Shadowing Practice: Cold Case Files: A 2-Year-Old's Memory Solves a Mother's Murder after 17 YEARS | A&E - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Let me see if I got you some invoice numbers and that.
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Let me see if I got you some invoice numbers and that.
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From a pile under his desk,
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Fort Worth Detective Manny Reyes pulls out a murder file.
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It starts small.
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It's just a simple police report, maybe a few pictures.
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And it just snowballs.
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Yeah, it's 9-0-C-Charles.
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Reyes' cold file bears the name of Jane Thompson.
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16 years ago, she was beaten to death,
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leaving behind her two sons,
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who now want the case reopened.
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Call case, Reyes.
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The oldest brother called and just wanted to know the status of the case.
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I didn't know anything about it.
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We hadn't even considered looking at that case whatsoever.
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So after putting them off for a while,
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I went and got the case, opened it up.
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It should be under service number 815.
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Last one.
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The more I read, everything's here.
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What's wrong here?
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It just seems to be falling in place as I'm reading the case itself.
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One witness statement in particular catches Reyes' eye.
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It is from Jane's son,
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Josh Thompson, two years old at the time of his mom's murder,
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and an apparent eyewitness to the crime.
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He wasn't being told what to say.
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Like, Josh, this is what happened, right?
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The line of questioning was, what happened?
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Where is she?
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You know, and he answered those questions.
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What I'm gonna do is we're gonna head towards the location.
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He said that his mom was hit,
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left out by some brush and brushes and stuff.
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And the other part was that it was his dad.
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The body was found right here.
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They've closed this street down since then.
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And then when I looked at the crime scene reports and I saw the crime scene photos,
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what he was saying was making sense.
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The body was a few feet away from the actual curb.
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Obviously, that's where she was killed.
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There was no signs of her being dragged and killed elsewhere.
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And he agrees to meet with Josh Thompson and his older half-brother,
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Val, at Val's house.
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Just a question out of curiosity.
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What made you decide to contact this?
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Oh, man, because it never was closed.
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My house was closed, wide open, man.
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I mean, it's...
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My little brother was there.
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They're like, hey, we know you guys are busy and all,
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and we're just wondering what the status in our mom's case was.
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We felt like we've grown up now,
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and we had to take care of something that should have been taken care of a long time ago.
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For the first time in almost 20 years,
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Josh tells his story to police.
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I remember as soon as we got out of the car,
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arguing, and I was in the back seat, of course.
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So when she let me out the car, she sat me down.
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And they just kept arguing,
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they kept arguing, and he swung and hit her with his hand,
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just by a fist.
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Do you by chance remember what the arguing was about?
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No. And the thing is,
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he didn't come out and tell us,
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OK, this is a conversation my mom and dad were having that night.
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This is the location we were at.
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It wasn't like that at all.
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He just remembered a certain event that was extremely unusual for a two-year-old to see.
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And he hadn't seen it before,
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and he was real dramatic.
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And that's what he told us.
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The reason I remember is because it's the first time I saw my dad hit my mom.
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And she fell.
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She got up and put her hand in his face and then he hit her again.
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Then once that happened, he took an object and he started beating in the head with it.
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And then the next thing I know,
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I'm back in the car.
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And for me, I remember it was a purse sitting in my lap.
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It was my mom's purse and there was blood on it.
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And I asked him, where's mom?
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And he was like, oh, she's fine.
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She'll be okay.
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I'm going to take you to your granny house.
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And that was it.
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She never got back in the car?
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No. I remember she was surrounded by a whole lot of leaves.
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I saw her laying on the ground.
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And the one shocker of all that I got out of that first meeting was that the day that this happened,
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when Bobby Woods dropped off his son at the grandmother's,
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from that on, he had never made contact with him.
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He just left and abandoned him that one day and never turned back.
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When did you next see him again?
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Never again.
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Never.
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Never seen him again.
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After that day he came and brought my brother.
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He never came back to the grandmother's house?
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Never seen him.
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Didn't see him at the funeral.
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Didn't see him at any wakes.
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Didn't see him at any gatherings.
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Nothing.
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Nothing.
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I mean, it's apparent.
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He disappeared for a while.
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Disappeared.
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Forever.
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Forever.
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It is unusual.
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Too much of a coincidence that the last day your father saw you was that Friday afternoon.
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Hello, Noella.
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This is Detective Manny Reyes for the worst cold case.
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I needed to get a 1990 autopsy report.
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At the top of Reyes' suspect list is Jane Thompson's boyfriend at the time and Josh's biological father,
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an ex-convict named Bobby Woods.
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It turns out she was last seen on June 5th.
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Depositions were taken.
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Reyes zeroes in on depositions between the time of Jane's disappearance and the discovery of her body.
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Again, just tell me what you remember from back then.
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Remember, I really had a close relationship at one time.
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Reyes unearths a former associate of Bobby Woods,
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one who claims Bobby confided in him about the murder.
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He's critical because he's pretty much a witness to what he said.
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You know?
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You go out there and you tell people what you did or what happened.
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You know, you just, you do that, it's gonna come back.
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Let's get to the part of Jane's disappearance.
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He told her to turn around,
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or something like he saw a rabbit or something,
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he went and got the shotgun, he come back.
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He told her to turn around,
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and that's when he hit him in the back of the head with the shotgun.
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And the shotgun broke, which is consistent with what the autopsy showed,
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blind force trauma to the head.
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On a Wednesday afternoon, Detective Manny Reyes prepares to arrest Bobby Woods for murder.
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Reyes' best piece of evidence,
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the couple's only child, Josh Thompson,
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just two years old at the time and an alleged eyewitness to the crime.
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When you pick him up at work, he knows it's serious.
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It's a little more serious when somebody shows up at your work than they show up at your home.
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It's just serious stuff.
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Detectives transport the suspect downtown,
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where Josh is waiting, with half-brother Vol and Vol's fiancee.
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Sir, what am I here for?
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Please.
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Bonnie, you're in custody, like we've told you before,
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because of something that happened a long time ago.
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As a matter of fact,
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the offense was in 1990.
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We'll get to more details on that in a little bit.
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But we are investigating the death of Jane Thompson.
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I should have stayed at the fashion boutique with her.
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At the what?
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It's a fashion boutique.
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Fashion boutique?
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Beautique.
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OK.
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That's what she came up missing at.
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At the fashion boutique?
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Yes.
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OK.
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In 1990, Wood's statement made no mention of a fashion boutique.
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Instead, he told police that Jane had disappeared,
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but he took her to get food stamps.
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It really surprised me.
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I would have expected him to have rehearsed his story in his mind at least a thousand times.
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If I'm ever arrested, if I'm ever questioned again in regards to Jane Thompson,
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this is the story that I gave,
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and this is the story I'm going to stick to.
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And it turned out that he changed it all.
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What did you do to the rest of that afternoon once you couldn't find her?
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Well, second time, I went back across the street with Dasha.
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We sit there.
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His news story turned out now that he spent hours there where he had dropped her off at the boutique.
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He spent hours there looking for her,
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walking up and down, checking all the locations.
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Then all of a sudden another shop was closing,
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And I asked the guy,
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I said, did you see a black woman wearing a brown shirt and yellow shorts?
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He said, yeah.
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He said she was talking with two guys.
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And I said, two guys?
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I said, where did he go?
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He said, they were sitting in the car down here.
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I said, how long ago?
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Oh, he said hours ago.
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The thing is, if that had really happened,
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you would have at least brought that up,
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if not to the family,
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but to the police back then,
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and say, hey, you need to look for two guys in a car because that's where she was last seen.
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That would have been brought up back in 1990.
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That would have been investigated in 1990.
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And of course, he didn't bring any of that up in 1990.
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Reyes turns the questioning to Woods' criminal past,
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including his conviction for armed robbery.
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Woods lays blame for the crime on his nephew.
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What kind of weapon did your nephew have then?
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He had a short, sawed-off shotgun.
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So it was a sawed-off shotgun?
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What I took from him.
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So that was good to know
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that we could actually put the possession of a shotgun on him a week prior to the murder.
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And the day of the murder,
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we believe the shotgun is what was used to hit her.
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And you never were told or you have no idea how she died.
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You don't know if she was shot or strangled, drowned, anything like that?
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No, I'm going to tell you nothing.
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We had reached the point where I was going to start telling him,
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OK, now wait a minute.
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You know, you said this, now it's this.
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You said this, now it's this.
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And everything that he had told me was going to be contradicted.
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OK, let me go get that statement that you gave back then,
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and I'll show it to you.
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See if we can see if it'll refresh your memory a little bit.
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I don't have an attorney or somebody because all this is going through
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and I don't know if I'm going on or what's going on.
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And you want to show me statements and I don't know what's going on.
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No, it's your statement I want to show you.
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The one that belongs to you.
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I have an attorney to look at it with me because right now I don't know what I'm getting into.
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So I think he realized,
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well, what I just said,
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I don't think is what I said back then.
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What I'm being charged with, it's murder.
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So he realized that it wasn't going to be very good after that.
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Come on, you got to know who I am.
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You know his name?
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You got to know me, man.
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Exactly, it's not Vol.
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Vol, V-O-L.
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I think the anger came afterwards when we found out he was denying it
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and he was making up stories and stuff like that.
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That's when the anger came.
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I hope this helps you a little bit,
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one way or the other.
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A lot of it.
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At day's end, Bobby Woods sits in a jail cell.
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About This Lesson
This lesson provides an engaging opportunity for learners to practice their English listening and speaking skills through a real-life criminal investigation narrated in the YouTube video "Cold Case Files: A 2-Year-Old's Memory Solves a Mother's Murder after 17 YEARS." By using this video as a resource, learners will enhance their comprehension while improving pronunciation and intonation through shadow speech techniques. The storyline involves complex emotions and investigative dialogue, making it an excellent context for practicing English conversation within a serious theme.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Cold case - an unsolved criminal investigation that remains open; new evidence can lead to its reopening.
- Detective - a police officer whose job is to investigate crimes, gather evidence, and solve cases.
- Witness statement - an account given by a person who saw an event, which helps law enforcement understand what happened.
- Crime scene - the location where a crime has taken place, often examined for evidence.
- Body - the physical remains of a person; in this context, referring to a murder victim.
- Eyel witness - a person who directly sees an event, especially a crime, often used in legal contexts.
- Reopen a case - to investigate a previously closed criminal investigation again, often due to new evidence or leads.
- Left out - a phrase used in the transcript implying someone was abandoned or not taken care of properly.
Practice Tips
To maximize your learning experience from this video, consider the following tips for shadowing:
- Speed Adjustment: Start by watching the video at a slower speed to grasp the dialogue clearly. Many platforms allow you to adjust playback speed, making it easier to follow.
- Intonation and Emotion: Pay special attention to the tone and emotional delivery of the speakers. Notice how they express urgency and concern; try to mimic that in your shadow speak to convey the same emotions.
- Repeat and Record: Use a shadowing app to record your attempts. Playback your recordings to evaluate your pronunciation and intonation, comparing them to the original audio.
- Focus on Vocabulary: Highlight the key vocabulary listed above. Practice these words in different sentences, reinforcing their meanings while shadowing the original context from the video.
- Interactive Approach: Share what you've learned with a partner or online in a shadowing site community, allowing others to provide feedback on your speaking skills.
By incorporating these practice tips and regularly utilizing the video as a learning tool, you'll gain confidence and improve your English-speaking abilities effectively while engaging with significant content that informs and intrigues.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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