Resilience in the Aftermath of Homicide with Dr. Jan Canty

When Not Yet Becomes Right Now (00:00)
Welcome to When Not Yet Becomes Right Now, the podcast where we dive deep into the moments of transformation, the times when not yet shifts into right now and everything changes. I'm your host, Jen Ginty, and this podcast is all about those pivotal moments in our life journeys. You know the ones, when the hesitation fades, when we take that first step, even if it feels like a leap. It's in these moments that growth and healing begins. Each episode will explore stories of resilience,

moments of clarity, and the sparks that ignite real change. From personal experiences to expert insights, we'll uncover how people navigate the complex journey we call life and come out stronger on the other side. Whether you're searching for that spark in your own life or just curious about how change unfolds for others, you're in the right place. We'll discuss the ups and downs, the breakthroughs and setbacks, and how to embrace the right now, even when it feels out of reach. Because sometimes,

The hardest part of the journey is realizing that the moment you've been waiting for has already arrived. So take a deep breath, settle in, and let's get started.

Jen (01:10)
Hello and welcome to When Not Yet Becomes Right Now. Today we have such a special guest on. Her name is Dr. Jan Canty and she is a seasoned psychologist with over 40 years of experience, an author, speaker, and host of the Domino Effect of Murder podcast. A Detroit native, she holds a PhD in psychology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in family therapy at Wayne State University.

Jan Canty (01:13)
Okay.

Jen (01:38)
But in July of 1985, her life changed forever when her husband vanished,

later discovered to be a victim of a brutal homicide. For the next three decades, lived a redacted life, silently carrying the weight of trauma. Now she's breaking that silence to help others navigate the long shadow of violent loss. Welcome, Jan.

Jan Canty (02:00)
Well, thank you so much for having me.

Jen (02:03)
Yes, yes, I'm so happy that you could come on the show. Let's get into this. What is your origin story?

Jan Canty (02:12)
Well, my origin story would be pretty uninteresting and typical. ⁓ Growing up, I played baseball, it was healthy, came from an intact family. I lived in a very tight little neighborhood in Detroit, lots of friends, loved school. And things were just chugging along and I went to grad school and two weeks shy of finishing my training.

to become a psychologist, I was in my postdoctoral fellowship at that time. 10 days shy of that, my husband vanished, as you said. And I'll never forget that night, if I lived to be 100, was July, it was in Detroit, and it was a steamy day, a churning kind of a storm coming kind of day. And by evening, it was windy and we had hail and rain. And I remember he was overdue.

And this is before cell phones. This is back in 85. This is before internet. So I called his office, got the answering service, and all they could tell me was he left work on time at six o'clock. He was punctual, so this was not like him. So I just brushed it off initially to the weather, and time went by, and I was watching a show that kind of distracted me for a while.

But by 11 o'clock I got frantic and I was pacing and I didn't know who to call. I just waited and night turned into morning and he didn't arrive and I never saw him again. And so I called the police and tried to file a police report. They made me wait 24 hours, which is not legal, but they do it. ⁓

And time went on and finally, 10 days later, I got a call from Detective Marlis Landeros from Detroit Homicide Special Victims Unit because she was assigned there, asking me to come down to headquarters. Well, as soon as I knew she was from that department, I thought, this isn't good. But my head had already gone through all the scenarios by that time. Anyway, what I had working in my favor was fatigue because it really softened everything when I got into that interview room.

And I met ⁓ the inspector, Gil Hill, who was her boss. He was very short on words. And all he said was, we have reason to believe your husband's been murdered. We don't have his body yet, but I suggest you go home and check your finances. We hear he's been giving out money in the Detroit, cast quarter area, which was like a seedy area of Detroit. And we'll be in touch. It was real blunt.

Jen (04:57)
Wow.

Jan Canty (04:58)
So I went home and I checked my finances and everywhere I looked, we were in debt. He hadn't filed taxes. We were behind on our mortgage, our car payments, you name it. I didn't know what to think because this wasn't like him. We never were late on bills. And then a few days later, Detective Marla Slanderos called me again and she said, I'm coming by to pick you up. And we're go down to police headquarters and I'm like, this is it.

And it proved to be true. I asked if my parents could come because by that time I asked them to fly in from Arizona and they'd had, and she said yes. So the three of us went down. We went into inspector Gil Hill's office and he said, you know, we have your husband's body. We need you to go over to the morgue to identify him and doctor ⁓ detective Marlis Landeros will brief you on the way as to what you're going to be in for. So to inoculate you.

I mean, it was real blunt, real short. I didn't know any of the names he threw at me. I knew he was murdered on Casper Street by a man named John Carl Fry Sr. And his accomplice was Dawn Marie Spence. And so on the way to the morgue, which was just a few blocks away, Detective Landeros told me that he had been beheaded. He was dismembered in the bathtub.

Jen (06:25)
Ugh.

Jan Canty (06:26)
and carried

out in parcels in his own trunk of his own car to Northern Michigan to Petoskey, which is on the Northern tip right below the straight there. And he was buried in three different places. But what happened was they got information from an inside informant who helped bury him. The guy was so afraid of John Carl Frye that he said,

He didn't want to be called into police headquarters himself. So he turned state's evidence in exchange for immunity. And so that's what happened. And that's how they got the inside information. Had that not happened, I don't think he would have ever been found. And so I had to go to the morgue and ⁓ there's no preparation for what you're going to see. ⁓ Detective Landeros told me that

Keep in mind, he'd been in a bog for 10 days. And ⁓ they had his fingerprints, which raised a red flag to me like, well, then why do you need me? And she said it's for help at trial. So that was the real reason. It wasn't that they needed me to identify him. Because as I had a detective tell me many, many, many years later, it wouldn't even hold up in court if you were there just to identify him because he was so disfigured. It wouldn't make any sense.

but they wanted me on the witness stand at the preliminary exam to say, yes, it was him. And I, he was recognizable enough that I knew it was him. And, so then I said, he, she said to me, I'll never forget this. She said, the reason we're going in here is because it will not only help us in court, but it will assure you confirm the fact that he's never coming home because

In your mind up to this point in time, he just vanished, but he's never coming home. And I need you to understand that. mean, police are very blunt. At this point in history, in that county alone, there was nearly 700 murders. So this was routine to them. And so she said, okay, this is what you're going to see. This is what you're going to smell. And my dad said, can I do it for her? And she said, no, for legal reasons, it has to be her.

I won't get too graphic. I'll just say that they brought his head out and put it on a table. And I nodded, I nodded yes, that was him. And she whisked me away. We were going out the front door of the morgue and the media had gathered with their tripods. And this is how crazy thinking I was at the time. Cause this is like a lead up. Remember this has been going on for days that I've been in picturing and anticipating and

Jen (09:02)
No.

Jan Canty (09:25)
thinking where could you have gone and all the scenarios that go through your head. And when I looked out the door of the morgue and I saw those tripods on the cameras, just for an instant, they looked like those old fashioned machine guns that you see in World War II aimed at me. And I froze. She turned me around, she took me out the back door, she put me in her squad car and she said, lay down, I'm getting you out of here.

And she did, she drove me home, she drove all of us home. And then it's like, now what? Now what? And that was in July. And the media went into full on mode crazy. And from July until the trial in December, I was just trying to escape public scrutiny because everybody, I found over experience that...

Once you're in the news a lot, even if you're a private figure, people treat you like you're a well-known person and they feel entitled to come up and ask you rude questions. So I got it to the point where I wouldn't go out in public except at night or I'd have people run errands for me. And it was just a waiting game from then until the preliminary exam in December.

Jen (10:45)
this idea that victims are free, you know, free to just destroy in public, especially in journalism has always been a serious problem for me. I went into college as a print journalism major, and by the end of it and having to have done

similar things with victims, I knew it wasn't for me because I can't imagine seeing a victim who has just learned such horrible things about, a loved one that I could just turn off emotion and go after them.

Jan Canty (11:30)
you have no choice. And furthermore, let me make this point. I don't totally blame the media. Here's why. The media is a business. They want ratings and today they want clicks. They are at the beck and call of the public. If the public is disinterested, they go away from the story. They zero in on what the public wants. And this, in my mind, is the reflection of the public as much as anything. They want the gore. They want

Jen (11:32)
Right.

Jan Canty (11:59)
the lascivious details. They want to be up close and personal. That's why true crime is so popular. It's literally, I mean this literally, it's a game at this point. There's games, there's, on Etsy you can even buy spoons for your cereal that say, cereal killer, ha ha. I mean, it's become a novelty and entertainment and that's what bothers me more than the media. Not that the media doesn't bother me, but the public,

Jen (12:19)
That's, ugh.

Jan Canty (12:30)
insatiability is what really bothers me. And that's why they were coming by my house, having their picture taken in front of my house, stealing things from the outside of my house and treating it as if it was a public place. And that's why I wanted out of that house so bad. I put it on the market ASAP. My dad helped me get it ready and it was devalued 23 % because of all the death tourists coming by. Because as a buyer of a house, do you want that?

Do you want to buy a house where everybody's driving by and taking pictures and stealing stuff? No.

Jen (13:03)
yet what doesn't make sense to me is that the murder didn't occur at the house. Right, yeah.

Jan Canty (13:06)
Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.

It's even worse then, or suicide. It's even worse then.

Jen (13:14)
Wow, I am so sorry that you went through such a horrific experience, not only of losing your husband, but of being tormented. Yeah, being tormented by the public.

Jan Canty (13:24)
But doing it in public. Yeah.

And I didn't realize then what I know now, which is why won't this story go away? It was always in the news. mean, with 700 other murders, excuse me, with 700 hundred other murders, why was this always in the news? I did not know till later that one of the reporters was writing a book. So he kept fanning the flames of it, keeping it in the public eye.

And even after 18 months, it didn't die down. mean, every little nuance, like John Fry went to prison, John Fry got this illness, John Fry made an escape from prison and they captured him. was all this other drama that they kept putting in the paper so that it kept it alive. then they'd be, and here's a year to the day review. It was just ongoing. And that really upset me. That was as difficult as the homicide in the end and why I left Detroit altogether.

which I didn't want to do. was my home. I my friends there, my education, the ancestors were buried in the graves there. You know, it was my roots. And I had to uplift that and transplant myself and start all over again. I didn't see an alternative. fortunately for me, it was in an era that was easier to do. Today, I don't think you can do it so successfully.

Jen (14:47)
No, not whatsoever. No, not with all of the cameras that are out there in all of our lives. Whether it's our own, yep, whether it's our own camera or it's out on the street, a Ring doorbell camera, we're being surveilled.

Jan Canty (14:53)
and the internet.

Yep. Yep.

Yes. Right. And so, as you said in your intro, once I moved, I went into stealth mode and I did not mention this to a soul for 30 years. Just not even physicians, you know, they would ask me, you know, on their intake interview, you ever had depression? Have you ever had trauma? Nope. Are you a widow? I was, but you know, that's a long time ago. I just brushed it off. I didn't want to tell a soul.

Jen (15:17)
I understand that.

Jan Canty (15:32)
And so I didn't, but that doesn't mean I ignored it. I set about my own way to heal myself because it was up to me. There was no internet, no grief therapy, no support groups. I didn't even have a family. I was going to move to Arizona, but the media found my parents and ruined that option. So I thought I got to go to someplace I've never been to before that doesn't know me. And so

After I settled into my new job, which I ended up loving, it was teaching, I thought, okay, if I was a psychologist talking to me, what would I do? And I know what I would tell a person is if you want to change and make it endurable, you've got to do the biopsychosocial model. You've got to address all three spheres. You have to, in the biology of it, get in physical shape, make sure you're not taking any bad substances in.

taking your medications as prescribed, yada yada, physical. Secondly, psychological model is you've got to look at your values and how you're thinking about this and find ways to pivot it. And sociologically is you've got to put yourself in a position where you're around positive people and you feel you're contributing. So that was the big plan. All I knew at that point in time was I had enough.

of being the victim, I was going to be the hammer and not the nail. And I was going to go about using the psycho-bio-psycho-social model to get myself together. So one of the things I did was I started volunteering internationally to remote places around the world. I mean, places that didn't have clean water, transportation, or paved roads or toilets, way off the grid. And boy, did that put myself in perspective. I met people who had it

a hundred times worse than me. They could be suffering from a severed arm and never see a doctor. They had no chance of being out of the village their whole life because it's two hours away by car and you don't know anybody that owns a car and you'd never survive walking it physically because of the wild animals. mean, the stories I could tell you about my international stuff, suffice it to say, I came away from those experiences as

a witness. was like, how do these people manage? And you talk about trauma. I won't go into details, but man, what they'd been through. And then I volunteered for Katrina. And I went down to that devastation that the hurricane brought. And that was a whole nother reinforcement of you think you got it bad. You've got your education, your health, a roof over your head, by this time, some money in the bank.

a heavy support system, the legal system believed you, you have a loving family, you have running water and heat and transportation and you're going to complain? Uh-uh. No, no, no, no. So that was one big aha moment. Then there was something that my friend said to me and he said it kindly. It might not sound kind, but he meant it kindly and I took it kindly and it sustained me. And then I'm not saying it would other people would.

Jen (18:36)
Yeah.

Jan Canty (18:53)
be sustained by it. But my friend, Matt Alexander, called me up and he took me to express his condolences after I'd moved. And he said very softly, very kindly, said, you know, life is meant to be an adventure and you do not know where you're going with this, but someday you will someday. You're going to look back on this and you're going to have that aha moment of why it clicks, why it falls into place.

and it might be years from now, but life is meant to be an adventure. And I'm not saying it's an exciting adventure or even that it's fair. It just is. I never forgot that. And as a kid growing up, something else impacted me greatly. And that was my father who I admired. He was just a great man. My father sat me down as a teenager. And I can't remember why he said this to me, but he said to me, you know,

The point of greatest accountability is you. You have to live with you. You make your decisions. Your accountability to you matters more than it does to me, to a judge, to a teacher, to society, to anybody. You have to live with you. So decisions you make, make sure you can live with them. Not just now, but 50 years from now. And that became important, for example, when the...

Jen (20:13)
Yeah.

Jan Canty (20:19)
when the two convicts were convicted and the court called me and they asked me, what do you want for their sentences? And I said, can I call you back in an hour? I got to think about this. And they said, sure. So I thought about it long and hard and I called them back and I said, here's my decision for John Carl Fry. I want the maximum penalty under law because I see him as an ongoing threat to society. This is his latest in a string of felonies.

Jen (20:30)
Yeah.

Jan Canty (20:49)
And he's older, this was planned because he clubbed him to death before he dragged him into the bathtub. He had a club there and he knew what he was doing. That club was ready. And I said, for him, he's a loss cause For Don Marie Spence, even though she'd had a sexual relationship with my husband for 18 months and helped drain our finances to the point where I was $30,000 in debt in 1985 dollars.

I said to the court, she is not a threat to society. She's young and stupid and she's swayed by drugs and John Carl Frye, she's under his control. So here's what I want for her. I would like her to have jail time, but minimum. I would like her to have home monitoring. I would like her to go through drug rehab and I would like her to have a volunteer work as part of her sentence. And they gave me everything I wanted except the volunteer work.

So she was out literally before I could even sell my house. But I wanted that because the taxpayers of Wayne County were broke. They could not afford to keep financing these felons decade after decade. So why do it? She's not a threat to society. And she wasn't. She got straight, she got clean, she went and got her degree in college and yada yada. She did okay. I've never had contact with her, but I've kept tabs on her. So society didn't hurt because of her.

Jen (22:17)
Jan.

Jan Canty (22:18)
But my father

saying that was very beneficial.

Jen (22:21)
Yeah. know, Jan, you're an amazing woman to be able to step away from that pain, that anguish that you had, to look at it in a reality kind of way, you know? Like you were looking at it as you had been taught as a psychologist, I can imagine. Yeah. Exactly. So you were able to step away.

Jan Canty (22:42)
Yes, as my parents raised me.

Jen (22:50)
from that emotion, which is not easy for anyone, not at all, and look at it in reality.

Jan Canty (22:53)
Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

And being a psychologist also helped me, and I'm not saying it was a cakewalk, but being a psychologist helped me, for example, when I had night terrors and when the nightmare started, I thought, yeah, that's right on time. And I wasn't frightened by them. It wasn't to me a sign of mental illness. It was like, yeah, here we go. And they were awful and they were repetitive and they lasted a long time, but I wasn't scared by them. So I guess what I'm trying to say is it doesn't spare you the reality and the

symptoms of trauma, but it did help me put it in a box. And I learned in my training as a psychologist that what you do when things overwhelm you is you find a quiet space, you let it come, you think about it, you write it out, you imagine it, you let it come in full force, whatever it is that overwhelms you. And you don't shy from it and you absorb it. And then you put a timer out there.

for 15, 20 minutes and at the end of that you say, that's enough. I've looked at it, I faced it down. I'm going to put it back on the shelf and go about my day. And then you do something physical to help drain the energy off. That way, what you're doing is you're not in denial because you faced it, but neither are you overwhelmed by it because you put it back on the shelf. And you do that periodically throughout the day, if you need to in the beginning and throughout the month as you need to, as time passes.

And you walk, you're walking that line between acceptance and getting on with life. And I did that too. And I'm not saying I was successful every day. There were days I could not get out of bed and I did have a lot of physical health problems. lost a lot of my hair. I went into menopause. I never returned out of that. And I had to go through AIDS testing. That was part of my physical challenges because of his involvement with her and AIDS had just been discovered.

The Elyssia test had just come out and my doctor said to me, you know, the results of your tests show that you're not, you're not, you have not contracted AIDS or however, ⁓ it's a seven year window. It could show up a year from now, six months from now, six years from now, you're not out of the woods yet. So I had that burden to carry for years. But again, I thought about the people that I'd met who'd never had the right to go to a doctor.

I mean, I saw a woman that had a growth on her ear that passed her shoulder and weighed her head down like this for years. She'd never see a doctor in her whole life. I saw children with splinters in their eyes from wood burning fires that were swollen like this. We were able to get the splinters out and give her antibiotics because we were there. We had physicians in our group, but ordinarily you just live with it.

And I used that same framework when I was diagnosed with cancer. It's like, okay, this isn't good, but I've got insurance, I've got good doctors, I'm otherwise healthy and I'm healthy enough to undergo the treatment. Let's do it. Come on, bring it on. And I just did it.

Jen (26:08)
Yeah.

I'd like to go back to talking about how you would sit with the discomfort and the feelings that you were having and then giving yourself a timer and putting it away. ⁓ My therapist says that a lot, like we'll talk about something, my trauma, and we'll talk about it during the whole session. And then she'll say, okay, what does the box that you

Jan Canty (26:25)
Huh.

Jen (26:34)
want to put this in look like. So visualizing, yes, like visualizing putting what you were sitting with away and compartmentalizing it. People think compartmentalizing is a bad thing, but it's not.

Jan Canty (26:37)
It's very similar,

No, it's adaptive. It is. If you use

it properly, it is. And for me, one of the biggest things that I had to put away was my rage. I'm not an angry person by nature. I was so full of rage. I was so full of rage, it was irrational. I'd go into the grocery store and I'd look at a dozen eggs back in the day, that's all you could buy them, or a loaf of bread and I think, why don't they package things for one person?

Why do they think everybody lives in a family? Or I'd see people walking hand in hand and I'd think, they don't know what they're doing. Life isn't like that. Life is just wait. I was so negative and I knew that. And so I kept, withdrew because I I don't want, I wouldn't want to be around me right now. So I didn't subject myself to anybody, you know? And ⁓ that was easy to do because I lived alone. So I did it.

Jen (27:39)
⁓ no.

Yeah.

So you decided, you left Detroit and you started teaching and you were working on yourself and going international, doing all these beautiful things for others. And you were looking at it in the sense of, well, I don't have it as bad as others, like the comparison. you know,

I use DBT and I usually try to shy away from the comparisons. in this case, this really was able to turn you around. Did it give you hope?

Jan Canty (28:19)
Right, they can be negative, right.

Yeah.

It gave me appreciation more than anything. Like I came home appreciating having a toilet, appreciating paved roads, appreciating the fact that I had vaccinations in my body. I appreciated the fact that I could turn on the tap water and know I could drink it. Those things I took for granted. And as a matter of fact, when my daughter turned into a little princess at age 12, I went to Africa with her and I said,

She's going to experience the same thing. She had the same reaction. She came home, she hugged the toilet. Oh my God, it feels so good to be home. And we took three showers a day when we got home, you know? When I went to India, I did not have a shower for a month. Nothing. So part of my physical rehabilitation for myself also was going to the gym. And I met a group of phenomenal women. Five of us worked out four mornings a week at 6.30 sharp.

Jen (29:10)
⁓

Wow, yeah, yeah.

Jan Canty (29:30)
And if you didn't show up, you better have a very good reason. They made me accountable. And we did that two, three years every four mornings a week, 6.30 together. I'm still friends with them. And we ended up doing triathlons together. And that was part of it. And boy, the runner's high that you get, that's a true thing. You feel like you got a motor on your back. And to feel that strength and to feel that accomplishment and

And, and, and when you do, at least the ones we were in, the women's triathlons are very different from the men's in this sense. Nobody crossed, no, there is no last person that crosses the finish line alone. That's not allowed. The last person over the finish line is always accompanied by somebody. So you'll never feel like I'm the last person. My husband rolled his eyes when I told him that one, but, my friend and I made a point to cross the finish lines together. And it's a bond. It was so fun. I.

Jen (30:26)
Yeah.

Jan Canty (30:29)
That was part of my healing. But the final piece was my podcast. Because with that, I got to meet other homicide survivors for the first time in my life. Interview after interview. And the things that they said were like, yeah, I get that. I could finish their sentences for them. It was like we spoke the same language. It was so gratifying. It was so... I could breathe again. And that was the final...

Jen (30:33)
Mmm.

Jan Canty (30:58)
peace I needed for healing. didn't even know, I didn't go into it for that. I went into it as an advocate to help others and talk about the realities that true crime doesn't address and court dramas don't address, like the, you know, the what comes after murder. But I got as much out of it as they did. I truly did. And I'm grateful to every single one of them that showed up with nothing but their story in a microphone.

talking out into the void, not sharing who's listening or what their reactions would be. But they did and they trusted me and that trust meant everything. I was flattered, I was appreciative. I felt I owed them. I don't know how you feel, but I found that the, least in my circle,

The podcast community was like its own little world and you meet people that helped you along the way. This is the kind of pop filter you need. This is the headphones. This is the setting and they, they wasn't competitive. Maybe it is in other circles, but I didn't find that. And so that was a opened another window. And so these were some of the things that happened when like Matt was talking about when he said someday long from now, it'll make sense to you and you'll put it in its place.

And now when I look back on it, I'm like, I don't know whether this was meant to be my calling or not, but it feels that way. It's like, I'm going to turn this into a plus no matter what. And I was fortunate. I wasn't murdered. could have been. John Carl Fry had our address and he was rage laden until he was caught and confined. It could have been both of us. And I was spared.

And it wasn't an easy thing, betrayal that I felt. man, was I angry. But here I am today and looking back on it, I survived and I'm hoping I helped other people along the way.

Jen (33:01)
Yeah, community. think my listeners at this point, going into it, there's always that community aspect of things that you found others who have gone through the same thing, who understand the pain that you had, the emotions that carried with it, the PTSD that came from it in its own unique way as someone who is the survivor of a homicide.

Jan Canty (33:03)
Right.

One day I sat down and I think it was my second year of the podcast and I sat down and I listened to many, many episodes back to back to back. And what I was trying to listen for is commonalities. And what I came away from after listening to this for like a day and a half was that while the murders themselves were unique or the traumas themselves were unique, no two were alike.

But boy, the aftermath had a lot of parallels. The social withdrawal, the anger, the fear, the insomnia, et cetera, et It was like, here we go. mean, it was fairly predictable what was gonna happen. And that's what led me to my book, What Now? Because I wanted to express to people, you're not crazy if these things happen. This is the part of your brain and what happens and why you're functioning the way you do.

what you can do about it. I don't want people going through this thinking they're nuts. It feels like you are, but you know, it's a life altering a moment.

Jen (34:30)
Absolutely. And I've started to think of podcasts as my own little therapy group, especially my podcast because I meet so many dynamic and outstanding human beings. Right, yeah, who give a unique perspective, but also share, like you said, the commonality, which is so important.

Jan Canty (34:40)
I get that. I get that.

that otherwise you'd never meet.

Right,

right. And it's wonderful when I talk to people from other countries, other continents. ⁓ It just makes it the community seem smaller and the world seems smaller as if it is a community, you know.

Jen (35:11)
Yes, yes. So tell us a little bit more about domino effect of murder.

Jan Canty (35:17)
Domino Effect of Murder is in its sixth season and I'm sad to say I'm gonna have to be closing it out because of a progressive hearing loss. ⁓ I even find headphones aren't enough and ⁓ that's very frustrating as you know when you're doing editing or I don't want to keep saying to guess what, what, what did they say? I don't want to misunderstand them. But it doesn't mean I'm giving up. What I'm doing

Jen (35:26)
Okay.

Jan Canty (35:44)
But the ⁓ podcast itself is probably, I'd say 90 % of the guests are ⁓ other homicide survivors, but I've also had on detectives and forensic examiners. I even have interviewed two murderers. so it's, it's, and I've interviewed people from crime scene cleanup companies or biohazard companies, and people who have been wrongly.

Jen (36:00)
Wow.

Jan Canty (36:11)
charged with and convicted and incarcerated of murder when they didn't do it because that's another domino effect of homicide. And that's what spurred me to get involved in the Innocence Project, which I go to every year. And it reinforces how big this problem is and it affects many more people than the family. And when people are wrongly convicted, that's a whole nother show. What I could talk about there. The last Innocence Project,

conference I went to, brought my daughter who's a budding social worker and I said, I want you and she wants to work in a prison setting. And I'm saying, great, but I'd rather have you work with people that are wrongly convicted than rightly convicted and just go with me. And she, her eyes were opened, you know, but my podcast means a lot and it's a, it's a, my baby and I don't like giving it up, but what I'm going to be doing is pivoting it into something else, which is I'm, working with somebody else on getting a national.

gathering of homicide survivors for September 11th of 2026 to 2028 in Washington state, because there hasn't been one, at least in decades that I'm aware of. And we need that. We need community. And what better way than to get out of the computer and get up and rub elbows with people. And I want to make it more support oriented and network oriented than anything, although I have lined up two speakers.

The first one is going to be an attorney who works advocating for victims. She's a victims rights attorney. That's what her practice is. She used to be a prosecuting attorney, but now she supports and goes to court for supporting victims in court, regardless if it's a rape case or whatever it might be. She'll be the plenary speaker. And then I have someone else lined up from Canada who will speak about the missing and murdered and indigenous women and girls and that whole saga and awful tragedy.

that we don't hear enough about. And so it's still in the making, but that's what's planned and I'm excited and looking forward to it.

Jen (38:16)
I'm excited for you. I'm excited about it. This is going to be so powerful because you're such a powerful woman. Yes, you are. I really hope that you truly see that. You own your power. You own your vibrance and your success. And it's...

Jan Canty (38:19)
Yeah.

⁓ Thank you.

I'm looking

at what I do now as my legacy because of my cancer. It's not curable, it's treatable, thought, always have, it has been my life, how I feel. I always feel like there's so much to do and so little time to do it and I gotta get going. So that's what spurs my writing and the podcast and now the book and this interview and others like it because there's just such a big need out there.

Jen (39:05)
You're right,

there really is. So one question for you, if you could go back to 1985 you and give her advice, what would you give her?

Jan Canty (39:19)
This is survivable. You will get to the other side of this. It will make sense to you one day. And it's going to be a very long, difficult, expensive journey. You're going to pay for it physically, financially, socially, vocationally, spiritually, and emotionally. But you will get there. And thank God you had the parents you did because you're prepared.

You'll do it.

Jen (39:50)
Yeah, that's such important advice. I can only imagine that it can be so devastating for a homicide victim to be able to get themselves back out into the world and to want to be seen again.

Jan Canty (40:08)
Yes,

and that's why moving helped me so much, but other people don't have that option. If your kids are in school and you don't have the financial wherewithal or whatever, you're stuck and it's horrible. ⁓ You take it a step and that's especially true if you live in a small town. I've interviewed people that have been in that situation and they'll go into the grocery store. Everybody knows your business and your family and where you live and they get interrogated as if they're a celebrity and they're not.

So my advice to people in the public is back off. I wish we could return to the days back in the 1920s when we had armbands that were black and you could wear them and said, I'm in grief right now, leave me alone. We should, wouldn't it?

Jen (40:49)
We should bring that back. My God, that would be incredible if people actually

went along with it. I don't see society going along with that anymore, but it's all sound bites. It's all getting the juicy bits. It makes me think, I do watch true crime a lot, and I think that's part of my own trauma.

Jan Canty (41:02)
Yes.

Right.

Jen (41:17)
And it gives me pause now to really think about who is behind all of this that needs to be protected. Right.

Jan Canty (41:25)
And what's the sequela of it? What happens

five, 10, 15, 20? Like right now, two of my friends now that were on my podcast, they're dealing with the ⁓ convicted criminal who served their time is getting out this month. And they're just as angry as the day they went in and they're going right back to the neighborhood where they did the crime. So it never ends.

Jen (41:41)
Ugh.

Wow. No.

Jan Canty (41:50)
I was harassed by the son of the man who murdered my husband for writing my first book, Life Divided, because it put his father who murdered my husband in a bad light. Well, duh. So he threatened me online. Fortunately, it was online and the FBI took it seriously. So I'm always thinking about that too. You know, he's a convicted felon. He hates my guts. He threatened me. You look over your shoulder, I mean,

This idea that somehow you get closure is a fallacy. The society wants a Hollywood ending that will not come. It doesn't, it perpetuates. A guilty verdict does not mean it's over. Or the end of a true crime show where they're putting handcuffs doesn't mean it's over. Not for the victims anyway.

Jen (42:37)
Yes, it's so true. So Jan, where can we find you?

Jan Canty (42:43)
It's easy. made it really easy. The simple place to find me is on my website, which is www.jancantyphd.com. And on there I have an active blog, which I really try to keep up on a variety of topics related to homicide or suicide or trauma and my books and speaking engagements and other things.

⁓ that's the and i'm on tick tock a lot too My daughter convinced me of that i'm like mom you want to try this? I'm like, I don't know about that, but i've done it i've enjoyed it and I am i'm on tick tock here and then And i've met other wonderful people there too. I network with them as well and found guests for my podcast from there so that's where people can find me and ⁓ Thank you, thank you so

Jen (43:34)
can't wait to follow you on TikTok.

All of that will be in the show notes and including your books and any way possible that Jan can be a bright light in your life. Please go to her website. And again, I'm so thankful to you for coming on the show and sharing your story.

Jan Canty (44:01)
Well, I thank you for the opportunity and platform because I'm, I, my sincere hope is that somebody listening out there has been positively impacted and feels if nothing else, like they can get through the day now because of it. That would be a wonderful thing for me and for this.

Jen (44:16)
Yes,

yes, that's the point of the show. It's if one person can find solace in this or, you know, feel that community. It's it's

Jan Canty (44:19)
Yes.

Right? And

when they feel that, they're more capable of paying it forward to somebody else. It's like throwing a rock in a lake, you know, it has that ripple effect. And, you know, there's an old saying, know, singularly we are a drop, but together we're an ocean.

Jen (44:32)
Yes.

Oh, that's a wonderful saying. I'm going to have to write that one down and put it up on my wall. Well, thank you again, Jan.

Jan Canty (44:52)
You're welcome. Jen, I appreciate the opportunity and good luck to you and your listeners.

Jen (44:57)
You too.

When Not Yet Becomes Right Now (44:59)
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the podcast. This show is produced by Phoenix Freed LLC and I'm your producer, Jen Ginty. We hope you found today's conversation inspiring. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the podcast. This show is produced by Phoenix Freed LLC and I'm your producer, Jen Ginty. We hope you found today's conversation insightful and inspiring. If you have a story of your own about when a not yet moment became right now,

We encourage you to reach out and share it. You can find more information about being a guest on our show at whennotyetbecomesrightnow.com. Remember, you are not alone on your journey, whether it's a journey of healing, growth, or transformation. Every story matters. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you next time with another inspiring episode.