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
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 may 2004, the very month brooke wilberger disappeared.
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
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? we went on line to see, 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.
He made lunches, he there are a lot of pictures of him on the ground wrestling with the kids and laying in the grass, looking at four-leaf clover kind of stuff. just the kind of dad that we had. you know, the kind of dad who was involved and wanted to be there for his kids. but now at age 38, this seemingly loving father was facing the trial of his life. locked up, caught with a crack pipe and a knife, charged with kidnapping and sexual assault. given his checkered history, something, maybe intuition, the massive media coverage throughout oregon of a similar crime, a young, beautiful female college student snatched off the streets just months before, something compelled dina and her family to ask the question themselves, the very questions corvallis police were just beginning to look at. just the details that we heard about the case in new mexico, there were some similarities and