Chapter 2 | Jessica

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Heads Up. This series contains graphic descriptions of violence. On the morning of August first, two thousand, a teacher preparing for the first day of classes noticed something on the ground near the flower beds behind the Mayfield Middle School.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: I saw this sandal laying right by the.

00:00:23
Speaker 3: Door.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: There's a little concrete path there, and I saw the sandal laying there, and I just thought, you know, I wonder what that sandal's doing there.

00:00:31
Speaker 1: As her sight shifted away from the sandal, scanning the school grounds, the teacher saw something else.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: And when I looked over to the left is when I saw the body.

00:00:46
Speaker 4: There's not a lot of bodies found in Mayfield, Kentucky. When you heard there was on, what were you thinking, Oh, our man was racing.

00:00:59
Speaker 5: But you know, when you've never had nothing like this happen before, it kind of gives you a little, you know, a little thought that, no, it's not happening to me.

00:01:14
Speaker 1: This is Joe Curran. For two days before Jessica's body was found, he and his wife, Jean had been searching for their eighteen year old daughter. The next day, police identified the body with the help of dental records, and Joe and Jan it was Jessica. They recognized the jewelry on their daughter's hands.

00:01:38
Speaker 6: It's the loneliest crime, saying, I'm ere saying, I've saying a lot.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: You met Dara, a woman on the last episode. Like me, Dara has poured over pictures and video of the crime scene.

00:01:51
Speaker 7: She just looked as if she had been tossed out the back her. She was, you know, all the jewelryes still honor and it was everything that she had that she felt. It was a value she had on her still. But she was all by herself. It was just long ley.

00:02:15
Speaker 1: According to police, Jessica's murder was the first in Mayfield in over a year and a half. They told the press that the school grounds appeared to be the scene of the crime, that there were signs of a struggle and then a homicide.

00:02:29
Speaker 5: We're getting that information that she was beaten, strangled, staled and burned. I don't know how I could get much worse, and then her body was dumped behind the middle school.

00:02:49
Speaker 1: I first met Joe Curran in twenty twenty three. He was born in Graves County in nineteen fifty seven, just a year after Mayfield started to desegregate its public schools.

00:03:00
Speaker 5: I'm kind of a country boy, and I went to some few schools out in the county and they didn't have any you know, black students at all.

00:03:07
Speaker 1: You were the only black kid.

00:03:09
Speaker 5: Yes, What was that like? Well, I mean, it's kind of like most of my life.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: Joe was among that first generation of black children to study in what had been white only schools in a county that has always been majority white ninety percent as of the last census. This is the world Joe grew up in.

00:03:29
Speaker 5: You know, I ride horses and go to rodeos and stuff, and a lot of places that I go basketball games and football games, and it's a whole stadium full of people. A lot of times, I'm only back person there. I go to a lot of farmers meetings, three hundred people. I may be the only black person in the room. So I mean, it don't mean anything to me.

00:03:47
Speaker 1: And Joe learned to thrive in this world. He played defense for the high school football team, the beloved Mayfield Cardinals, worked as a bailiff, and ran his own business.

00:03:57
Speaker 5: I'm a fish farmer, so I'm eight fish pond.

00:04:00
Speaker 1: What kind of fish?

00:04:02
Speaker 8: Catfish?

00:04:05
Speaker 1: He became a lieutenant in the fire department and went to church every Sunday. Joe Curran did write by Mayfield, so when his daughter was brutally killed, Joe thought Mayfield would do right by him. Instead, local police bungled the case and it went unsolved for years. This is Graves County, Chapter two, Jessica. Depending on who you ask, there are dozens of versions of what happened to Jessica between the times she was reportedly last seen and the time her body was found. You already heard one version last episode, but that's different from the story about the final days of Jessica Current's life that were first put on the record. This is according to my team's own reporting, court testimony, police interviews, and private investigator interviews, which you'll be hearing throughout this episode, all of which have been edited for length and clarity. In July of two thousand, had a seven month old baby named Zion. She was close with her family, shared a room at home with Zion and her baby's sister, but she wanted her independence, so Jessica got her own apartment at an affordable housing complex in the southeast part of town, so she was slow to fully move out.

00:06:19
Speaker 5: Joe says the first whole week she stayed at home. In the second week, she moved out on Thursday. She went to her house on Thursday, and she was there on Friday and in Saturday.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: That Saturday morning, Jessica dropped off Zion with her parents and she went to hang out with some girlfriends, including her boyfriend's cousin, Veneisha's Stubblefield. You heard her name last episode. Vnesha and Jessica had become friends earlier that year.

00:06:47
Speaker 6: Me and Jessica just started really actually hanging out.

00:06:49
Speaker 9: In two thousand, she was going to a Duart Lunder Center to get her ged form when she dropped out of high school when she was pregnant.

00:06:57
Speaker 6: She went to the GD school.

00:07:00
Speaker 1: They crossed paths after class.

00:07:03
Speaker 10: Well, she was coming from Gd's school when I was coming from summer school.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: Venetia, a wiry girl with giant eyes, was among the very first people interviewed by police. She was sixteen at the time. According to Venetia, she Jessica and a few other girls hung out at a friend's house playing cards and having drinks. That night, we all sat.

00:07:31
Speaker 5: Third play ors listen to music.

00:07:34
Speaker 1: We had a few drinks.

00:07:37
Speaker 11: Wad it.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, in another part of town. There was a party on a street called Chriss Drive. It's about a ten minute drive south from where Jessica was hanging and a little more rural, surrounded by fields hanging out or a handful of locals and twenty four year old Quincy Cross Quincy in Tennessee, but a friend had convinced him to go to Mayfield and hang. He could even sell some drugs there.

00:08:06
Speaker 6: He was like, come on, man, if you go, we'll bring you back later on.

00:08:10
Speaker 1: Some partygoers say Quincy stood out that night, not just because he was an out of towner, but because he was rowdy. He kept wanting to play drinking games and was fidgeting with his braided belt.

00:08:23
Speaker 7: He had aided belt at home, and he was swinging it around the night.

00:08:28
Speaker 12: Because while he was talking to us in the living room, he was flickering the end of it, kind of flicking around while he was talking.

00:08:35
Speaker 13: It stuck out in my mind because he had taken the belt off and was like swinging it around and wrapping it around his hands and making noise with it. And I think at some point Ashley and I both kind of looked at each other and thought, you know, that's annoying.

00:08:57
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, back at the other gathering, the low key one with the girls playing cards, Jessica decided to call it a night around one or two am. Her friends tried to get her a ride home, but no one was available, so Jessica had to go back to her apartment on foot. Venetia walked Jessica outside to say goodbye.

00:09:18
Speaker 14: We stood there wait talk for a brief minute, then she left the shoe.

00:09:24
Speaker 5: Up by herself.

00:09:26
Speaker 1: Venicia says she told Jessica to take care and watched her disappear into the night. So this was the night that we think everything happened. She leaves there and it starts.

00:09:45
Speaker 6: She's walking somewhere along here.

00:09:48
Speaker 1: I charted that walk with Joe Curran and a private investigator. It would have been at least a forty minute journey alone in the dark.

00:09:57
Speaker 6: But that'd be a long walk for her at that time of day.

00:10:01
Speaker 12: Not that she wasn't capable of doing it, but I don't know how smart that would be.

00:10:07
Speaker 1: The middle school is halfway to Jessica's place, and it would have been desolate.

00:10:12
Speaker 12: This town pretty much dies at dark.

00:10:20
Speaker 1: Back at the party on Chris Drive, Quincy asked to borrow someone's car around daybreak. He says he wanted to go find food.

00:10:29
Speaker 6: I'm like, man, I'm hungry.

00:10:30
Speaker 10: Now, I'm like, man, how do you get to town?

00:10:33
Speaker 5: So he pointed in a direction.

00:10:34
Speaker 13: I asked him, let me use his car.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: But some of the other partygoers remember it differently.

00:10:40
Speaker 12: He was on the phone quite frequently that night and was calling back to university in different places, saying that, you know, he found some women at a hotel or something or other.

00:10:49
Speaker 1: He recalls Quincy saying he wanted to get.

00:10:51
Speaker 12: Some bitious, sorry, get some bitches.

00:10:54
Speaker 1: So he borrowed the car and drove off. But remember it's two thousand, he'd been partying. We didn't have Google Maps or anything like that back then. So Quincy says, he got lost on those rural roads.

00:11:08
Speaker 15: I can end up making a big loop, a big old circle.

00:11:12
Speaker 6: So when I do that, the car runs.

00:11:15
Speaker 5: Out of gas.

00:11:16
Speaker 1: It stalled about two miles from Chris Drive. That's when a local jailer saw Quincy pulled over and asked if he needed help.

00:11:24
Speaker 6: I popped his trunk and this gas.

00:11:26
Speaker 10: Can you know what I'm saying, It's in this trunk soul.

00:11:29
Speaker 1: The jailer watched him put gas in the car and spill some on himself.

00:11:34
Speaker 10: He's standing right beside me, so he see me drunk, a couple of trumps and gas on my parts.

00:11:39
Speaker 5: Laid he seat me do it.

00:11:44
Speaker 1: There's no disputing that the jailer found Quincy putting gas in a car, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus as to where exactly the gas can came from. Here's the car's owner at trial.

00:11:59
Speaker 14: Is that your gas?

00:12:00
Speaker 12: No, sir, I didn't have a gas can my car. Did mister crosstay where he got that?

00:12:05
Speaker 8: Guess?

00:12:06
Speaker 12: Said he stole it from building or something somewhere around the road. He got the gas in my call or try to get the gas station.

00:12:15
Speaker 1: Either way. Around seven fifty am, a state trooper driving by noticed Quincy right away.

00:12:22
Speaker 5: He had no shirt on.

00:12:23
Speaker 2: He could see multiple tattoos.

00:12:26
Speaker 14: He had a pair of dark pants on with no belt.

00:12:32
Speaker 1: Quincy quibbles with some of those details.

00:12:35
Speaker 10: I had a key shirt on, he kept saying, I didn't have no ke shirt on. I did have a T shirt home.

00:12:40
Speaker 1: But the trooper says he specifically noticed Quincy didn't have a belt on.

00:12:46
Speaker 13: The pants were drooping.

00:12:48
Speaker 14: I could see his box or shorts. He kept having to pull him up while we were having conversations.

00:12:53
Speaker 1: The state trooper gave Quincy a ride back to Chris Drive, and when the trooper went to retrieve the stalled car as he found marijuana seeds on the front seat and a handgun in the glovebox. That gave him enough to go back to Chris Drive and search all the party goers for more drugs or weapons, and Quincy, along with a few others at the party, ended up getting arrested early Sunday for drug possession. One of the guys booked with Quincy remembers the smell any.

00:13:27
Speaker 10: Stong cup gasoline.

00:13:29
Speaker 5: I mean it was just breaking on a smell I gay.

00:13:36
Speaker 1: Later that Sunday morning, Jessica's parents, Joe and Jean, went to pick up Jessica so they could all go to church with Zion, but they didn't find her. At first, Joe thought she's probably still out with friends. When did you realize something was really wrong?

00:13:54
Speaker 5: Well, being working at the fire department in the shrif's department, I knew that a person is a grown up at eighteen. You can't really do nothing with a missing person until so many hours, So I mean, we were already feeling like, you know, something wasn't right, because she hadn't been calling.

00:14:13
Speaker 1: Sunday went by, then Monday, and still no sign of their daughter until the teacher found the body on Tuesday. She'd been burned, part of her dress charred onto her body. Her sandals were strewn as if she'd been dragged or had run. Her underwear was found ripped into next to her on the ground. According to the medical examiner, Jessica appeared to have been hit in the head, her nose was broken, she had some cuts around her face, and what appeared to be stab wounds in her back. He determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma plus strangulation based on another piece of evidence found near Jessica's body, the fragment of a black braided belt laying near her neck. More after the break, for a brief moment in time, Joe Curran had everything he wanted. He and his wife Jean, got married young, and their plan was to have two boys and two girls.

00:15:42
Speaker 5: And I wanted boy first and girl second, and that's the way we had. We had a boy and a girl, and then another boy and a girl.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: All their names start with Jay. Is Jessica the.

00:15:53
Speaker 5: Youngest, No, she's the second oldest.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: Joe Curran is the kind of man who looks like he carries the weight of the world. He stands tall and proud with the build of a football player, but his eyes are sunken and tired, revealing decades of pain.

00:16:15
Speaker 5: And that's a picture of her, her older brother.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: I'm sitting with Joe going through old family photographs.

00:16:22
Speaker 5: This is a picture of my wife and she's holding her.

00:16:25
Speaker 1: There a tiny Jessica in a frilly white dress and white bonnet, probably going to church. Jessica was pretty, with big brown, almond shaved eyes and a wide, perfectly white smile. She looks like Joe, a spitting image of her dad. She usually wore her hair in a cute short bob. And she was tall.

00:16:46
Speaker 5: Yeah, she was about five nine fifteen.

00:16:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's like a little string bean here, tall and skinny. Yeah, and athletic. She ran track and she was a solid nineties teen who liked Tupac and the X Files.

00:17:01
Speaker 5: She was the only one that would watch the X Files with me, and she could kind of keep up with it. My wife gets lost on it and she can't. She can't keep she have the patience.

00:17:11
Speaker 1: So Joe's wife, Jean isn't sitting with us.

00:17:16
Speaker 5: I've apologize for my wife. She's still pretty shook up.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, So you know why. While she's talked to press in the past, Jeane just isn't up for it today. I can't say I blame her. After years of telling strangers about your dead child, what else is there to say except I'm in pain and I miss her.

00:17:38
Speaker 5: I mean she still goes to the down to the grave site at least once or twice the week sometimes. I mean they were close. They were close friends. I mean about as close as you could be for a mother and a daughter, you know, daughter, Yeah, almost like you know, two sisters. And it really really hurt her.

00:17:59
Speaker 1: After two years of reporting on this case, I can say that from all I've gathered, Jessica was sweet and loving, but she was also feisty and brave.

00:18:10
Speaker 3: Jessica cut a boy one time for calling her the Inward, she pulled out a light and.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: Cutting This is an old police interview of Jessica's best friend seeing Jessica once pulled a knife on a boy for calling her the n word.

00:18:25
Speaker 3: If she had a problem, I mean she would I mean, hit you or whatever she felt necessary to defend herself.

00:18:33
Speaker 1: Jessica Lindsay met Jessica Curran at Graves County High.

00:18:39
Speaker 3: I've considered her one of my best friends. She was a very outgoing person, very down to earth. What caught my attention about her in school was that she stood up for people, like when they would get picked on, and she didn't allow that. If she's saying it going on.

00:18:58
Speaker 16: She would put a stop to it.

00:19:00
Speaker 3: So, I mean she was just very you know, very kind girl, very very kind girl. She would pretty much do anything for anybody.

00:19:10
Speaker 1: And she was also a teenager who in the summer of two thousand was getting over a heartache. She had her baby in December nineteen ninety nine, a little boy named Zion, and Jessica thought that baby's dad was a boy named Marcus.

00:19:26
Speaker 3: She used to snake out her bedroom window and I'll say him.

00:19:29
Speaker 1: But after Zion was born, Jessica got the news.

00:19:33
Speaker 3: She was trying to get child sport ordered for Marcus or whatever, and they'd done a daneitis and it came back negative or however they come back. It wasn't his.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: It hit her heart, especially when she realized that if Marcus wasn't the dad, then it had to be a local drug dealer named Jeremy Adams, a guy she barely knew and didn't even like. According to her friend, they had just hung out once and smoked some weed.

00:20:05
Speaker 16: We all went.

00:20:05
Speaker 3: Back to my house and we smoked a blunt and hung out marijuana and we hung out or whatever. And that night he kind of forced Lee took her around the building and had.

00:20:22
Speaker 16: Said they had sex.

00:20:23
Speaker 17: It was like two.

00:20:25
Speaker 3: Seconds they were around there and came back and he walked off and that was that.

00:20:34
Speaker 6: That was that.

00:20:35
Speaker 1: A baby came nine months later.

00:20:38
Speaker 16: She was very upset when she found out it wasn't Mark, So she was very upset. This is after Zion was born. She stopped messing with Marcus and she started messing with.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: Lolo Carlos, Lolo Saxton, Venetia Stubblefield's cousin, and another local drug dealer, a dreamy one at that a year older with sad puppy eyes. They started seeing each other in the spring of two thousand.

00:21:08
Speaker 3: I mean she liked him, she really liked him.

00:21:12
Speaker 1: It was panning out to be a good summer for young Jessica, meeting a boy she liked, moving out on her own so much to look forward to. In the months that followed his daughter's killing, Joe walked around in a daze, in a nightmare. He remembers sitting at a restaurant.

00:21:34
Speaker 5: I was sitting at the table by myself, and this waitress come over and said to me, you look like you lost the last person in the world. It looked like you y'all lost your best friend.

00:21:45
Speaker 1: She didn't know, She.

00:21:45
Speaker 5: Had no clue. She apologized later because she found out what happened and she knew who I was, and she apologized later. She said, I had no clue that you know that was your daughter, because it just showed on my face, me sating there by myself. We'd just show.

00:22:04
Speaker 1: One of the few comforts the Kerran family had was believing that soon, eventually they'd find whoever did this to Jessica, and they'd be able to ask how and why, and hopefully get some sense of justice. The man put in charge of Jessica Kerrn's murder investigation was Tim Fortner, a patrolman who had just been promoted to detective. This was his very first murder investigation, and according to interviews, press reports, and court filings, Fortner and his small town police department were out of their debts. The problem seemed to have started from the get go.

00:22:49
Speaker 7: Here's Dara again, okay, So it took forever for them to rope off the crime scene, right.

00:22:55
Speaker 1: They didn't log who came and went or properly canvassed the neighborhood.

00:23:00
Speaker 6: No statements were taken at the scene.

00:23:03
Speaker 1: They also threw away the maggots they found on Jessica's body. Maggots could have helped determine how long her body had been decomposing. Without them, it was hard for the medical examiner to determine an exact time of death.

00:23:19
Speaker 7: In supplemental reports that I've read by the police, they're like, do we keep her underwear?

00:23:24
Speaker 6: What about the seven up bottle?

00:23:27
Speaker 1: They threw away part of Jessica's dress and a couple rape swabs from other crime scenes were mixed in with the evidence boxes for Jessica's case.

00:23:36
Speaker 6: So no one is in charge. It's the blind leading the blind.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: I found Fortner's number and called him to ask about the investigation. Hello, Hi, I'm looking for mister Tim Fortner. I interrupted his evening at home. Hi, mister Fortner, my name is Maggie Freeling.

00:23:57
Speaker 6: How are you.

00:23:58
Speaker 5: I'm well, how are you?

00:24:00
Speaker 1: He still lives in Kentucky as far as I can tell. His last gig in law enforcement was as a school resource officer in another county, and he hosts a show on the side for WKMS, the local public radio station. I am a journalist and I am reporting on the Jessica Currn case and going through the documents. You were the first responding officer, So I was hoping you'd want to talk. Yeah, I was, but I'm in the middle of dinner and I don't have to be you know, there's nothing to comment on.

00:24:33
Speaker 6: Okay, cool? Appreciated. Yeah, I'm actually in town. Could I meet you tomorrow? Perhaps? Well probably not?

00:24:41
Speaker 1: Probably not as in no, and.

00:24:44
Speaker 5: So it's.

00:24:47
Speaker 6: You know, do you can contact the stake place? Okay? And I should do appreciate your calling me.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: A very polite no.

00:24:55
Speaker 6: You all right?

00:24:56
Speaker 1: You two buye. But Fortner has spoken to the press before, and he's admitted that he wasn't the man for the job. In two thousand and four, he told Tom Mangold, the BBC reporter, that quote, I didn't have a clue what to do next. He said, I didn't know how to organize a crime scene or look for forensic evidence. Frankly, I was scared stiff. He even admitted this to the Currents.

00:25:30
Speaker 5: Told us me and my wife that he had no clue what he was doing. He didn't know what he was doing.

00:25:34
Speaker 1: He tells this to you, The lead detective on your daughter's homicide case, says to you, I don't know what I'm doing.

00:25:40
Speaker 5: He said, I don't know what I'm doing. That's his words.

00:25:47
Speaker 1: On top of that, the Mayfield Police Department was dealing with a flurry of internal investigations and allegations of malfeasance. The chief and assistant chief were ousted and eventually played guilty to felony charges for misusing public funds, including money that police had confiscated from drug arrests. Mayfield Police Department was a mess. Fortner and his team had chased some leads, interviewed many people, and pinpointed a few suspects, but it all fell apart the rookie detective's first big case of failure. In two thousand and three, Fortner quit and the Kentucky State Police had to step in to take over the case. The state police pursued some lines of investigation, but didn't seem to get far either, and as the years went by, Joe had to fight to keep his daughter's case top of mind.

00:26:48
Speaker 5: We've had protests at the courthouse several times. We've had one at Mitch McConnell's office, the leading senator from Kentucky in Paducah.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: Even Reverend in Dell Sharpton's National Action Network got involved.

00:27:03
Speaker 5: We went to Frankfurt, to the Attorney General's office, we went to the FBI office, the YUS Attorney's office. We didn't out all of that stuff.

00:27:17
Speaker 1: But what Joe didn't know at first was that another person was also growing increasingly frustrated by law enforcement failures and decided to stop watching from the sidelines. Susan Golbreth, the citizen sleuth who you met last episode, embarked on a whole investigation of her own, and now she started digging into the files. A name stood out, of.

00:27:43
Speaker 10: Course, both well Quincy Ill last across.

00:27:53
Speaker 1: After the break, Susan said she'd felt a connection to Jessica Currn since the day her body was found, and she went to look at the crime scene that she was called by a divine power to help find her killer, but as far as I can tell, she didn't actually act on that calling until four years after the murder, when Susan began talking to the Kentucky State Police and getting updates on the case.

00:28:39
Speaker 6: Susan, yeah, it's the same, and.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: Started both prying on and cooperating with the investigation.

00:28:47
Speaker 6: Hi, how are you. I'm fine. I'm surprised I had heard from you.

00:28:53
Speaker 15: Well, I've been off and I hadn't been working any of this week.

00:28:57
Speaker 1: In reviewing her correspondence, taper, courtings, and court testimony, I found that at times the detectives kept Susan at arm's length, but they often entertained her ideas and followed up on her tips.

00:29:11
Speaker 15: But Lieutenant Cannon called and said he spoke with you and said that she had some new information or something that you.

00:29:17
Speaker 6: Wanted to know. It was the same information.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: And this emboldened Susan to start conducting a parallel investigation, even though, as she testified in court, she had no experience.

00:29:36
Speaker 14: Education in the area of all no, just a lot of court TV.

00:29:41
Speaker 1: It was also around this time that Susan started working with British journalist Tom Mangold, who flew to Mayfield in the spring of two thousand and four, so he was.

00:29:50
Speaker 14: In Mayfield for ten days when he left.

00:29:54
Speaker 5: I continue to dig.

00:29:56
Speaker 1: Susan kept digging through police records that Tom helped get, interviewing people. She even started wearing a wire.

00:30:04
Speaker 14: I kept a recorder pinned to my body or duct taped at all times.

00:30:09
Speaker 1: All with a main suspect in mind.

00:30:12
Speaker 5: Quincy became the top of the list.

00:30:15
Speaker 1: Susan had seen Jessica's autopsy, pictures from the scene of the crime and the police reports from the weekend she was last seen alive, and there she noticed that a man named Quincy Cross had come to town. Witnesses heard him asking about finding girls, and he had been arrested smelling of gas with his belt missing. So she connected the dots.

00:30:38
Speaker 5: I just know he killed her.

00:30:40
Speaker 1: In an email to Tom, Susan wrote that from the beginning she knew who the suspects were and her job was proving it, and Tom helped her publicize her main suspect's name, starting with his first article in the summer of two thousand and four and subsequent reports through the years. Here's Tom and Susan in a BBC broadcast.

00:31:06
Speaker 8: So here was a man shortly after the murder of Jessica cahnen. His black braided belt is missing because it's round the throat of the dead girl. Correct, and he stinks of gas.

00:31:17
Speaker 17: Yes, everything just started coming together. It was like a deca card just fallen. I really really got emotional because I finally started feeling that there's going to be an.

00:31:29
Speaker 5: End to this.

00:31:30
Speaker 1: Now. Not only did Tom introduce Quincy Cross as his main suspect in his articles, but as far as I can tell, he was the first reporter to really hint at the idea that there was a sexual element to the crime against Jessica. Up until then, every time law enforcement talked about Jessica's case to the press, they did not mention rape or sexual assault. But Tom took those descriptions of Quincy at the party as one and wanting girls and wrote the Quincy's demeanor quote suggested a sexual predator on cocaine end quote. Years later, he would go even further, saying that early on in his reporting, he and Susan knew something more nefarious had occurred.

00:32:18
Speaker 11: We were pretty certain by now that Quincy Cross together with other accomplices, had murdered Jessica in a sex and drugs frenzy.

00:32:26
Speaker 1: In his digging, Tom also found that a small souvenir bat had allegedly gone missing from the car. Quincy had borrowed a bat that, according to Tom, could have been used to bludgeon Jessica since no other weapon had been found. Tom and Susan shared all their findings and theories with the police, but they were both disappointed to learn it was not enough to make an arrest.

00:32:55
Speaker 11: The Kentucky State Police were no closer to arresting the perpetrators than their Happiness predecessors, the Mayfield.

00:33:01
Speaker 1: Police, but Susan did not give up. Instead, she continued to pursue another one of the suspects on her list, Vnesha' Stubblefield, the last known person to see Jessica current alive. Susan already knew Venesha from around town. Remember Mayfield is small.

00:33:24
Speaker 14: I want to say the first time I met her she was thirteen years old.

00:33:28
Speaker 1: But her interactions with Venesha increased when she started investigating the case.

00:33:33
Speaker 14: After two thousand and four is when I talked to her a whole lot more.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: In their first investigation, Mayfield police suspected that Veneisha knew something, but they never really got anywhere with her. Then came Susan. She became convinced that Venetia had to know who killed Jessica. The police let her off too easily. In their recorded conversations, you mostly hear Susan talking trying to convince Vanicia to come clean.

00:34:02
Speaker 18: The reason that no one has pushed you or any further on this for these four years is because no one's really listened to you talk. Well, at the time I've seen you, I listened to you talk.

00:34:11
Speaker 1: I listened.

00:34:12
Speaker 18: No one's done that to this point.

00:34:14
Speaker 15: Wait.

00:34:14
Speaker 18: Wait, that's what I'm saying. I listened to you, and when I listen to you, I hear what you're selling to me. I hasn't anyone has any four years.

00:34:24
Speaker 1: In Susan's mind, if Vanicia knew the killer and the killer was Quincy, then she had to get Vevoenicia to write him out. Susan also tells Vanisiha that if she confesses, she'll help broker a deal with police.

00:34:40
Speaker 18: And honestly, when we were in the car today, I just felt that you were going to tell me. Then I really did. And I kept thinking, Okay, I could go to Mills and I could say, look, she's willing to talk, you've got to guarantee your safety and guarantee her jail time.

00:34:53
Speaker 1: But still Vansia doesn't deviate from the original story she told police, the one about the all party playing cards and saying goodbye to Jessica around one or two a m. And she doesn't even admit to knowing Quincy.

00:35:12
Speaker 14: I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her, we know we know what.

00:35:17
Speaker 2: I don't get kill quick for that.

00:35:21
Speaker 18: Just well, I'm talking to me, all.

00:35:23
Speaker 1: Right, got here, So Susan tried another angle. If the nishe wasn't gonna crack, then Susan would have to get the suspected killer to confess. She would have to talk to Quincy Cross herself. And it turns out Susan knew one of Quincy's cousins from around town.

00:35:44
Speaker 14: I would go to her house and work on her computer in the meantime, always talk to her about Quincy, just try to, you know, get anything I could out of her.

00:35:53
Speaker 1: And she used her to set up a meeting with Quincy under the pretense that she was a researcher for Tom.

00:36:01
Speaker 6: Which I was.

00:36:02
Speaker 14: I did help to research for him. So after he went back to London, I just kept up the speel anybody.

00:36:08
Speaker 1: She even told her she could help Quincy.

00:36:11
Speaker 5: I told her that I was good. I was there that to try to clear.

00:36:14
Speaker 1: His name, and Susan told the Kentucky State Police about her planned sting operation.

00:36:20
Speaker 14: I called Kentucky State Police and invited them to help me on that.

00:36:26
Speaker 1: The police did indeed help her. They gave her a cell phone to record and a few officers to wait outside of the house for protection.

00:36:34
Speaker 14: Was all set up very professionally.

00:36:37
Speaker 2: You know.

00:36:38
Speaker 14: We had code words I had if I needed any assistance from them, I had my code rounds were I wish my big brother was here and they would be come right into the residents.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: Quincy did not know he was being recorded. I don't have the recording. I asked law enforcement for it and they said they can't find it. But according to Susan's court testimony, a transcript, and a police report, these are some of the things. Quincy allegedly says that he was wearing a sweatsuit that night, yes, that.

00:37:13
Speaker 14: He didn't have a belt, and that he was wearing a jogging outfit.

00:37:16
Speaker 1: But then he says they kept his belt at the jail when he was arrested. Then, according to Susan, Quincy says that as soon as they smelled gas on him, he knew police would blame him for what had happened, and Susan perked up at this Was this a confession a slip? How did he know that night that a girl had been burned unless he was there? Tom Mingled also thought she'd struck gold.

00:37:48
Speaker 11: She didn't get a full confession, but she got an interview which contained self incriminating remarks. She'd made more progress in a day than the police agencies have made him five years.

00:37:59
Speaker 1: But still no arrests. Another failed plan in Susan's citizen investigation, and another year with no major inroads by the Kentucky State Police until the Kentucky Attorney General stepped in a year later in two thousand and six, with a new set of agents and brand new set of ears for Susan goalbreath. Around this time, Susan was pursuing what would be her final scheme. With a little help from the Internet. She set up a MySpace account.

00:38:32
Speaker 14: It's titled Murdered Jessica Curran at MySpace.

00:38:37
Speaker 1: This was pre Facebook being widely available, and Susan used the page to track down anyone from Mayfield and add them as a friend. That's how she first made contact with Victoria Caldwell, the state's main witness you heard from last episode, the one who eventually confessed to being an accomplice to the crime. The first message between them that we have a record of is from January two thousand and seven. Here's Victoria reading that message for Tom's piece on the BBC.

00:39:12
Speaker 19: In January twenty four, two thousand and seven. I don't want anyone to find me. I am afraid from my life. I'm sorry about what happened. I will help the police as much as I can, but I really don't know who to trust. I am afraid someone might kill me if I testify to things about this.

00:39:32
Speaker 1: Victoria was living in California at the time, far away from Mayfield, apparently in hiding, and Victoria turned out to be Susan's missing puzzle piece. She would not only point the finger at Quincy, but at many others, including her own family, and her story would find a captive audience in the investigators from the Attorney General's office. Sometime after Tom Mangold published his first p on Jessica's killing, her father Joe Curran told a local TV news station that he thought maybe this was it. Finally they were getting closer to solving his daughter's murder, thanks in part to a journalist from England.

00:40:16
Speaker 15: This gentleman had come over here and investigated about a week or ten days on this case. He had found several pieces of information that hadn't been discovered and hadn't been checked out. Wouldn't make no police had the case.

00:40:29
Speaker 1: All the information Tom and Susan uncovered was stuff the original investigators with the Mayfield Police Department had, but according to Susan, the police had missed it, either on purpose or because of ineptitude. Tom and Susan took a few threads, a belt, a gas can, a missing miniature bat, and they used them to weave together a story, one that was incomplete and till Victoria showed up. And all I have right now is Quincy's account saying he was just at a party that day, took a drive, got lost, and then the car ran out of gas and he got arrested. But the problem with people's stories is they can be inconsistent. So I call my producer Rebecca to discuss a few things that are nagging at me.

00:41:23
Speaker 6: Hello Maggie.

00:41:25
Speaker 5: Hello.

00:41:25
Speaker 1: So, first, Quincy told me he left the party to go find something to eat, but none of the other party goers seem to have ever supported that claim.

00:41:36
Speaker 9: And one of the also only consistent things is that the entire night Quincy is saying I'm going to find girls, I'm going to find goals and he took the car to go find one of his girls. That has been consistent from the beginning, which is also kind of sketch because it's like, he again told me he went to get food.

00:41:53
Speaker 7: I think either Quincy is misremembering, or he was like, well, I was also hungry, or he's like, no, that makes me sound creepy and bad.

00:42:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think he thinks it makes me sound back. And again, that's just really sketchy.

00:42:10
Speaker 9: That a girl goes missing, you're driving around like, I get it, I get why they're onto him.

00:42:16
Speaker 1: Second, the infamous belt. According to police records, Quincy wasn't arrested wearing a belt, but.

00:42:24
Speaker 9: Then he also says the police kept his belt.

00:42:28
Speaker 1: He also told Dara this.

00:42:30
Speaker 9: By the way, Dara's like, no, the police kept his belt once he was arrested, and I was like, okay, what belts?

00:42:34
Speaker 1: What are we even talking about right now? Lastly, the gas. We know Quincy smelled like gas and the jailer saw Quincy spilled gas on himself, but I haven't been able to corroborate where the gas came from or what exactly he was doing in the time he left the party and his car stalled, Like this is where the breakdown all happens.

00:42:58
Speaker 9: So this is where I'm like, this is this is where Quincy gets pinged because of the belt and the gas, and like, what is the truth?

00:43:11
Speaker 6: Do you think Quincy Cross killed Jessica Kurran No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

00:43:31
Speaker 1: On the next episode and I told Joe.

00:43:34
Speaker 2: Current that day, I said, if I'm elected, I will be my best to solve that case.

00:43:39
Speaker 7: We're here to product an interview with Tambra Calwell, you presently located in the conference room of the Druid Sweeps. It brought down the defenses of the people they were interviewing because you're in a hotel, you're not in a police station.

00:43:58
Speaker 6: Everyone felt like, what the Fuck's.

00:44:01
Speaker 10: Happening, but just to sit there and to see the kangaroo cord that they've done.

00:44:06
Speaker 5: They would not even let.

00:44:07
Speaker 10: Us sit through picking the jeer that kicked us out of the court room.

00:44:20
Speaker 1: Graves County is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company Number One. This show is written and produced by me Maggie Freeling and senior producer Rebecca Ibarra. Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wurtis are executive producers. Our editor is Martina Abraham's Ilunga. Dannia Suleman is our fact checker. Sound design and mixing by Joe Plord. Music created by Wrench. Our theme song is the gangsta grass version of The One Who's Holding the Star by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick. Daryl Woolman is investigative producer. Our head of Marketing and Operations is Jeff clyburn. Is Many Quarter is our social media director, and our Social Media manager is Sarah Gibbons. Andrew Nelson is art director, with additional production help from Jackie Pauley, Kara Kornhaber, and Kathleen Fink. Be sure to follow us on Instagram. TikTok, Facebook, and threads at Lava for Good and follow me at Maggie Freeling. And we know there's a lot of names for you to keep up with in this series, so for a detailed list of characters, please go to our show notes