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The Case of Tom Rhodes
📻 Episode #490
🎙️ Hosted by Maggie Freleng
📅 Nov 04, 2024
About This Episode
On the night of August 2, 1996, Tom Rhodes and his wife Jane were on a boat ride on Green Lake, in Minnesota, when Jane fell overboard. Tom failed to find Jane, and her body was discovered the next day. Police suspected Tom from the get-go, focusing on previous marriage and financial troubles. This led…
Case status as carried in this site's original 2026 profiles. Independent record verification is rolling out episode by episode — statuses are being re-checked against court and registry sources and date-stamped as verified.
The Case
On the night of August 2, 1996, Tom Rhodes and his wife Jane were on a boat ride on Green Lake, in Minnesota, when Jane fell overboard. Tom failed to find Jane, and her body was discovered the next day. Police suspected Tom from the get-go, focusing on previous marriage and financial troubles. This led the medical examiner to give his initial finding of undetermined cause of death a second look – working backwards from police suspicions, and eventually changing the cause of death to homicide. Tom was eventually sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
Click here to see the entire interview on our YouTube channel.
Tom’s art gallery as mentioned in credits https://www.thomasdgalleries.com/
Great North Innocence Project https://www.greatnorthinnocenceproject.org/
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In Their Own Words — transcript excerpts
Short excerpts from the episode's official published transcript, with timestamps — listen from these moments, or read the full transcript via the podcast's own platforms.
00:04:47“Speaker 1: were married in nineteen eighty So you met Jane and Speaker 1: you guys were like had over heels. Speaker 3: It was kind of a quick romance and we loved Speaker 3: each other and each other's families. Speaker 2: It was a good bit. Speaker 3: I think that we had so much in common from”
00:17:48“Speaker 1: After more than a year of investigation, police had their Speaker 1: prime suspect in sight, and on December ninth, nineteen ninety seven, Speaker 1: a grand jury indicted Thomas Rhodes for murder. Speaker 4: We didn't know how to respond. We didn't know, you know, Speaker 4: how to help him.”
00:30:56“Speaker 8: new evidence from new studies from recent years about the Speaker 8: physical findings you would expect to see in accidental drowning victims, Speaker 8: which mapped on perfectly to what you saw in Jane's case. Speaker 1: They all concluded that she was not struck multiple times”
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