Watch the video on YouTube: Detective Realizes The Witness Is Actually The Killer — EXPLORE WITH US
Explore With Us's Andre Brown Video: When the Only Witness Is the Suspect
On January 2, 2017, Helen Frazier called 911 in Des Moines to report that her boyfriend, Andre Brown, had been stabbed by a visitor to their home. She was the only witness, and police arrested the man she named. Explore With Us's 77-minute documentary follows what happened when detectives started checking her story — and kept finding that it changed.
Explore With Us builds its documentaries around interrogation and interview footage, and this case gives the format unusually strong material: a witness interviewed repeatedly over weeks, giving a different account in successive sittings. Published in January 2024, the video has drawn more than 5.5 million views.
The interest here is not a twist in the crime itself but in the investigation. A single stab wound, a witness who seemed cooperative, and an arrest made quickly — then a slow, methodical unpicking, driven by phone records, inconsistencies, and the interviews themselves.
At a Glance
| Video | “Detective Realizes The Witness Is Actually The Killer” |
|---|---|
| Channel | Explore With Us |
| Published | January 7, 2024 |
| Length | ~77 minutes |
| Views | 5,562,780 |
| Subject | The 2017 murder of Andre Brown in Des Moines; Helen Frazier's shifting witness accounts and conviction |
What the Video Covers
The video opens on January 2, 2017, in Des Moines, Iowa. Brown, 55, was found at his East 9th Street home with a single stab wound to the upper chest. His girlfriend, Helen Frazier, 51, told officers and detectives that a homeless friend, 69-year-old Milton Leake, had come to the house, argued with Brown over money he owed, stabbed him, and fled with a bloody knife. Leake was arrested on the strength of that account.
The middle section follows the story coming apart. Frazier's accounts shifted across repeated recorded interviews — naming different people in successive versions, including a man investigators could not find because he did not exist. The video shows how detectives worked through each version, checking the people she named and eliminating them, while other evidence gathered weight: Frazier had called her mother for about eleven minutes before she called 911, and her mother later acknowledged that Helen had told her on that call that she had stabbed Andre.
The final section covers the arrest and the court outcome. Frazier was arrested on March 6, 2017, and charged with first-degree murder and two counts of malicious prosecution for falsely implicating Leake and another man. At her bench trial she argued the stabbing was accidental and in self-defence; the court rejected that account, finding her guilty of second-degree murder and both malicious prosecution counts. She was sentenced to 52 years in prison, with parole eligibility only after 35 years.
Strengths
The successive interviews are the evidence. Because Frazier was interviewed repeatedly, viewers can watch a witness account change in real time rather than being told that it did. That makes the video a clear illustration of why investigators re-interview cooperative-seeming witnesses instead of simply recording a first statement.
It shows the cost of a false accusation. Milton Leake was arrested for a murder he did not commit on the word of the person who did commit it. The video keeps that fact in view, and the malicious prosecution convictions underline it: the false story was itself a crime, not just a failed lie.
The phone evidence is explained plainly. The eleven-minute call before the 911 call, and what Frazier's mother told investigators about it, are presented as a checkable timeline point rather than a dramatic reveal. It is a good example of ordinary records doing decisive work.
Weaknesses
The runtime is long for the material. At about 77 minutes, the documentary gives the interviews room to breathe, but some stretches repeat points about Frazier's inconsistencies that earlier sections have already established. A tighter edit would lose little.
Brown himself stays thinly drawn. The video is organised around the interviews, so viewers learn more about the investigation than about Andre Brown's life — his military service, his work, and the family who lost him get limited attention compared with the interrogation story.
Read the narration as a telling, not the record. As with other videos in this format, the analysis layered over the footage is the channel's interpretation. The Iowa Court of Appeals record in State v. Frazier, which summarises the same interviews, is the firmer source for what was actually said and decided.
Who Should Watch
- Interrogation-footage viewers — repeated interviews with the same witness, changing across sittings, are the centre of this video.
- False-accusation case viewers — a documented case of an innocent man arrested on a fabricated identification, and of that fabrication being prosecuted.
- Explore With Us regulars — a long-form, footage-led entry in the channel's familiar documentary style.
- Investigation-process viewers — phone records, elimination of named suspects, and patient re-interviewing, shown step by step.
8/10
A strong interrogation documentary — the changing witness accounts are genuinely instructive, the false accusation against Milton Leake is kept in view, and the court outcome is followed through. Long for its material, and lighter on Andre Brown's life than on the interviews.
Source: EXPLORE WITH US on YouTube (“Detective Realizes The Witness Is Actually The Killer,” published January 7, 2024); case background via Oxygen's Snapped coverage of the Helen Frazier case and the Iowa Court of Appeals record in State v. Frazier (2021).