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My name is Bob Pulno, and I was a private investigator. I'm now retired. That day I met with the Wilsons was November 11. Justin had been missing since the night of November 1. So I was eleven days into this incident before I knew anything about it. They told me that Justin was not the type child of their, one of seven children. They had to go without making contact with them, frequently by telephone or in person. The Wilsons were not financially well off, and I thought I could find Justin within a week. He seemed to be very, very popular from what they were telling me. Had a lot of friends, and I have found young people like that, particularly teenagers who have run away from home. And I would find them at other teenagers home hiding out or whatever, you know, for whatever reason. This could have well been another one of those. So I took the case pro bono.

Bob Pulno decided to take on Justin Gaines case 16 years ago. He thought that Justin would turn up within a week, and he'd move on to the next case, as it happened many times before with teenagers running away from home. But that was before Bob knew how twisted this case would become, how deep he would have to go to find answers, or how dangerous his investigation could be. The case of Justin Gaines would torment him for nearly two decades. To this day, he's never charged Erica or Stephen Wilson a penny, all because he made a promise to them to never give up. From Waveland, I'm Shawn Kite, and this is drowning Creek.

I grew up in Ohio, outside of the Cleveland area. Met my current husband in 1994. We each had three boys, so when we got married, our boys were 11234 and six. It was definitely an experience, but a big family. It makes Christmas fun, holidays fun, vacation fun. We decided to pack up our children from there and move to Georgia for better schools and nicer weather and to get away from ex husband.

Erica Wilson had left her first husband and the biological father to her three sons, Justin, Joseph, and Jordan.

Justin's father? Yeah, he was really abusive and a drinker. Just leaving that behind and, you know, not having to worry about that stress and focus on the kids, their education. Actually moving to Georgia was probably a blessing.

Justin was five years old when Erica and Stephen Wilson married, and the large blended family soon left the cold Ohio winters behind and relocated to Georgia. But there's six boys and a daughter soon to follow. They didn't have a lot of money left over, but they always made it work and made the best of it.

Camping was great. With a big family, we usually would go out to Myrtle beach. They have these, like, resort campgrounds. So when the kids got older, it was nice to go there because, you know, it was a huge thing. They could meet other people.

Erica encouraged Justin to meet new people because when he was younger, he was a bit introverted.

He was a really good kid. I mean, he was a boy, but, I mean, he was good. He was honest. He was, you know, helpful. If he did make a mistake, he would own up to it. When he was young, he was a totally different kid. I mean, kids made fun of him. Up until 6th grade, he was very heavy set. Every year he'd go to play football. This one kid would be like, hey, Justin gains more pounds. And, I mean, he used to come home and be crying and be like, mom. No one wanted to be my partner again.

Her husband Steven gave advice that seemed to be life changing for young Justin.

My husband said, you know what, Justin? You gotta love you. If you want people. You gotta love yourself first. When you love yourself, you know it's gonna all click. And I don't know if he took it to heart because by 7th grade, he was totally different. Most outgoing person, never shy. It was just a total change. He never worried about people, you know, making fun of him. He started truly loving himself fully.

He also started working out like crazy. Lifting weights was the beginning of phase two of Justin's life, the good phase.

So he lost all this weight. He went from being the kid that was poor me. I wanted to be my partner too. Everyone wants to be my partner. Lifting weights, eating tuna out of the can and eating all my peanut butter off the spoon and leaving the spoons all over to get his protein in.

Justin bulked up to nearly 230 pounds of muscle by the time he turned 18. His friends used to joke with him that he looked like Vin Diesel. With his new physique and a buzzed haircut. The once portly, introverted kid that got pushed around in middle school hallways was now good looking, popular, and certainly able to defend himself if needed. As close friend Katie Kuhn tells me, he was well liked and always fun to be around.

He was always the character at the party, like he was the guy putting on a show or just being the life of the party.

Katie was very close to Justin. They hung out all the time. Justin's friends initially thought he must be with her. When they couldn't reach him on the phone after he went missing, I get.

A call, a three way call, asking, have I seen Justin? And I was like, no, what do you mean? And they're like, no, no, no, seriously. And they said, well, we've called around to everybody who he might be with, and nobody has seen him.

This wasn't like him. And Katie being so close to Justin and his family offered to make the dreadful call to his mother, expressing their concern.

And I said, well, I will call Erica. I didn't want to put that on them. I said, I'll call her. So I called Erica, and that was an extremely tough phone call to make. I'd say I probably blacked out. Cause I don't remember the actual conversation, but the emotions were so strong. So much crying, so much realization that she has to file a missing person's report for her son. I sat there on the stairs at my grandmother's house, which is where I was at the time, just bawling my eyes out. I couldn't believe that we were having to start this process of having a friend who was missing. Volunteers pulled and poked through debris during day two of searching for 18 year old Justin Gaines. After talking with his family and friends, they learned Gaines had a drinking problem. That's why they believe he may have died of alcohol poisoning.

The first day of searching for Justin was, as one would expect, extremely difficult for all involved. Most of the searchers were just out of high school and had never experienced anything like this before. Everyone was filled with a wide range of emotions.

We start trying to piece everything together like it's a puzzle talking to all of our friends. Where is he? What was he doing? Who was he with? Was it foul play? Were we looking for a person that was still alive? Were we looking for a person that wasn't alive?

Ugh.

That was a terrible day. That feeling of having to walk through the woods in a line of people, looking for what could possibly be your deceased friend is a feeling I never want anybody to feel.

I've heard similar statements, like those that Katie Koon shared from pretty much everyone I've talked to so far regarding how Justin was just a good guy who was liked by everyone. The life of the party. They chose to focus only on the good qualities he possessed because that's how they wanted to remember him. But if that's true, then who would want to hurt Justin? Then why? Could this have been a completely random act of violence? And if so, why was Justin, of all people, targeted? There just has to be more to the story. As my investigation unfolds, I'm digging deeper into Justin Gaines background, trying to find any reason someone would have to hurt or kill him. I already knew that he was arrested for underage drinking, but that's not connected to his disappearance. That's what investigators told me. I did find something interesting while talking to his close group of high school friends. Here's Katie again.

He was definitely a little bit of a troublemaker, but not, I would say, not getting in trouble. He just kind of pushed the boundaries a little bit on sneaking out and partying and stuff like that.

He pushed the boundaries. This rung a bell as soon as Katie said it, because I'd heard it before. Mike and Patrick Heiser both told me on separate occasions that Justin always seemed to want to push things a step further and that usually alcohol is involved somewhere along the way. Between graduating high school and starting college, it had gone from fun times just hanging out and partying to not fun at all.

You know, he was always the, whenever we were being rambunctious, he was always the one that wanted to take it to whatever the next level was. And the drinking progressively got, like, more and more extreme. You know, Justin worked at quick trip. Quick trip has, like, these big 44 ounce cups and, you know, basically fill it up with straight vodka and drink straight from that. Just straight vodka. And it was like, dude, I don't think you need to get that drunk. Like, that's, that's to another level.

He wasn't the same person that I knew who was this very balanced, focused man, but I hadn't seen him like that before for, to that level. He just didn't feel like Justin.

I think he was losing it because he was at a point where he was so independent, because he's living out on his own, he's got nobody telling him what to do, what not to do. He was just doing whatever he wanted.

Some of Justin's friends had started pulling away from him, not because they didn't like him anymore, but because around the time he started college, he began to change and was hanging out with new people, some of whom they didn't really care for.

I remember just, like, the feeling, like, I couldn't tell you what any of them looked like or names or anything like that, but I do remember the feeling of, there's some people that he was hanging out with that were unsavory characters that didn't have his best interest at heart and was putting him in situations that maybe we didn't care for. And I do remember us, like, telling him, like, hey, we aren't a big fan of these people. But he was just like, I mean, he saw also, he saw everybody as just a good person. And like, if they're fun to hang out with, then they must be fine, right? And he was all about the fun, whether it was good or bad.

Bob Pullneau heard the same thing from several of Justin's friends early in his investigation.

They said that he had really changed recently. His personality had changed, that he had befriended some people that they didn't like, that were into drugs, they didn't run with that crowd, so they would stop associating with and hadn't stopped associating with Justin other than just call him on the phone. And how you doing?

Justin began engaging in vandalism and petty theft too, as Mike Heiser tells me.

Oh, car hopping. Yeah, yeah. Yep. I was, yeah, there's, there's legitimacy to that story.

Car hopping, of course, is walking from car to car and checking the door handle to see if it's unlocked. If it's locked, you move on to the next. If it's not, you see what's worth taking inside and sell it later.

I saw a bunch of the stuff that he gained. I heard stories. There was one in particular where he had gone into a unlocked police car that was in the same neighborhood that I lived in. And within that police car, there was a bulletproof vest and a pistol. And he actually, you know, the story that I heard, I never validated it or anything like that, but the story that I heard is he took the pistol and he went and threw it down a sewer drain. I was like, that's getting a little crazy, man. Should probably settle down a bit.

Justin was never caught or arrested for it, and this didn't come out until after he went missing. Patrick Heiser tells me it even went further than car hopping, though.

I know of things that they did that I would never do in a million years. I know of things that, you know, Justin got into, like throwing rocks through people's windows 02:00 in the morning, like jumping cars. Like, you know, those things. The more you get to know it chisels away at your moral foundation. Car hopping suddenly makes that jump where there's a reality behind that. Like, okay, well, I've already broken the law once. Nothing's happened. And it was fun, and I need money. That's a huge driver. Like, that makes a lot of sense to me. If he really did want to live up to the life that he was, that he wanted to live, he really wanted to live up to the, like, okay, I have this problem, prestige that I have at school. I have this prestige of how I look. I need money to go along with it.

A lot of the information I just shared about Justin was collected over the first couple of months or so after his disappearance. Initially, Erica Wilson said that police seemed to not really take this case very seriously and would share very little information they had learned with her or Bob Pullneau.

The Gwinnett County Police Department would not give me. I mean, they wouldn't give me anything for the longest time, they wouldn't even work with our private investigator. They were just very guarded, and they didn't want to tell you anything. I mean, I found out that Justin's original file, the first detective they put it with, was a pregnant woman who was just having a baby. So she went and had a baby, and his whole file's missing. Well, they finally find it in, you know, a desk, you know, I mean, so things aren't getting worked on.

There's no national protocol for law enforcement to search for missing adults. Okay, bottom line. And I understand that there are so many people missing. Every year, many of them are found alive. Law enforcement can't tap their resources on all of these missing adult cases, and they would just be overwhelmed with it. Now, they searched for missing children actively and for obvious reasons, but not adults. And Justin was an adult at age 18. So Gwinnett county police, who this missing person report was filed with initially, did not actively, at least at that point, search. A detective was assigned to it, but had not, to my knowledge, worked it.

Justin was seemingly just eight months too old to be considered important enough to search for initially by police. And while I do understand high caseloads, limited resources, and other obstacles they face in cases like these, try telling that to his parents.

So I had the Wilsons asking me questions which Gwinnett police obviously knew the answer to, but they wouldnt or couldnt communicate what they had to the Wilsons, even a generalization of the cases. So I began receiving phone calls by the scores. Once this hit the news media, Bob.

Suddenly found himself at the center of the investigation. He quickly became the person to go to. If you had information about Justin Gaines, not the police department. And many of the people he was speaking to had one discouraging trait in common. No one was listening to them.

I started to get these calls that they had called ten days, two weeks, three weeks, what before, and to the police department, and nobody would call it back. And they had information about the case. And so I began working those leads. I wound up calling the detective, and he would not communicate any of this to me, because now I know he wasn't working the case. I'm not an officer of the law, so they can't reveal confidential information, and I understand that. But at the same time, we're working on the same issue. I think it's important to give them information, and at times I need the feedback in order to give them more information that I'm learning that parallels what they're doing, and that wasn't happening.

Bob makes a good point. Typically, police aren't going to share information on an open, active case with a private citizen, even a private detective. That's just common sense. But I can't help feeling that mistakes were made early in the investigation. And though Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway eventually did convince all entities to work together, I want to know why this case wasn't investigated more seriously from the start, why the owner of every number Justin called and texted that night wasn't questioned, and why these phone numbers weren't subpoenaed to see if any of those people were in the vicinity of wild bills around the time he went missing, and why Bob Pulno, a private citizen working for free, was able to find witnesses and get what is potentially the most important lead in this entire case, Justin's scene with the blonde woman in the black car. One piece of information investigators did obtain from Justin's phone, however, was its location data. The last location ping from his phone was was approximately 4 miles away from wild bills, in the opposite direction of Justin's house. After this ping, the phone went dark, and all calls to his phone from that point went straight to voicemail.

Using eyewitness accounts of Justin at the club and his phone data, Bob Poulneau and the Gwinnett county police, who were eventually working together and sharing information, tried to reconstruct Justin's movements that night, up to the point at which he vanished. Erica told me that Justin spent about an hour and a half at home before his friend and college roommate Chris and his girlfriend Amanda picked him up to make their way to wild bills. He had grabbed some cash and one of his fake ids, but left his wallet behind in his old bedroom. They left sometime between 630 and 07:00 p.m. then the three headed to quick trip to get chasers for their vodka. At least that's what was initially heard from Chris when he was interviewed. But Bob dug deeper into this statement himself and found that it wasn't the case at all.

The videotapes that I secured from the management at Quicktrip don't show them going there. And the employee that worked there during that time tells me that they never.

Came in, and he would have known because Justin worked there previously, right?

Right near him. But he didn't come in that day.

Justin used to work at that quick trip near his parents house and visited frequently. He knew pretty much everyone that worked there, including the person on the register the night of November 1. The fact that no one saw Justin, Chris, or Amanda that night and that they weren't seen on surveillance footage appears to punch a hole in that part of the story. So why would Chris say that they went there? Were they somehow just not seen by anyone? Or is someone lying?

Then Chris tells me that they went from there to the pool room, which is a walking distance from Wild Bill's, and they don't have a surveillance camera outside pool hall. I don't even know if it's still there. But they sat outside in Amanda's sister's car with Chris and Justin in the backseat and drank. A friend of Justin met them over there, and his name is Clint, and drank a little while before they all went to the club.

And this is the group pre gaming, as I talked about previously. But when Erica told me this, she didn't mention or didn't know about Justin meeting up with a person named Clint or anyone else, for that matter. It feels like something's missing here.

Now, we know that Justin didn't get in that club until 20 minutes, till midnight. The security camera video shows an earlier time, but it was 1 hour off. 1130 at night, 1140 when he arrives. What happened between 630, we'll say 07:00 okay. And three or 4 hours later. What happened there?

What really transpired in the four plus hours between the time Justin left his parents house and the time he arrived at wild bills? Did they really drink in the pool hall parking lot for that long? If so, it's unlikely they would have even made it to the club. Or could they have left the pool hall and gone somewhere else before going to wild bills? Investigators learned Justin had an altercation with someone on the dance floor. I also know he was drinking and exited the club around 01:00 a.m. and started calling for a ride after asking several people inside if they could take him home. Then hes seen around 02:00 a.m. by eyewitness James Irving. Irving said Justin was getting into a car with a blonde woman in a black dress. Irving said he spoke to Justin briefly, but didnt actually see them leave. Irving did, however, give a pretty detailed description of his encounter with Justin. He was decidedly credible because he was also able to give a description of several other occupants in the car. And he knew Justin. Irving also stated he had recognized the blonde woman from inside the club earlier that night.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to speak with him because he passed away some time ago. But fortunately, he wasn't the only one who saw the woman in the black dress. To me, one of the most important aspects of this investigation so far is the identity of the blonde woman in the black dress. She's been mentioned a lot, and that's because she's one of the last people to have been witnessed with Justin. Shortly before he disappeared, Justin was seen inside the club and getting into a car later that night with her and two other people who've yet to be identified. This woman, whoever she is, may hold the key to knowing what happened to Justin.

When I met with James, I knew I had a good witness because he can place Justin Gaines in that club. He can place Justin Gaines at the time. I know that James saw this same blonde girl sitting at the table with him as the same blonde girl that got into the car. I have another eyewitness that did not know Justin Gaines, but had seen him on television after the disappearance, of course. And she identified this blonde girl as the same one seated at the table with him. And then she got a table next to him, and this blonde girl was there.

Bob met a woman who claimed she was seated at a table next to Justin. Having no knowledge of James Irving's statements, the woman gave Bob information about what she remembered seeing, including the woman in black.

She saw Justin that night seated at a table next to her table with this blonde girl and a black guy, which I think James told me was a black guy there at one point, and that they were with another group of people seated behind their tables. They would interact with another group of people back and forth, sometimes other people coming up and seating themselves at the table with. With Justin.

I managed to track down this woman named Susan and see if she even remembered making these statements at all.

The only reason how we started really talking to each other is because he played football at Brooklyn High School with my little nephew.

Surprisingly, Susan remembered quite a bit about her short encounter with Justin that night.

I'm like, you know, are you having a good time? Why aren't you out there dancing? And he said, no, he was out for the night, and he knew he was going to be out for the night. And I think he said he left his wallet at home or can't find his wallet or something, and asked me if we could buy him a drink, buy him a beer. And I said, how old are you?

Susan recounted everything she could remember about who was sitting at the table with Justin.

I do remember a boy, a young boy wearing a white, like a white hoodie. I don't really know. I just know when he, when he came over to our table and he addressed Justin, that he just, it was quick. And then they walked out to the back. I guess they're smoking places back there. So I know they went to the back and he was with another guy, and I can't remember. I think he may have been asian. And then another guy was a black guy, and he was with a young white girl. And I know she had long hair. It was blonde.

Bob had actually mentioned an asian guy to me as well. When we spoke, he told me the man escorted the mystery blonde woman into the club, but seemed to not know much more about him.

I have not identified the asian male that escorted the blonde girl into the club. Don't know how he fits into this, other than the girl paid for him. And there's no, appears, no personal relationship. He may have been someone, I guess, just to look after her. But he was, he was not with her, apparently there to party. He followed her into the club and he went with her.

I asked Susan if anything seemed to be off with Justin that night, other than him being under the influence of.

Alcohol, everything seemed fine. They were going over to barnacles. It was, I mean, right across the street almost. And he goes, and I know he was drinking and he was underage. And I told him, I said, you shouldn't be drinking and being underage. Who are you with? He goes, I'm going to be with some friends. I said, well, you need to be safe. And he goes, well, my mom brought me up here. At least I think that's what he said. He said, my mom brought me up here and I'll be getting a ride home. And I said, well be safe. And thats the last time I talked to him.

Bob learned another critical piece of information. Thanks to the surveillance video from the.

Club, I was able to find a video of this blonde girl by watching the entire video many times and deleting in my mind the blonde females who were present in the club that didn't match the description. And I do know that the blonde girl has now been identified by a witness who's known her all her life as Heather.

I'll keep her last name confidential until I speak with her. That is, if she'll talk. But now the woman in the black dress has a name. Heather. She has a fairly defining trait. I'm told that on both shoulders, she has a tattoo of what appears to be a single sunflower. Could Heather know what happened to Justin Gaines that night? When I started out on this case, Bob Pullneau, who probably knows more information about Justin's disappearance than anyone else, was initially hesitant to speak with me. I can't say I blame him. He had no idea who I was. But at the urging of the lead investigator on the case and Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman, he did, of course, begin to share information with me, as you've heard. As he got more comfortable with me and we began to develop a sense of trust with each other, he began to tell me more things I couldn't learn any other way because they were kept out of the media until now. I knew that an anonymous caller gave a tip shortly after Justin's disappearance, but I had no idea what the information given was or its relevance.

Police have desperately tried to find out who the caller was for years, even going to the media to ask the person to reach back out to law enforcement. Bob Pullneau shared this lead with me, and if true, it changes everything in the search for Justin.

This anonymous phone call came in to Texas ECU search. They had set up an anonymous tip line, published them on billboards around Atlanta, and it was all over the news. This caller, I believe, was very important, and I tried my best to identify this lady, even allured to her call in what ways that I could, and they were permissible by Gwinnett police at the time. To release to the news. Gwinnett Daily Post newspaper, front page. Please come forward. You know we want to talk with you again and never did call.

What you're about to hear has never been shared publicly before now.

Good afternoon, Texas equisers. This is Sheila.

Um, hi, yes, is this the anonymous line? I can give you some information. Yes, ma'am. Um, okay. This is just all I know. I'm letting somebody know because this could be life or death for this boy. Boy Justin owed a guy named Chino a lot of money. He owed a good bit of different people. The money about drugs.

Drowning Creek is an original production of Waveland. I wrote and created the series, and the original score. Executive producer is Jason Hoch. Associate producer is Leo Culp. Sound engineering by Shane Freeman. Special thanks to Erica Wilson and her family. If you have any leads on this case, please contact me@infocuype.com. and if you love the series, please leave a review and tell your friends. Follow waveland on Instagram avelandmedia for more on this series and upcoming new shows. And you can also find me on social media at seancipe official or@seancipe.com as always, thanks for listening.