March 14th, them people knew who my child, who my child were and where my child was. He was down there in the morgue.
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Betterstein Wade asked where her son Dexter's body was, but no one could tell her.
They say, well, he buried in a cemetery down there by Raymond. I went to every cemetery down there by Raymond. I said, no, he can't be in none of these.
Betterstein decided to get in touch with a reporter named John Shoupy, who works for NBC News. John had interviewed Betterstein for an article about the death of her brother, George.
And after we were done with that story, I said, just keep in touch. Let me know if there's anything else you ever want to talk about. And a month later is when she called me to tell me what had happened to Dexter.
John started looking into it and requested public records like crash and incident reports.
On the night that Dexter left home, within about an hour, he was crossing a nearby highway on foot. and he was hit by a car and killed. That car was a Jackson Police Department vehicle being driven by an off-duty Jackson Police Department officer. And that officer, after striking Dexter, pulled over and reported it.
And so there was immediately a response from the Jackson Police Department's Accident Investigations Unit And because he had died instantly, there was also an immediate response from the Hines County Coroner's Office. And that's where they began to collect basic information about the accident and Dexter.
John says the death was ruled accidental, and that the off-duty police officer was not suspected to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol. And once the coroner got Dexter's body, I mean, would it have been his job or Hines County to notify his family?
These types of procedures differ from place to place. But my understanding about at that point in time when it came to the coroner's office in Hines County and the police department in Jackson is that they kind of shared that responsibility. Although after we started reporting on this, each side started pointing the finger at the other.
First of all, it's one of the main priorities of a coroner's office to identify positively and definitively identify someone who has died. And so that was the first thing that the investigator did, and that's the main part of his job, which was to identify Dexter Wade. He did that because Dexter had a bottle of prescription pills in his pocket, and the coroner's investigator was able to
get a preliminary identification, and then through fingerprints, a definite identification of Dexter. That happened within a couple of days.
Okay, so there is no argument here that, wait a second, you know, we didn't contact Dexter's mother because we didn't know who this person was. They knew that this was a man named Dexter Wade.
That's correct. The coroner's office investigator began steps to try to track down a next of kin for Dexter. And for him, that meant, because of those prescription pills, contacting the hospital where he had gotten those pills and finding a next of kin listed for him in the hospital and finding a name, Betterstein Wade, his mother, and a phone number.
The coroner's office investigator said in his notes that he tried calling Betterstein Wade's phone number and didn't get anybody. Betterstein says that she does not recall any such call.
John says that the coroner's office investigator then passed along Betterstein's name and contact information to the Jackson police. What are the laws about notifying family after deceased family members?
It's very vague, and I think that you'll find this in most places. Laws, when they do address this, talk about making a, quote, reasonable effort to find next of kin.
Which is what Mississippi's law says. But it doesn't specify what reasonable means. And it doesn't list any required steps.
At the time that Dexter died and his body was was in the county morgue. Within several days, while his body was still there, the police department's missing persons unit had a missing persons report for Dexter Wade, whose body had been identified at the morgue.
The accident investigations unit of the police department were conducting an investigation of the crash in which they knew that the victim was Dexter Wade. And the coroner's office knew that it had the body of Dexter Wade.
So what did they decide to do with Dexter?
When a coroner's office, any type of morgue anywhere in America, has a body, that institution cannot hold onto the body indefinitely. And every jurisdiction has different procedures about how to handle that situation. In Hines County, Mississippi, their procedure was
If a certain amount of time has passed in which the person has not been claimed by next of kin, the coroner's office can apply to the county to have that person buried in a pauper's field. The pauper's field in Hinds County is in a series of plots of open land, not particularly well-maintained behind a wing of the county jail.
And over the years, decades, hundreds of unclaimed people have been placed in that potter's field. And in these paupers' burials, an inmate from the county jail digs the grave, and the body's placed in there with a number.
Dexter's body was in the Hines County Raymond Detention Center, down there in Raymond, Mississippi, behind that jailhouse, down there in a field. His number was 672.
When she went to see where Dexter was buried, Betterstein brought her sister and reporter John Shoupie.
And so we show up there together in one car, and a sheriff's deputy and two inmates came show up in a pickup, and they tell us to follow them. Betterstein's behind the wheel, so we drive down. We follow them down this, like, bouncy dirt road behind the jail. And the whole time that we're driving, Betterstein and her sister are talking about how strange it is. Like, where are we going?
This feels surreal. It was way out in the middle of nowhere with no real sign of any respect for the dead. And it's very nondescript, the potter's field. It's a patch of grass surrounded by trees, and there's some crude signs affixed to metal posts in rows. And the deputy sheriff pointed her to Dexter's grave.
They took me on down. We drove down a long, long, long thing. Way back in the back. That's way back in the back. It had a number. A little stick stuck down there with 672 on it.
And I remember Betterstein approaching that and kind of saying, is that it?
I just broke down. I said, baby, I look for you. I tried to find you. This is not what I wanted for you. I just cried. I just broke down on my knees. I was just screaming and howling and crying right there in front of him, telling him how I missed him and how I was looking for him and how I am so sorry. I would just say, I couldn't do nothing but say, baby, I am so sorry.
I am so sorry that this happened to you, and I am so sorry that they buried you like this. I just broke down.
After Betterstein visited the grave, she then began work on having him exhumed so that he could get a proper burial and funeral. In order to do that, she had to get permission from the county to show up and have a funeral director on hand and have county crews exhume the body. So she arranged for all that.
She had a lawyer representing her who helped get the red tape tied up and showed up, was told to show up one morning for the exhumation. And I went with her to that as well. So I rode with her and along the way, we started to get word that the body had already been exhumed. And sure enough, when we got there, the funeral director was there
And Dexter's body had already apparently been put in the back of a county coroner's truck. So for Betterstein, that was just another insult and injury to this process.
She had to pay to reclaim his body.
Yeah, speaking of final insults, she had to pay $250 to reclaim the rights to Dexter's body and give him the proper funeral.
Hundreds of people attended Dexter's funeral. The Reverend Al Sharpton gave the eulogy.
It was a relief for me to know that he was getting a proper grave, a proper burial. Al Sharpton put him away nice. Al Sharpton went to the most to put him away nice. They put him away real nice. He had a real nice funeral, and it was a relief that at least he wasn't down there with buzzers flying over his head.
It was a relief to know that I can go to a graveyard and actually see him in a graveyard.
Did you speak at his funeral?
Yes, I did. And I thanked everybody for what they did. And I told Dexter, you're home. You finally got home. Now you can get a little peace.
John Shoupie reported Betterstein's story for NBC News. He says he started to wonder if this had happened to other families in Jackson.
This can't be a one-off. There's got to be, because of the systemic aspect of the failures here, this can't just be the first and only time this has happened. We collected records of the paupers' burials in Hines County, and we began to examine missing persons reports. And we started to connect dots.
He and his colleagues found two more people who'd been buried without their family's knowledge. Then John heard from more and more families who wondered if the same thing had happened to their relatives. The city of Jackson has now adopted an official policy for how to notify next of kin, something most cities already have.
In January of 2024, Anthony Fox, the police officer convicted for the death of Betterstein's brother, George Robinson, was released from prison. The state attorney general for Mississippi had been working toward overturning his conviction since before Dexter went missing. The Mississippi Supreme Court found that the evidence was insufficient to support the guilty verdict.
We reached out to the Jackson Police Department and haven't heard back. Anthony Fox, who's now with a neighboring police department, told us he'd been maliciously prosecuted. Quote, the appeals court saw the evidence of the case and ultimately acquitted me.
Bye.
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