The murder of 14-year-old April Millsap in July 2014 sent the village of Armada into a frenzy. They hadn’t seen a murder in years let alone the murder of a child. The police enlisted the help of the Michigan State Police and the FBI to run down over 1000 tips. They followed every path of investigation. Most were dead ends but one led to James VanCallis.
Chapter 1: What happened to April Millsap?
April often took her dogs for a walk, but never took them together. They didn't walk well together. On this day, she took her oldest dog first, Penny.
So it's kind of unusual for her to walk this late in the afternoon, in the evening?
No, she... Yeah, I mean, she goes up to Austin. He'll call and say, I'm at the park, come meet me. And she goes to the park to meet him.
So she leaves the house, and you don't know what trail she's going on, but were you fairly confident she was going to go on the trail?
Yeah, yeah. She only goes to two places, like I said.
She didn't just walk around the village or anything like that?
No, not with the dog. She was a creature of habit and only took one of the two paths when walking the dogs. Penny, especially, was getting on in years and couldn't handle long walks.
You may be wondering what this interview is all about.
Well, after April left to walk Penny that day, she never returned.
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Chapter 2: What were April's last moments before she disappeared?
When he became evasive and hostile, the authorities got a search warrant for his house. They wanted to see if the shoes he wore that day matched the tread pattern found on April's neck. Little did they know, they would discover a large marijuana grow operation. Both James and his father Jim were arrested on federal drug charges.
They sat in jail while the authorities tried to build their case against James. Months would go by, and the police would redo interviews and try to find out as much as they could, gathering all of the circumstantial evidence. After serving the search warrant and seizing all of his stuff, they didn't find anything. They didn't find DNA, fingerprints, hair, nothing.
And the shoes he said he wore didn't match the pattern. So they talk to his father, who seemed a little too comfortable in his orange jumpsuit.
Did Jimmy do this? Did he murder that girl? No. Did he kill that girl? No. Even by accident? No. How do you know? I don't. I don't want my son. I don't want all my kids. He's been running on a straight and narrow for the last, well, for the last year anyway. The year before that, he was in prison. Yeah.
He didn't think his son was capable of doing such a thing. You know, because he turned a few new leaves over or some shit in prison. So the officer tried to paint a scenario to see if it changed his mind.
He's got that explosive temper. And maybe something just went too far that day. There's a chance encounter. Maybe, you know how Jimmy is with the ladies. He's a ladies' man. He's a ladies' man. He likes to talk to them and... Somebody rejects them, it doesn't sit too well. No, that don't happen that way. It's not like he doesn't know the consequences of what would happen. Emotions are running hot.
No, no, no. I'm on a lifetime registry. He knows this. He's lived with it for the last 20 years with me, so he knows. So, you know.
His son wouldn't have lost his temper because he would have never talked to an underage girl. He knew better. Messing around with little girls leads to trouble. It was a lesson he learned from his father, a registered sex offender. Another lesson he learned from his father, the self-proclaimed asshole, was not to beat women.
Because for the whole time that we've been with her, I beat her up all the time. He knew his son and just didn't think he was capable of murder. He'd been on the straight and narrow for nearly a year.
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