Why Does Elijah Vue’s Mother Face Sixty Years While the Man She Gave Him to Faces Life?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Jesse Vang faces three felonies with repeater enhancers, including a charge that carries life in prison. Katrina Baur faces up to 60 years. Both have pled not guilty. Vang's defense has already lost motions for a change of venue, outside jurors over sequestration, and a fight over forensic evidence is still pending. Beyond the courtroom, there's a systematic question this case forces. How does a man with Vang's record, still on federal supervision, end up with unsupervised access to a three-year-old? Clearly, nobody's checking in on Vang when he's supposedly under this federal supervision. So that's not happening. Or if it is, it's somehow they're not catching this.
That's an interesting element to this. But let's go with what's going on here in terms of what these people could possibly face going forward. 60 years for her life, for him, and all the questions about a fair trial.
I don't know. Is fair trial that huge of a concern here? I mean, considering, I think, almost anyone that could look at this, and just the sheer evidence of it, it's damning. Doesn't really matter where you live. I get you already have it in your mind, all the information, but I would think a jury who hears any of this is gonna be in the same boat pretty quick.

**Lisa** (1:35)
I do think so.
I think what is going to happen, and this is just from somebody who's covered this kind of thing before. The crime beat has always been my favorite beat. My least favorite is politics. We won't go into that. But the crime beat has always been my favorite beat. And what I think I'm going to see when it comes to the trial. Now, Jesse Vang's trial is set for November of this year with alternate dates set in February next year and April of next year, in case they have to move into one. Katrina Baur's not set at all. She's just got preliminary hearings coming up and hearings and motions, and that's it. Now, they have different attorneys.
If I were Katrina Baur, I would be testifying against Jesse Vang in order to reduce my sentence, because Katrina did not…

**Todd** (2:44)
She did not physically commit it, correct? Right.

**Lisa** (2:48)
She moved… She…
You know, Elijah, you're going to go stay with Uncle Jesse for a while. Oh, that's a terrible way to put it. You're going to stay with Jesse for a while, and you're going to learn to be a man. But she didn't physically do that. She encouraged stuff.

**Tony Brueski** (3:04)
That's enough.

**Lisa** (3:05)
Yeah. But I can honestly see her flipping.

**Tony Brueski** (3:13)
And is that a good move for the state? Should the state be encouraging that? I hope to God they don't offer her some sort of a plea deal on this.

**Lisa** (3:23)
I would almost put money on it, Tony. Almost put money on it. And the reason why I say that is because she can tell them, you know, after this happened, this is what he told me, or we said this, or I said this.
She is directly connected to it all.

**Tony Brueski** (3:42)
Yeah, through the text messages, she's pretty damning herself. I mean, it's not like she's, you know, it's not like she dropped him off with Uncle Jesse, you know, from Full House and thought, oh, you know, they're going to go to a Jesse and the Rippers concert, you know, and the Beach Boys are going to be doing backup and it's going to be wonderful. They're going to sing forever and it'll be a hit song. You know, it's, I know, I know too much about Watch Full House as a child, but it's, it wasn't that. I mean, she dropped him off and then she's going back and forth with him about, I want him to fear you. I mean, she's just as villainous as he is.

**Lisa** (4:20)
Yes, yes. But because he was the one who did the physical act, because he was the one that allegedly committed the murder, allegedly hid the body, allegedly conducted a report to police of him being missing. She could probably flip.
The only reason I'm thinking that is because none of her trials have been set.

**Tony Brueski** (4:47)
Yeah.

**Lisa** (4:47)
Nothing, it's all pretrial motions and hearings. Nothing has been set for her.
He has tried everything to get, you know, it moved and all this. He writes constant, constant motions from his jail cell when he didn't have a lawyer for such a long time. He was writing motions, you know, you can't take me to trial. I don't have a lawyer. Get me a lawyer. Nobody wanted to represent him.