some person that you don t know, does that still hold true if it s your loved one? and we did a lot of thinking and praying about it and we came to the conclusion that, yeah, we still did. you would have been okay with him getting the death penalty? i think so, yeah. as horrible and heartbreaking as that is, he did take a life. right? as i think about, you know, what happens to him impacts his wife and his children and always will, but ultimately justice and truth have to prevail. dina says she was ready to testify but what she didn t know was that the pressure was building on her brother to find another way out. in new mexico, the courts
so the prosecutor went to courtney with the deal and true to form, the inmate made everyone wait again, for months. until his defense lawyers delivered the word. joel courtney was not interested. he did not return a counteroffer. he outright rejected our offer. feels like holding her family hostage in some ways, you know. courtney s sister dina watched all of this unfold, knowing a trial would mean she would have to testify about the times joel tried to rape her as a teenager, about his unexpected visit to her oregon home just before brooke s abduction, and about his incriminating, presumably drug-induced statements. dina knew her testimony could help put her own brother on death row. my mom and i actually talked about this before she got sick and talked about, you know, we ve always said that we believe in the death penalty and here it is your brother. my brother, her son. and so if you believe in it for
were struck by the parallels between brooke s abduction and the crimes joel patrick courtney was accused of in albuquerque. from our perspective, it s a signature crime. right next to the university of new mexico campus, young woman, attractive, broad daylight, abduction in a vehicle, drives away. yeah, we were real excited that we were on the right track at that point. by the time police learned joel courtney s name, joel s sister dina and her family had been thinking about the same connection for days. we couldn t even say the words out loud. we were up till the late hours in the morning going over the calendar thinking, was he missing then? what was going on? when did she go missing? what were the dates? could he have done that?
did you call the police? i had surgery. we can t say yes for sure or no for sure. we decided to pray about it. what were your prayers? we really prayed that god would give us wisdom, that we would make the right choices, that we would speak when we needed to speak and not speak when it was not wise. dina waited, saying nothing, until a week later, corvallis police, looking for information about her brother, called her. in that moment, do you know in your heart that he did something? in that moment i did not know that. i thought too many coincidences to automatically discount it. right? you can t just assume because he s your brother, somebody that you love, that he couldn t have, right? what dina told police was revealing. during their first interviews, she shared some dark, family secrets.
when she was a teenager, her brother joel had attacked her. he would come in in the middle of the night and put a hand around my neck and attempt to sexually assault me. more than once? more than once, yeah. and i have had a great old-fashion wind up alarm clock that met his head. two more courtney family members would soon come forward, claiming that joel had raped or tried to rape them. the further we got into the investigation as far as the number of people we interviewed, the more sexual assaults came to light. and more pieces of the puzzle were coming together quickly. despite their troubled past, dina and joel had maintained a relationship over the years. joel s sister now showed police these photographs of joel and his family, not at their home in new mexico, but visiting dina s home in the portland suburbs, in