In the early morning hours of September 19, 2023, two masked figures sneak into a quiet house. They systematically search it for valuables, stealing jewelry and firearms. This may seem like an ordinary, random burglary, but one of these men is keeping a secret. He knows something about a death on this property that occurred nearly a year earlier.
52-year-old Harold Allen passed away peacefully in December 2022—or so everyone thought. But this burglary is about to turn everything investigators believe they know completely upside down. Here, everyone knows everyone. It’s not like a big city where such things happen all the time.
“I just want to know if Marsha… I know this. I didn’t go to anyone and say anything because I don’t have proof of it. This woman is a psychopath.” Here at The Decoder, we have exclusive footage and an interview with one of the lead detectives in this case. Without the burglary, we wouldn’t have even known about the murder.
Welcome to the shocking story of the death of Harold Allen. Harold Allen, nicknamed “Peanut,” died on December 20, 2022, at an unexpectedly young age. He had heart problems and insulin-dependent diabetes, but he had both conditions under control. At least, that’s what his wife, 52-year-old Marsha Allen, believed.
“911. Yes, uh, this is 3287 North State Road 135. My husband is lying here on our bedroom floor, he’s unresponsive.”
“Is he breathing?”
“No, we thought… Okay, wait a second.”
“Did you find him like this?”
“Yes, um, I work from home and I went to the back to check on him because he was sick. In the room right there, he was just lying on the floor. It looked like he had tried to get up to go to the bathroom or something. He’s not breathing.”
“Do you want to start CPR if I help you?”
“Uh, yeah, I could do that.”
But even with resuscitation measures, Marsha couldn’t bring him back. Harold was dead. He also left behind a stepdaughter, 30-year-old Ashley Jones, and two step-granddaughters who were shattered by this unexpected loss just before Christmas.
Furthermore, they were dealing with a police investigation that initially appeared routine. “I’m Lieutenant Adam Nicholson, and I was the lead investigator in the Ashley Jones case. Harold worked as a laborer for an auto parts manufacturer. Everyone Harold worked with, his family, his friends—all these people said he was a very loving husband. He was a good friend. He was a good colleague. He was the kind of person that seemingly everyone liked.”
At the time of his death in December 2022, the assumption according to the autopsy report was that he had passed away due to heart complications. There were no signs whatsoever that Harold’s death was suspicious in any way.
The autopsy was signed on January 18, 2023. It listed the cause of death as calcific constrictive pericarditis, an underlying heart condition. Opioid-containing painkillers were found in his body, but only in low concentrations, as they had been prescribed to him for chronic pain. He also had some recent emergency room visits on his record, but these were not related to his heart condition.
The autopsy was the end of the matter. Harold died of natural causes, and his family began to move on with their lives—or at least, that’s what everyone thought. Well, the Harold Allen case didn’t just land on my desk. It essentially began with a burglary on September 19, 2023, at the home of Marsha Allen. Marsha Allen was actually out of the country at the time of the break-in.
She was visiting Tennessee with her mother and father. She had recently installed a security system for her home and had access to this system via her phone. So, when someone broke into her house around 5:00 AM, she could see on her phone in Tennessee around 8:00 AM that people had been in her house.
One of these individuals was wearing a ski mask. She could see they were at her safe, taking weapons, jewelry, and other items from it. Marsha can observe from a distance what is happening in her house and calls the police.
Our detectives had gone to Marsha Allen’s house to investigate a burglary and asked for my assistance in searching for one of the suspects. One of the burglars wore a ski mask the entire time, but one of them had his face uncovered, and Marsha recognized him. This is 29-year-old Stephen White. Just after 10:00 AM the next day, the police are at his home.
“They said they caught me on camera last night breaking in there. If that’s the case, do you know anything about that?”
“No.”
Stephen is full of excuses. “I don’t even have a car. This here is my car. Someone stole it from me on Sunday night.” But the camera doesn’t lie.
“The person who owns the house identified either you or him. I don’t know which one. Here is the photo. And they also have a video.”
“And we have a video. That’s just a still frame from a video.”
“Wait, let me see.”
Stephen begins to buckle. In 90% of the burglary cases we handle, it’s better for the suspect if we can satisfy the victim. This stays between us, between me, him, and you.
“Do we just get the stuff back? Do you know how good that will make you look? What’s the guy’s name?”
Good. It will look much better for you because we already know who was in the house. And what do you think he’s going to say when we talk to him? He was right here at home in bed watching TV.
“Who? We have him on video too.”
The police suggest that Stephen’s accomplice is his husband, but Stephen defends him and reveals something startling.
“So you’re saying it wasn’t him?”
“No. It was someone else because that person is wearing a mask. Yes. Look at the other cigarette. I smoked the whole thing. It’s not me. Because this lady is the one who told me to go get that… Her name is Marsha Baxter. And she asked me to do it because her husband, Harold Allen, passed away in December for unknown reasons.”
Unsolicited, Stephen brings up the death of Harold Allen, which occurred 10 months earlier in that very house.
“She gave me an address. She said, ‘Hey honey, I need you up here. I need you to grab someone and go there.’ And she told me to meet this guy there.”
“Mhm.”
“And I did. And I went there. She wanted us to get rid of it, and it’s… This woman has hated me for years. I became her daughter’s best friend.”
“Okay. What’s her daughter’s name?”
“Ashley Jones. Okay. She doesn’t live here. She lives somewhere in New Mexico at the moment. Um, because she told her mother she wasn’t happy. I guess apparently Marsha asked Ashley if she could help her take care of her husband, and Ashley told the little baby, who is mixed race… And uh, my girlfriend, she was talking the whole time about Ashley being a lesbian. She’s with a Puerto Rican woman. And Marsha was talking the whole time about how she doesn’t need to be with any of them. In fact, she should just come home and live with her. ‘Believe me, after Christmas I’ll have enough money to provide for all of us for the rest of our lives.'”
This is a completely new perspective on Harold’s death and his grieving family. Marsha doesn’t seem so sad at all. Instead, she profited from it.
“She told me, and I already deleted all the messages like she asked. She said, ‘Hey, I’ll give you $3,000. You can go into my house.’ She gave me the safe code. She said, ‘You can go down there. You can get that, and I want all of it taken somewhere, please, because his brothers are trying to get into my house, and they want to take me to court and take all of Harold’s guns and everything.'”
Could the burglary have been Marsha’s idea?
“She told me to go on Monday night and Tuesday night. To me, it sounds like she set me up cold. The other person, whoever it was that she had there and that I met, I don’t know the guy at all. He said his name was Richard, and he was like, ‘No names. No names.’ He made me unplug my Bluetooth thing, turn off my phone and everything. He took my phone away from me, and he’s the one who told me where to go. Because I had the directions in my phone. I thought to myself, ‘Okay, this is what I was told to do.'”
It is certainly convenient for Stephen to say he felt threatened while committing the burglary. Initially, it was hard to tell if he was just giving us information to get out of trouble with the burglary or if he was actually being sincere, but regardless, we took it seriously. We followed up. We opened an investigation, and I’m glad we investigated so thoroughly, because otherwise, we never would have solved the murder.
This is the kind of report that feels like the tip of the iceberg. Marsha and her family turn out to be far more complicated than they initially seemed.
“Her daughter Ashley told me in November when we were living in Florida, ‘If you ever come back to Indiana, don’t post it on Facebook because my mom is watching you. And she doesn’t like that husband of yours because she thinks Nathaniel drove a wedge between Ashley and her years ago.’ This woman is a murderer. Okay. I know that. I didn’t go to anyone and say anything because I don’t have proof. This woman is a psychopath, and I’m telling you that right now.”
And there it is, the most shocking lead of all. According to her, her husband died because she needed the life insurance money. But she didn’t get that money because the insurance was set up so that it went to his brother. If someone dies for a specific reason, you can’t really call it “passing away” anymore. You would call it something else.
“She told me straight out. She said, ‘Listen, I had to take care of him.’ Harold, maybe. Maybe his name was Harold Allen or Allen Harold, hell, I don’t know.”
Stephen’s husband leads investigators to his accomplice.
“Um, so the person they left with came here?”
“Uh, yes, sir. Okay.”
“And uh, was this guy… was he a white guy or a Black guy?”
“He was white.”
“He was white? Okay. Do you know what he was wearing?”
“Black. I think black pants and a white shirt. I think that’s what he wore. Okay.”
“Similar to what you’re wearing right now?”
“Yes.”
“Is this… is this someone you’re familiar with, someone you’ve spoken to before?”
“Yes. Okay. So what’s his name?”
“I think it’s Kane Napier.”
“Kane Napier. Okay.”
So Stephen is lying. He knew his accomplice, 28-year-old Kane Napier. But does that mean he lied about the rest too?
“Kane is my friend who I thought was at home. Well, I left last night to pick him up from his girlfriend’s house.”
“Was he with you when you unloaded the guns here this morning? Yes. Whenever you came back with all the guns.”
“He was unconscious. Yes.”
“I think you need to listen to this… You only told us half the truth. We need the whole truth. You know, don’t… And we already know Kane was with you. So there’s no point in protecting him now.”
“No.”
He admits it was Kane.
“The reason I didn’t tell you is because Ashley is the one who set this up. Okay. And…”
“You were the one who set it up?”
“No.”
“No, it was Ashley.”
“Ashley did it. Because her mother… She told me her mother gave her $28,000. Let me keep drinking this because I’m going to go to jail, but I’ll take one more sip. Ashley was the one who set everything up, but the reason was everything I just told you. Okay. This woman murdered her husband, and if you look in her computer files…”
So Stephen has changed his story. Now he says Marsha’s daughter Ashley was responsible for the break-in. But he insists on the idea that Harold did not die of natural causes. That, he says, is the truth.
“I called her daughter, who explained to me, ‘Mom has gone crazy and her husband died for unknown reasons, but I think it might have been a heart attack, but I know it wasn’t because he was fine.’ Everyone was drinking on Christmas Eve. Marsha went into the kitchen and made a root beer float with whipped cream and sprinkles on top. And she poured something out of a bottle into it and told Ashley that was his little extra shot because he liked ‘spiked’ root beer floats. That’s what she told her daughter. And she gave it to him. He drank it, I guess. Her granddaughter wanted to take a sip and she grabbed her, pulled her away and started screaming, ‘You’re going to be a bad girl. You have to go to bed. I don’t want you drinking Pop-Pop’s root beer float. You’re going to be a bad…’ That’s what Ashley told me.”
Stephen describes an incident around Christmas time. It’s second-hand, so he gives the wrong date. After all, Harold was already dead on Christmas Eve.
“The story I know was that Marsha had taken all their cell phones and put them away while they were drinking. ‘I’m going to charge the phones, guys. We’ll put them in the back room. We don’t want them ringing and waking up the girls. You know what I mean? Because we’re going to have our drinks. We’re going to have our adult time, blah blah blah.’ And then I thought to myself… I think Ashley said it was terrible, because about an hour and a half later he started saying, ‘Oh, I’m tired. I’m drunk. I have to go to bed. I don’t feel good.’ But apparently he only had that one drink and maybe two beers.”
By all accounts, someone had mixed something into Harold’s drink, and the consequences were fatal. But who was it? And if we take Stephen’s story seriously, who set up the burglary? Marsha or Ashley?
“I still talk to Ashley sometimes. I’m pretty sure that was Marsha.”
Stephen is pretty sure who to blame. “Marsha killed her husband. Sorry, Mom. Marsha set me up.” But the police can’t take anything for granted.
To begin the investigation into the murder after receiving the information from Stephen White and the burglary, we brought Marsha Allen in on September 20, 2023. She gave us information about the break-in and the stolen items, and before she left, she was questioned about Harold’s death. During this interview, a detective asked her if she would consent to a cell phone extraction, and she agreed.
As soon as we received the phone extraction and began analyzing text messages, emails, and the Google search history, that was probably the moment we realized that the information we received about Harold Allen’s death during the burglary was true.
Based on this digital evidence, investigators obtain a search warrant for Marsha’s house.
“How’s it going, Marsha? We’re here today because we have a search warrant for your house, okay, to go through a few things. I know you probably feel a little intimidated by all the officers here. I just want to… Before I ask you anything, I want to make sure you understand your rights, okay? Then I can talk to you.”
The warrant applies to all her other electronic devices. It is executed early on the morning of October 16.
“What stands out to me about the day we executed the warrants at Marsha Allen’s house was probably the moment when we brought her back to the Sheriff’s department and interviewed her for the second time. And that was when we were actually able to present text messages to Marsha, show her the messages on my computer and say, ‘Do you know what this means? Help us clear this up.’ And she had an excuse for everything.”
As before, the police start with the burglary and her home security.
“I had maybe 15,000, 20,000 in there. Well, when I went back to put it back into my savings, I only had about three or four thousand dollars left.”
“And it was in the safe?”
“It was in the safe. I didn’t have cameras at the time, so I couldn’t prove anything.”
But the one person—I think you told the detective at one point that she knew… Of the three people who knew the combination to the safe, one was dead and one was Marsha herself. And either Ashley or Marsha must have given Stephen the code for the safe later, as the video footage shows Stephen looking at his phone before opening the safe.
“Was the reason for the cameras because the money was missing?”
“No. I had never left my cats alone for that long. And I had a bad feeling. I thought maybe one of my daughters could… and I felt bad if I didn’t know. And I got them to keep an eye on my cats. Mhm. I never thought in my life I would catch someone coming into the house. That shocked me. Especially someone you know, and I didn’t know, it scared me. I’m still scared. That’s why I have the security cameras, because every time I hear a noise, I jump up.”
Was Marsha just paranoid, or was there a reason why she was so jumpy after Harold’s death?
“Was there any reason why you think someone else—I mean, or maybe even Ashley—would have wanted to hurt Harold?”
“No. Not that I know of. I mean, maybe… I thought everything was fine. Obviously, it wasn’t. I had no idea. If I had even the slightest suspicion, I wouldn’t have let him in the house in the first place.”
“I’m just trying to put two and two together, like: The money was missing, she got the money. Maybe she knew there was life insurance. And that insurance wasn’t that high. It wouldn’t make sense.”
“Yes. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe… was he mean to you? Was he mean to her?”
“No.”
“He was… he wasn’t like that… He wasn’t mean to the kids or anything where she…”
“No.”
“…would have had any kind of reason for any kind of retaliation?”
“I see. Okay.”
According to Marsha, it was most likely Ashley who set up the burglary in September and killed Harold 9 months earlier. Marsha claims to have known nothing about the whole thing.
“I mean, just based on the messages, without including the other things that will still come to light, but that something was done to him. We’re really trying to make sense of it, because otherwise these messages mean something completely different. But if you know she did something—I don’t want to… and I know it’s your daughter and I have daughters. I have children, you know. I have three daughters. I have a son. And I know how hard that would be. They are young. Mine is as old as Ashley, so my kids haven’t had the chance to betray me the way your daughter betrayed you. And I can’t imagine the situation you’re in, but I just want you to know that we’re talking to you first, and if you know she did something, then make sure you tell me today, because when we talk to her, I don’t think she’s going to hold back.”
The investigators present Ashley as the main suspect. They give Marsha the opportunity to get ahead of the story by telling them what happened.
“You’re a human being. Everyone makes mistakes. And if you… my feeling is, if it was a mistake, then we need to know that.”
“I feel like things are being twisted.”
“Why do you think that? What is she saying?”
“The kid. She says things. And I always thought, telling the truth without telling the truth. She says something, maybe it’s… as if she’s joking or something, but she’s actually telling the truth.”
The investigators try to exploit natural tensions between mother and daughter. Ashley has been living in New Mexico with another woman, also named Ashley.
“I mean, did you support her being with another woman?”
“I don’t care, as long as she’s happy.”
“I mean, if she really did something to hurt Harold, she’ll… I mean, she probably won’t tell me that, you know? I don’t know why she would do that. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Ashley was previously married to a man named Tarson Jones, who died suddenly in 2019. This is all I have from my nephew. William says Tarson was found dead in his home in 2019, just a few days after receiving an inheritance from his great-grandfather. He says the family members didn’t know about Tarson’s death until they received a call from Ashley.
“She had his body cremated quickly, in a hurry, even before I could even ask for an autopsy or do anything about it.”
“What happened to Ashley’s husband?”
“He had the… right. Her father’s heart had a blockage. And they said nobody would have known that unless they noticed it when it happened, and it ultimately killed him. So he had a heart attack.”
“I’m not sure.”
It is an eerily familiar situation. A coincidence or something worse. This is the moment when investigators bring up the allegedly poisoned root beer that Stephen mentioned.
“You all had root beer floats. If that had happened, something would have happened to all of us.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
“…even knew where I lived. And then making the accusation that you did something to your husband.”
“I didn’t do anything to my husband.”
“Did Harold actually die on the 20th or was it the 19th?”
“He died on the 20th.”
“What was it like… did he just tell you things were going downhill fast?”
“He wasn’t speaking right. He was slurring his words. Mhm. But he had been doing that for a few days.”
Marsha paints a picture of Harold’s ongoing health problems, which we know today were caused by more than just bad luck. In response, the police show her a screenshot of one of her text message exchanges with Ashley.
“There’s a picture that she… she had pulled up the order on her phone. As if you had seen this piece of paper—you can’t see it. But then, and then this is from you to her, it says: ‘How much do you need?'”
“She constantly sent me money, mainly just for cigarettes.”
The order from December 14 concerns half a gallon of ethylene glycol. Odorless and colorless, it is used in things like antifreeze, and when ingested, it is fatal.
“So this is the UPS tracking code for this ethylene glycol.”
“She sends me a UPS tracking code for everything. What she orders for Christmas, and then I never look at them. Mhm.”
“Well, this one was sent by you.”
If Ashley used ethylene glycol to poison her stepfather, Marsha attempts to claim she knew nothing about it. But her digital footprint suggests otherwise.
“She writes texts all the time. And that showed when you deleted these on September 20.”
The burglary took place on September 19. The next day, Marsha deleted her text conversations with Ashley—perhaps because she knew the police would now have a reason to look. Fortunately, we were still able to recover these text messages. You could see in the extraction when the messages were deleted, and she actually deleted them while she was in the interview with our detective.
Thanks to the messages, they now knew what to look for when they revised the original autopsy. So as soon as we learn of Harold’s death, we have to contact the hospital and ask them about the autopsy and obtaining the autopsy or the coroner’s office. And at that point, we learn that they had removed Harold’s heart during that autopsy and the hospital still had heart tissue. We learned that the hospital keeps any organ tissue they remove during an autopsy for one year. So we were within that year—it was just before a year, but we were still within that timeframe.
So we had the heart tissue and also the blood that had been taken during the autopsy. This allowed us to personally hand over the heart tissue and his blood to a lab in Philadelphia. Ultimately, we were able to determine that Harold Allen actually had ethylene glycol in his body at the time of his death.
It was the ethylene glycol that killed him—the poison that Ashley and Marsha had worked together to order. Marsha tried to shift the blame to Ashley, but she was just as involved. I don’t know if there was ever a time when we thought Marsha was more guilty than Ashley or Ashley was more guilty than Marsha. It was a duo. They were both equally involved and both are equally as guilty as the other.
On December 17, they discussed the upcoming arrival of the poison.
“You might have thought the order was coming, and then she wanted to know something about Slurpees that night. That seems a little strange to me, considering we were just talking about an order of ethylene glycol coming up.”
On December 19, it arrives. “The mail is here smiley face.”
“So it is being claimed that you poisoned him.”
“That’s not true.”
“But that’s what’s being claimed. I don’t know… And that’s what we’re trying to find out, because when you look at these messages… It looks legitimate. But it says this root beer float was what it was done with. You know, it was only put in his. If the ethylene glycol was only put in Harold’s and not yours or Ashley’s or the kids’, then you would have been fine.”
Undeterred by her excuses, the investigators dig deeper into earlier conversations.
“Order of foxglove seeds.”
“I have no idea. Okay.”
“I know what foxglove is.”
“What is foxglove?”
“That’s a plant that occurs in various areas. Did anyone ever come into contact with that stuff or anything?”
“No.”
“Nobody ever came into contact with foxglove?”
“Ashley asked me about different plants that were poisonous. Out of fear that they might get into them, or because she is small and didn’t know what it was if they went somewhere.”
“You said: ‘I need foxglove seeds.’ And she says: ‘I think’… or you said: ‘I think I’ll get them at Walmart.'”
“Those are pretty flowers.”
“And then she said: ‘Thank you, we’re watching a new movie on Netflix with the kids, and those are traceable.’ I don’t know what that means.”
“Me neither, and you see why that’s concerning, because she says: ‘Those are traceable.'”
“I don’t know what she meant by that.”
Marsha’s response to Ashley’s remark that the seeds were traceable if they looked for them: “Lol.” Foxglove seeds are poisonous when ingested. They can lead to symptoms such as vomiting, fever, and chills. This conversation took place on November 27. On November 30, Harold showed up at the hospital with those exact symptoms.
“So you said: ‘I’m irritable and can’t sleep.’ That’s on November 28. Mhm. ‘Can’t sleep peacefully. I need this to be over. It’s hanging by a thread and he’s mean and narcissistic.’ Mhm. ‘It’s hanging by a thread.’ What is ‘it’?”
“My nerves.”
“He snaps and acts so sweet and innocent, as if I’ve been mean to him for days. Mhm. And then she says: ‘And it’s hanging by a thread. It’s taking so long because he’s big. Moves slow and has to build up.’ You say: ‘I wish it would reach its peak and be done lol.’ She says: ‘Agreed.’ She said: ‘Close, though, it’s a sentence than that.'”
The “it” they were referring to could be no one other than Harold himself. Marsha had poisoned him and they were waiting for him to die.
“Do you know what she means by the second one, where it says: ‘If not, we’ll do something else’?”
“We tried everything to get rid of his flu and his COVID. We tried all kinds of medications.”
On the same day, Marsha sent Ashley a photo of Harold sleeping sick on the couch. His condition was almost the only thing they talked about. But he rallied and got better, so they tried again.
“I think you ordered something for her. She said: ‘You mustn’t touch the plant. When they come, just say gloves.’ You say laughing out loud: ‘I was going to tell you that too. You’re going to need gloves.'”
“Yes, those are the plants that were in the basement.”
“She said: ‘Aha’—or I think you said: ‘Aha’. She said: ‘Oh, I know I have to wear gloves and need some time alone to prepare the root.'”
This was on December 2. Ashley had placed an order for a water hemlock plant the day before. It is the most poisonous plant that grows in North America. Just a tiny piece of its roots is enough to kill a horse. Marsha mixed it into a chili, a Sprite, and a margarita for Harold. He got sick, but he didn’t die. And these attempts had already been going on for a month.
In September of that year, Ashley ordered Pong-Pong seeds on eBay, another poisonous plant that could be mixed into food. In October, she texted Marsha to say they would arrive that day. Marsha replied: “Yay.”
His medical history with the hospital visits was always a misdiagnosis by the emergency room staff. But they were common symptoms like diarrhea or stomach pain. I think he had blood in his stool once. They had diagnosed him with diverticulitis. He was also taking insulin, he was diabetic, so the symptoms he experienced matched what the emergency room staff diagnosed, but they also matched being poisoned by Pong-Pong seeds or water hemlock.
Had someone noticed the magnitude of his symptoms, they might have realized what was going on. But they didn’t, and he continued to eat and drink everything his wife gave him. Harold thought he had a wife who loved him, and he had a stepdaughter he loved, who had a child, and he welcomed Ashley and her child into his home and let them move in. He enjoyed spending time with his wife. He loved going on vacation with his wife. But my impression of their relationship is that Harold was the kind of guy who just likes spending time with his wife and has no idea they are trying to kill him.
“Did you go to school together?”
“We did. We went to high school together, graduated together, but didn’t know who the other was when we met for our 30th class reunion. And then we started talking and we’ve been together ever since.”
They had only been together for three years, but that was enough time for their relationship to turn sour, as the text messages prove. They argued, and Marsha said she had lost trust in him. Ashley was by her side every step of the way. But the investigators are still trying to win her trust.
“But I can’t imagine how you feel being betrayed by your daughter. But at this point… I mean, there is so much content, and I would almost call it evidence.”
By using that word “betrayed,” they are using the language of her own text messages. On September 19, the night of the burglary, Marsha accused Ashley of betraying her by stealing from her.
“I have the feeling that Ashley had a lot to do with it, and maybe you were drawn into it. On the same day that that is delivered, there are root beer floats. And then the next day, Harold is dead.”
The investigators turn to questions about motive, such as the life insurance.
“One year’s salary, that was 64, and then he had one for over 50,000 that paid for his funeral and I paid off a few things on the house with it, because I couldn’t afford to pay the house payment plus that.”
“So was there between March and September, when the money was taken, conversations? Were there conversations with Ashley, like she wanted to know how much money was there, or whether she was like: ‘Is there still money?’ or maybe she thought she was entitled to get some of the money?”
“I honestly don’t know why she took it.”
“She wanted to feel that he owed her money because she helped you kill Harold.”
“No. Because I didn’t kill him.”
And even stranger things come up. Another detective and I read it through and think to ourselves: do they think he’s possessed? I mean, that is literally our thought process. Marsha and Ashley talked a lot about Harold’s dark energy, calling him demonic and possessed.
“I always ignored that stuff, which I probably shouldn’t have done.”
“And it says it’s looking for someone to attach itself to, and then she talks about the grandchildren, and you say: ‘Well, we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. You know, I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.’ But at that time, whatever is trying to attach itself to the grandchildren or attack them… is in him. That’s clear from the messages. It’s in him and…”
“She always said that, but I never believed it.”
“And she thought that was some kind of demon that was in him?”
“She always talked about stuff like that. I just never paid attention to it.”
Either Ashley or Marsha or both believed that there was some kind of demon or something in Harold that they were trying to kill. This is a new, disturbing layer to the case, but Marsha insists she never believed in it, and she sticks to her story.
“Here is a ticket. There’s you and Ashley. I don’t know if you’re going to fight over who gets this ticket, but someone is going to use this ticket.”
“…don’t even know what she’s going to say. It will all be lies.”
Marsha doesn’t take that ticket. She admits nothing, and the investigators end the interview. Marsha leaves the police station under the shadow of suspicion. She is not arrested, but it is looming. So she takes matters into her own hands.
That very evening, she dies by suicide. We wanted to interview Ashley Jones on October 17—the day after her mother had just passed away. Ashley Jones didn’t know at the time that Marsha had passed away. And we had to make a decision. Do we let Ashley know about her mother, or do we interview her first and tell her after the interview? And it was my decision not to tell her before the interview. The reason for that was that I wanted the truth in the interview. I didn’t want to offer her an out by letting her pin it on her mother, who she knew had already passed away.
“We’ll be with you in a minute. All right. What was your relationship with Harold like?”
“He was nice. Okay. You know, we didn’t really talk much, you know. Mhm.”
“But what did he die of?”
“I don’t know. Mom didn’t really say.”
So far, she is playing ignorant.
“Did she have financial problems?”
“She said he would just squander the money, making $4,000 a month and barely making ends meet.”
“Are we talking about Harold?”
“Yes.”
It was around August 2022 when Ashley and her children moved in with Marsha and Harold, just before the first poisoning attempt.
“How did Harold feel about you moving in? Did he think that was cool, or did he ever get kind of grumpy about it, or…”
“No, he was actually very nice about it. He loved the girls. He said: ‘I never had the chance to be a father or a grandpa or something’, and we enjoyed that.”
She paints a picture that is almost too good to be true.
“Do you remember anything being mentioned about Harold possibly having some kind of demon or it being referred to as ‘it’?”
“She would say something about an ‘it’ when his moods shifted. I was…”
“As if that was referring to whenever he started getting snappy with her.”
And she downplays the extent of her mother’s belief in demons.
“I thought that was more like a metaphor.”
But that doesn’t match the text messages, where Ashley frequently sent her mother Amazon links for energy clearing candles and talked about cleansing herbs from the Bible. So they try the same strategy with Ashley that they only used yesterday with her mother.
“I think at some point she probably drew you into something you didn’t want to be in, or it had something to do with these demons or something, you know, but we just want to know the truth. And I think you know the truth. Ethylene glycol was definitely ordered. I mean… Is your relationship with your mother good?”
“Yes and no. I kind of put up with what she does. She has always tried to draw me into everything she gets involved in, and…”
The way Ashley picks up the investigator’s words and quotes them back to him is a big red flag. She knows she’s in trouble.
“As I said, she was asking all the time: ‘Can I use your phone to look something up?’, which I found strange. You were drunk, but whatever. Okay. Someone in the house did something to him that night. So we have to look at either Marsha, you, or Ashley, your fiancée, because I don’t think the two kids did it. I don’t know. And I think that Ashley, your fiancée… I don’t think she did it. Mhm. Okay? That’s why I’m trying to make you realize that this is very important. If you know, because basically there’s going to be a ticket here, and I don’t know if you and your mother are going to fight for this ticket, but we already know what happened to him.”
But since Marsha is dead, there is no ticket. Ashley is the only one in their sights.
“Was there any life insurance that you know of?”
“There was, but it didn’t go to her.”
“Who did it go to?”
“To her brother. His brother. She wanted to be completely free of him. She wanted to see him dead. And I said: ‘You’re going to go to hell for that, Marsha.'”
She willingly shifts all the blame onto Marsha, but that isn’t enough.
“So my question is: Did she ask you to help by placing the order for her?”
“She asked me to place the order for her. Yes. For the ethylene glycol? For something like that.”
“You do remember it was ethylene glycol, don’t you?”
After 53 minutes, she admits to buying the ethylene glycol for Marsha. Marsha had sent her the money for it, $32 via the Cash App—a transaction that the police can trace.
“For that woman, I just do what she asks, and I’ve been doing that since I was a child.”
She also admits to helping with the foxglove seeds.
“Was she worried that it wasn’t working?”
“Yes. She said… Concerns? She said: ‘I will never be free.’ And I thought: ‘Okay.’ That’s because it’s not supposed to be like that. She kept begging for the same help. She kept saying: ‘I can’t live like this.’ It was the same repetitive cycle. I was… And when she… Until she gets her way, she doesn’t stop and she makes life hell for you if she doesn’t get what she wants.”
Let’s not forget that it was Ashley who said on November 28 that if the foxglove seeds didn’t work, they could try something else. She presents herself as far more passive than she actually was.
“And you knew she was going to mix ethylene glycol into the drink?”
“I knew she intended to.”
Manipulative, but also easily manipulated.
“The demon stuff, can you tell me more about that? Did you really think he was possessed?”
“She thought she had something… he had something in him. She did. I thought she was just, as I said earlier, splitting off what she didn’t like about the man. Okay. Like a character. But the way she worded it, she really believed there was something in him. And that it would attack everyone in the house and it made them evil, and she really believed that.”
But the burglary organized by Ashley suggests a completely different reason why she kept quiet about her mother’s beliefs. Over time, it seemed that Ashley probably didn’t even really believe that. It was just a motive for her to get her mother to kill Harold so she could profit financially.
“How much money did your mother end up getting from the insurance?”
“About 60,000, I think, she said.”
“60,000?”
They had also checked how much all the guns that were in the safe were worth. They had also checked how much the property and the house were worth. I think it was mentioned once that the house would be worth about 350,000. So they wanted to sell all his possessions. They wanted to sell his truck. They wanted to sell his motorcycle. They wanted to sell his house. They wanted to sell everything he owned to profit financially.
Ashley could claim it was her spiritual mother’s idea all along, but the digital evidence and the cold hard cash tell a different story. She had expected to profit from her stepfather’s death. And when Marsha withheld the proceeds, it looks like she recruited Stephen to help her steal it. In her texts with him, she practically said exactly that. On May 16, 2023, she sent him a link to Harold’s obituary and wrote: “Mom owes me something and screwed me over.” She had no idea that the burglary would be her undoing and Marsha’s.
After the interview, another policeman comes in.
“I’m here to talk to you about something completely different. Okay. Okay. It’s not going to be an easy conversation, okay? After your mother was here yesterday and talked to us, we received a call to check on her well-being at her home. And she has passed away.”
“What? She’s… she’s passed away. What happened?”
“Without going into too much detail…”
“What you can tell me.”
“It seemed as if something might have been ingested… and she passed away on her bed.”
The death of her mother changes everything for her defense, but it’s too late. She has confessed.
“So we wanted to inform you that you are under arrest for the murder of Harold, okay? And for conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder.”
While the state prepares its trial, they think they have all the evidence they need, but Ashley continues to surprise them. In April 2024, one of her fellow inmates approaches them and shows them a letter Ashley had given her to smuggle out of prison. In it, she speaks of a prayer list she wants to put people on, including Stephen White and Cain Napier. “Prayer list” is code for a hit list here.
The investigators get the inmate to wear a wire. Much of the audio is hard to understand because Ashley is cautious.
“She said a high-powered rifle right back there in the neck. Was a high-powered rifle mentioned and maybe two shots to the neck? Okay. Right here. She said: ‘Can your people get guns, scopes, a high-powered rifle?’ Right there. Right here it severs every nerve and kills you instantly. Or right here. Okay. I mean, right here.”
She wanted those people taken out. Ashley in particular. The inmate gets Ashley to write another letter with more details about her proposed targets, including addresses and a map.
“That’s Stephen White’s mother. That’s her handwriting, not mine.”
“So she wrote all that?”
“Yes. That’s the floor plan of the private building where she wants them to shoot. Because I told her about the private…”
“…know who she… who did she want to have shot?”
“Ashley Nedez, and she should take out the old woman. I don’t know if you heard that.”
According to this inmate, Ashley put a hit out on her own fiancée.
“Did she say why she wanted Ashley Nedez taken out?”
“Because she… she said she was there. Ma’am, she poisoned Harold.”
This is not the behavior of someone who was forced by her mother to help with murder. No, Ashley is a murderer herself. Some of the messages that stand out to us most are probably the “LOLs,” laughing out loud, smiley emojis while Harold is suffering and in severe pain or even in the emergency room—because they are trying to kill him and they are laughing about it.
I remember a text message where Ashley laughed that the emergency room staff had sent him home. Her message was: “LOL, they discharged him” or “they discharged him LOL,” one of the two. But she couldn’t believe it—she just laughed about the fact that the hospital staff essentially discharged him from the hospital and let him go home, and they had gotten away with trying to kill him again.
Worse yet, it’s a pattern of behavior. Ashley Jones had been married once before. Her husband died of heart problems. Marsha Allen had lived with a man in Crothersville, which is also in Jackson County, and he died of heart problems. So it was like an ongoing pattern—it seemed as if the men near them died, and they all died of heart problems. I believe they have done this before. And I have no doubt, if they hadn’t been stopped and caught, they would have continued and probably already done it again.
Ashley pleads guilty in 2025 to charges of conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder. She is sentenced to 50 years in prison. And I am very, very satisfied with the 50-year sentence. I think the 50-year sentence is probably the highest sentence anyone has ever received in Jackson County.
Both Stephen White and Cain Napier plead guilty to the burglary. They are each sentenced to 1,095 days, including time already served. Ashley’s charge for conspiracy to commit burglary is dropped in September 2025. She’s behind bars already anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference.
Marsha escaped justice. The kicker: in the year before her death, she wrote a book about her husband’s death. At first glance, we thought, you know, this is maybe just a woman grieving for her husband. But then, after the evidence and the text messages, we see the truth about Marsha Allen, who she really was. It seemed more like a diversion. The book was something that was maybe supposed to distract us from her.
Published on Amazon on June 8, 2023, just 3 months before the burglary and everything that followed. The book was titled “From Surviving to Thriving: Rebuilding Your Life After the Loss of a Spouse.” One thing I know about the book: the date of Harold’s death is wrong, which kind of told me it was an AI-written book. She didn’t even put her own thoughts into it. Even after Harold was gone, Marsha tried to make a profit off of him.
He loved his family. He was a hard-working man. You know, he wasn’t a rich man. He worked every day of his life. He worked the night he was killed. He worked that day. And on the way home from work, he stopped to get wood pellets for the stove to keep the house warm for his wife and his stepdaughter. To repay him for that generosity, they killed him. And if it hadn’t been for Ashley’s obvious greed in planning the burglary, nobody would have ever known.
