Lee Rodarte Described the Truck in Detail. There Was No Truck.

On 2 August 2017, Savannah Gold left her parents' house in Jacksonville, Florida for a shift at the Bonefish Grill in Mandarin. She was twenty-one. The camera over the parking lot filmed her arriving. She parked, and then she walked to a car that was already waiting and got in on the passenger side. Fifteen minutes later the same camera recorded a struggle in the back seat, and her kicking the door open three times. It did not record her getting out. Three days later, detectives put the owner of that car in an interview room at the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office and left the recording running. What they ended up with is five hours and seventeen minutes. He is alone for almost four of them. This film is that tape. It starts where almost every other version of this interrogation throws the footage away - the hour and three quarters before anyone walks in, while a twenty-eight-year-old restaurant manager sits in a closed room and waits. When the detectives do arrive, nothing is raised. Water is offered. His rights are read, and he is asked to read the first line out loud himself. One of them sets out the rule the evening will run on: he will say back whatever he is told, and if he gets it wrong, he wants to be corrected. It sounds like courtesy. For forty minutes he is useful. He remembers times. He volunteers detail nobody asked for. He admits, without being pushed, that he argued with her, took a knife out of his own car and put it through her tyre - because a man who gives up something ugly sounds like a man telling the truth. And then, with that credit in hand, he produces a vehicle: an older Ford pickup, green, driven by a man he has never seen, that comes round the plaza and takes her away. He describes which way it drove. He estimates how long she stood there first. The second half of the interview is two detectives taking that apart, one sentence at a time, without once raising their voices. They have had the parking lot footage since before they sat down. They have his route - which road, which turn, which interstate - and they have been letting him talk over the top of it. And then four words change the direction of the evening, and a man who has been talking for an hour stops talking. The last act is the part nobody uploads. The detectives thank him and leave. Divers are called out. And Lee Rodarte is left in that room for two hours and ten minutes, with a camera in the ceiling and a microphone that nobody has turned off. Savannah Gold was found that night, in the pond he had drawn on a map and signed. She was twenty-one years old. Her family had reported her missing three days earlier, after a text message from her phone that did not sound like her. In February 2021, Lee Rodarte pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was sentenced to forty years. A note on what is not in this film: the medical examiner was never able to determine how Savannah Gold died. The ruling was violent homicide, and that is as far as the record goes. Where Rodarte gives his own account of what happened, it is presented as his account and nothing more. CHAPTERS 0:00 The green truck 1:22 The room 2:16 The interview 3:23 The story 5:16 The holes 7:14 The cameras 8:37 The turn 10:06 The pond 12:22 The hours SOURCE Interrogation video released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Case 1707212, Fourth Judicial Circuit, Duval County, Florida. Presented for commentary and criticism. THE TELL FILE Every case here turns on one moment - a sentence, a pause, a detail that should not have been there. We find it, and we show you the tape.