Sept. 24, 2025
Persons of Interest
Grave County: Chapter 3 | Persons of Interest
Six years after Jessica’s death, agents with the Kentucky Attorney General’s office took over her murder investigation. After pinpointing their main suspects with the help of citizen investigator Susan Galbreath, the agents conducted a series of unorthodox interrogations that elicited key confessions and led to the trial and conviction of Quincy Cross.
Key figures in this chapter:
Susan Galbreath (1960 - 2018): Citizen investigator.
Greg Stumbo: Attorney General of Kentucky from 2004 - 2008. He promised Joe Currin that he would solve his daughter’s murder. He revamped the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation (KBI).
Lee Wise and Bob O’Neil: Agents with the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation (KBI). They ran the interrogations that elicited key confessions later used in the 2008 trial and conviction of Quincy Cross.
Rosie Crice: Victoria Caldwell’s sister. Served as a corroborating witness for the prosecution.
Quincy Cross: Convicted of murder and currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Tamara Caldwell: Served almost six years in prison for manslaughter in the second degree. Victoria and Rosie’s cousin.
Jeff Burton: Served almost eight years in prison for manslaughter in the second degree.
Victoria Caldwell: The state’s key witness in the trial of Quincy Cross. Served less than three months in jail for being an accomplice to the crime.
Vinisha Stubblefield: The other main witness in the trial of Quincy Cross and the last known person to see Jessica Currin alive. Served six months in jail for being an accomplice to the crime.
Barbara Maines Whaley: The lead prosecutor in the trial of Quincy Cross. Assistant Attorney General at the Kentucky AG’s office.
David Cross: Quincy Cross’s father. He was born and raised in a small town in Tennessee.
Darra Woolman: Fighting alongside David Cross’s family to get Quincy Cross out of prison.
For photos and images from this chapter, visit Lava for Good
Graves County is hosted by Maggie Freleng, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the hosts of Lava For Good’s Wrongful Conviction, and is executive produced by Gilbert King.
New episodes of Bone Valley Season 3 | Graves County are available every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. To binge the entire season, ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good+ on Apple Podcasts.
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00:00:00
Speaker 1: Heads up, this series contains graphic descriptions of violence. So Quincy, I have a couple questions that are going to be difficult questions. It basically comes down to.
00:00:12
Speaker 2: That night jivy Ill Jiv.
00:00:16
Speaker 1: In one of my calls with Quincy Cross, I brought up the concerns you heard last episode about the gas, the belt, and his demeanor the night Jessica went missing. These three things made Citizen Investigator Susan Galbreath home in on Quincy and make him suspect number one on her list. Not only that prosecutors would use these details in their case against Quincy as proof of his guilt.
00:00:46
Speaker 3: He was pouring gas into the car when Debbie Herkins bandied, and he didn't have a belt.
00:00:55
Speaker 4: Or shirt.
00:01:01
Speaker 1: When I spoke to Quincy, his story remained relatively unchanged. He went to a small party, borrowed a car, and left around daybreak to go find something to eat. He got lost and then the car broke down. Where did you get the gas can?
00:01:18
Speaker 2: Don't cash?
00:01:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm failed.
00:01:20
Speaker 2: I found at it was a pall and something else.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: It's just shat, he says. He got the can and started filling the tank. Then a deputy jailer stopped by to help and saw him spilling gas on his pants. As far as wanting to find girls that night, he says, yeah, he brought that up at the party. It was full of guys, like a whole bunch of boots, so maybe that's what people at the party remembered. And the missing belt, he thinks maybe he left it at the house when he dozed off on the couch.
00:02:03
Speaker 5: That wanted to get it off the edge of the couch and kill on the couch.
00:02:09
Speaker 1: These answers are unsatisfying, and they don't look great if I'm being honest, But they would concern me more if the case against Quincy weren't so flimsy, Because when you look deeper into the actual evidence presented at Quincy's trial and the story the prosecution told about how Jessica was killed, these two details lose their damning power, and I'd go as far as saying they don't even matter at all. This is Graves County, Chapter three, Persons of Interest. After interviewing Quincy under false pretenses, Susan Goalbreath was going to get him for Jessica Curran's murder. She knew it was him. The gas the belt. It made too much sense. I just needed to figure out how, why, and with whom. One of the things Susan did next was find the names of exactly who all had been at the party at Chris Drive, the same one Quincy was at the night of the murder. It was a small gathering, but it was one of many on that street that night, so people came and went. Susan started by going over original police interviews from the days after Jessica's body was found on August first, two thousand.
00:04:30
Speaker 6: I immediately started laying out the transcripts, and if I've talked too much, I apologize.
00:04:36
Speaker 2: I have a bad habit of it.
00:04:38
Speaker 1: But during trial, Susan recalls that in the transcripts, partygoers mentioned two guests whose names remained a mystery.
00:04:47
Speaker 6: These two white boys stopped by five minutes then Chris Try So for some reason, I thought they were so they were important because they kept asking about him.
00:04:57
Speaker 1: One party goer told police that the two guys had come from a nearby gathering, but they only stayed for a minute or two.
00:05:07
Speaker 2: I caught.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: Through some digging, Susan says, she managed to identify them. Then she called the Kentucky State Police.
00:05:17
Speaker 6: I had called Sam Steer and I said, look, I said, I got the name of those two white boys with Jeffrey Burton.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Jeff Burton, a scrawny guy from around town who was close to his mom. Grew up going to church and playing baseball, though like many in Mayfield, he went through a rough patch. He quit high school, got busted for drugs, and got into fights. But by the time Susan found his name, he was in his mid twenties with a wife and three kids, getting his life together and mostly keeping to himself. In a two thousand and seven email to journalist Tom Mangold, Susan reveals what had interest at her about Jeff. A colleague will be reading Susan's emails.
00:06:05
Speaker 7: I had found out earlier that Burton's house was near the middle school. I quit focusing on what I already knew and went after what I didn't know.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Jeff's house was close to the middle school where Jessica's body was found. Susan writes that she went to Jeff's house ready to knock on the door. She wanted to know what he was up to the night of the murder.
00:06:27
Speaker 7: Long story short, I finally found Burton's house. I was so excited I pulled.
00:06:32
Speaker 1: But when Susan arrived to the house, there was no one living there. It was completely abandoned, she writes Tom.
00:06:41
Speaker 7: As I walked around the house, I saw a garage. It was so eerie I could see inside the house.
00:06:49
Speaker 1: She walks back to the garage.
00:06:51
Speaker 7: The air was still. There were houses close by, but it felt as though time stood still. The driveway and garage were totally surrounded by brush and foliage.
00:07:02
Speaker 1: She creeps closer.
00:07:04
Speaker 7: I crept over to the door and was overwhelmed with the feeling of dread. I didn't go in for fear of changing the scene. I was so excited. I knew I had finally found where they had Jessica. I knew this house was connected to her. It's hard to.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: Explain another spiritual moment. Perhaps up until then, the police had maintained that Jessica was attacked and killed at the middle school, according to records I've reviewed. Susan also had it as the crime scene in her murder theories, but in this email to Tom, Susan expresses that once she got to Jeff's house, she just knew it was connected to Jessica's death.
00:07:53
Speaker 7: I told Lee Wise about everything, and he told me he would check into it on his next trip into town.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: Susan shared her new thing theory with law enforcement, and sure enough that winter agents also visited Jeff's house.
00:08:06
Speaker 4: We're in the city of Mayfield, Kentucky present and the vehicle is myself, David James, Agent bib O'Neil, Agent Lee Wise.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: The agents recorded the visit, but by that time it had been demolished.
00:08:20
Speaker 2: This would be the house where Jeff Burton resided. The house is now gone.
00:08:25
Speaker 1: And what you hear in these tapes seven years after Jessica's murder is a shift in the official murder theory. The crime scene is no longer the middle school.
00:08:38
Speaker 2: This is a house where they took Jessica to she was allegedly killed.
00:08:43
Speaker 1: Also, up until this point, the police didn't have a reason to believe Jessica had been raped or sexually assaulted. They hadn't found any physical evidence of it, like trauma on her body that suggested assault or seamen. Because because her underwear was found ripped laying next to her, it was a possibility one that Susan and Tom jumped onto and which you heard last episode.
00:09:12
Speaker 7: We were pretty certain by now that Quincy Cross, together with other accomplices, had murdered Jessica in a sex and drugs frenzy.
00:09:20
Speaker 1: But they hadn't been able to corroborate their hunch. So in two thousand and seven, when Victoria Caldwell responded to Susan's friend request on MySpace, Susan was elated and let Victoria.
00:09:32
Speaker 7: Know, you just gave me goosebumps.
00:09:34
Speaker 8: Hun.
00:09:34
Speaker 7: Of course I can help you, she replied to Victoria. I'll do anything I can for you. I promise you. I'm sitting here with tears rolling down my face. I had no idea. I have friends in high places, Hun, and I can probably help you a lot. In fact, I know I can.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: Susan was convinced Victoria was the key to cracking the case against Quincy Cross. Yes, because Victoria had been tangentially involved in this case from the beginning.
00:10:07
Speaker 9: I met the Make That High School in the conference room outside of time for Rogers President as myself, Detective camp Fortner, and also have Victoria Caldwell.
00:10:17
Speaker 1: Just days after Jessica's death, Victoria told police she heard people talking about killing.
00:10:24
Speaker 10: Jessica at the core because that'll it.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: But then she moved to California and virtually disappeared from the case until two thousand and six, when she emerged again. First, she called the state police to say she'd overheard relevant information about the Jessica Current murder. Then she made contact with Susan, saying she knew things that could put her in danger. By this time, a third investigative agency had taken over the case, the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation, or KBI. Susan built a rapport with them like she did with our predecessors, and on Susan's tip, the KBI traveled to California to interview Victoria Caldwell.
00:11:12
Speaker 4: The age day it is more than twelve, two thousand and seven and it's you.
00:11:21
Speaker 11: I'll visit to the Santo Marea and trying to flow in adiators too in that this interview with was Victoria Barwell.
00:11:30
Speaker 1: Victoria Caldwell sounds and looks like a young girl, even though she was twenty two when the KBI first spoke to her. There's an innocence to her tone.
00:11:40
Speaker 12: Oh norma start from beginning, Yeah, okay.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: She has a bashful gaze and chubby cheeks that enhance her childlike features. During the interview, Victoria says she felt unsafe in Mayfield. She tells the KBI Quincy had threatened her over the phone to stay quiet about anything she may have over herd about Jessica's murder.
00:12:02
Speaker 12: Yeah, you know, you know it was my belt around her neck. You met it was And I was just like, no, no, I don't know anything. And you just got said you know, you know, he said you mad, you make you disappear, And I was like, okay, Like that's why I got a panic.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: In this interview, Victoria told the KBI that he'd been threatening her for over a year, and even though she didn't have his threats on tape, there was a recording of her sister Rosie, telling Victoria that Quincy was after her. In May two thousand and six. Rosie is saying, Quincy is going to kill your motherfucking ass. The KBI took these threats seriously, so the agents moved Victoria from California to North Carolina and into state witness protection, and soon after, authorities would blast Quincy's face and name in the local news as an armed and dangerous suspect wanted for the murder of Jessica current. Hello, mister Sumbo, get.
00:13:10
Speaker 4: To see you.
00:13:11
Speaker 9: Hi, Maggie, how are you.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: I am well, so, like Rebecca said, my internet's kind of slow over here, so I'm probably.
00:13:16
Speaker 8: Going to turn.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: The reason these state agents got involved in the first place was Greg Stumbo.
00:13:22
Speaker 9: Mayfield's not known for having violent crimes, and it's a little sleepy town in Kentucky, or you know, everybody sort of knows everybody. It's a farming community, and this type of crime was obviously not something that happens very very often.
00:13:41
Speaker 1: Stumbo served thirty six years in public office, including four as the Attorney General of Kentucky from two thousand and four to two thousand and eight, the years when Susan started looking into the case and working with the state police. While on the campaign trail, Stumbo met Jessica's dad, Joe Curran, at a political events, and.
00:14:01
Speaker 9: Joe sought me out and told me about his daughter's tragic death and it hadn't been solved.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: Joe had been marching and demanding that law enforcement solve his daughter's case.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: We went to see the county attorney, We went to see the police chief, We went to see.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: The sheriff, and now he had the ear of the potential state attorney general. Stumbo made a promise to Joe and.
00:14:26
Speaker 9: I told Joe Current that day, I said, if I'm elected, I will do my best to solve that case.
00:14:32
Speaker 1: Stumbo won and he did exactly that.
00:14:35
Speaker 2: This guy decided to do something on it, so we would have regular meetings with my KBI Commissioner, David James.
00:14:46
Speaker 1: Stumbo revamped the investigative unit the Attorney General's office had at the time.
00:14:53
Speaker 9: We changed the name. I like the name, the Kentucky Breau Investigation and make them a more effective investigating unit.
00:15:04
Speaker 1: They tackled major crimes like drug trafficking, fraud, and public corruption. The KBI wasn't formed to solve homicides, but Stumbo had made a promise to Joe Kurrent, the KBI was on it. The man Stumbo chose to lead the agency happened to be black, and he thought it would be beneficial to send black agents to Mayfield. He figured black agents would have more success getting people to open up than the previous white law enforcement officers.
00:15:37
Speaker 9: But just so happened we had two very good African American agents and they were big guys, you know, big impressive footing gas. We sent them down there, and sure enough, the local people in the African American community who had knowledge about that crime, who were afraid to talk to the Mayfield police about it or the Kentucky State pleaseers began spill into veins.
00:16:03
Speaker 1: Like Victoria Caldwell.
00:16:05
Speaker 2: They confronted her.
00:16:06
Speaker 9: She wrote down, tell the whole story.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: The story that would end up implicating herself. Jeff Burton, Tammer, Caldwell, Venetia Stubblefield, and Quincy Cross. But the agents had never investigated a homicide. They were two former narcotics cops who used a series of unorthodox tactics to elicit several confessions. And these tactics start with the place they conducted some of their key interviews and.
00:16:39
Speaker 11: Presently located in the conference room of the Dry Sweets located in.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: Paducah, Kentucky, the Drury Inn and Suites in Paducah, Kentucky. Not a police station, but a modest hotel about thirty minutes from Mayfield, the kind of place with free hot breakfast, seventy style looking conference rooms, and limited surveillance.
00:17:03
Speaker 13: They never did bring me my rights or anything. They just had me get in the car and I was like, well, where am I going? They would not tell me where I was going at all until I got there.
00:17:14
Speaker 1: I thought that I was going to the police station. Tammer Caldwell was among their persons of interest. She's Victoria's cousin, the homebody who never went anywhere without her babies and who dated Quincy Cross. He was great with her kids. Victoria had implicated both of them and her interviews with the KBI, and now they were being questioned by law enforcement, including two agents who made it clear that they already knew the truth. They just needed their suspects to confirm it.
00:17:46
Speaker 4: Don't you know we already know?
00:17:48
Speaker 1: I know y'all know what Lee Wise takes the lead, imposing and commanding.
00:17:55
Speaker 11: You look so pathetic, faking those who rocking in that and telling them lie, girl, Look, I don't.
00:18:03
Speaker 14: Know a fool.
00:18:06
Speaker 1: Agent. Babo'neil is mild mannered and more reserved.
00:18:10
Speaker 2: Okay, Quincy, you have the right to remain silent.
00:18:13
Speaker 15: Anything you say Cannon will be held against you in the court.
00:18:16
Speaker 4: With these rights in mind, do you wish to talk with us now? Sure?
00:18:21
Speaker 2: All right?
00:18:22
Speaker 1: Quincy actually turned himself in after seeing his name and face on the news, so you.
00:18:28
Speaker 11: Know, And I ain't never been the type of drong, so I ain't dope.
00:18:31
Speaker 5: So I'll bet I'll turn to myself in you know what I mean, I'd rather come to you instead.
00:18:35
Speaker 4: Have you look for me.
00:18:40
Speaker 1: Quincy and everyone else who was taken to the drury and in sweets went willingly. No one was under arrest, and no one had an attorney present. Tammer tells me she was questioned for hours on end forever. I'm talking about like nineteen hot words. The interviews turned interrogations are confusing, chaotic and taxing.
00:19:03
Speaker 4: You hear what I said, you crying, but your eyes.
00:19:07
Speaker 11: You're sitting there doing what you've got done for your entire life. If you're lying and you're not accustomed to be hailed accountable for your actions.
00:19:25
Speaker 1: In this clip, they're yelling at Tamera while she weeps. She's wearing a collared blue and white pinstriped shirt, her hair is in a side pony, and she looks like a little girl. She's trapped alone in a hotel room with law enforcement, thirty minutes from home and very few people. If anyone knows she's there, oh, terrified.
00:19:53
Speaker 2: That would tell me.
00:19:54
Speaker 13: If you don't tell the truth, you're gonna get shipped up the river. You're never gonna get to see your kids graduate, You're never going to maup to anything.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: The KBI also brought in Rosie, Victoria's sister as a corroborating witness against Jeff Quincy and Tamra. Rosie says they interrogated her for two days.
00:20:14
Speaker 3: They told me I was lying, he kept telling me to shut up, and then they told me that they could take my kids away from me.
00:20:23
Speaker 1: And the line of questioning is also disturbingly focused on the women's sex lives.
00:20:29
Speaker 11: What type of sex did he like or was he did he enjoy?
00:20:33
Speaker 4: Or sex or sex?
00:20:35
Speaker 8: Yes?
00:20:35
Speaker 2: What's your sexual preference?
00:20:37
Speaker 4: Are you by sex? Or you're lesbian?
00:20:40
Speaker 1: Especially about the women being lesbians?
00:20:43
Speaker 4: You considered yourself a lesbian?
00:20:45
Speaker 13: No, you know, I think right after that, right after he asked me if I was, when he stuck his hand up on the table and was rubbing on my leg.
00:20:55
Speaker 1: Jeff Burton was also brought in The White Kid, Susan Golbroth had found I don't want to go to jail.
00:21:03
Speaker 16: I don't want to go to jail, but I don't want to sit here and listen to this lies.
00:21:06
Speaker 12: I don't want to listen to these lies, man, I don't want to.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: And they squeezed him, all of them for confessions.
00:21:12
Speaker 2: It's gonna be your word against five or six other people.
00:21:15
Speaker 4: And you know what it takes. You know what it takes. All it takes is for jury to either the jury to believe what you say or what they say. That's messed up. That's messed up.
00:21:28
Speaker 16: If that's the case, and that's how it goes down, and that is messed up.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: To me, it sounds like the agents learned how to be detectives from watching Law and Order.
00:21:38
Speaker 4: And I hope you a good surfer, baby. I'm giving you one wave.
00:21:42
Speaker 11: You better ride this way until you done, because you're not gonna get another way from me. Okay, yes, So if you can't surf, you better lay down on that board.
00:21:51
Speaker 4: And hope it.
00:21:56
Speaker 1: In these KBI videos, only the interview he is visible. All law enforcement are off camera. We don't know what they were or were not doing out a frame, or who is in the hotel room. Think of videos you see in police stations. The camera is usually above. You can see the whole room. Everyone in it that didn't happen here. Plus video and tape recorders were turned on and off frequently.
00:22:23
Speaker 13: They would ask me questions and they would cut the recorder off.
00:22:27
Speaker 4: We're gonna go off record for about ten minutes, and.
00:22:32
Speaker 13: And he go in this room and he come back in and unpiles the record or whatever and start talking crazy to.
00:22:38
Speaker 4: Me, and we're back on record.
00:22:44
Speaker 1: At one point during Jeff's interrogation, Rosie is brought into the room to identify.
00:22:49
Speaker 4: Him Jeff Burton, Jeff Burton.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: If you know anything about witness identification or lineups, this is absolutely not how it's done. Looking back, Jeff says, the whole thing was mind boggling.
00:23:07
Speaker 16: I feel like they're telling me that, you know, we already got to prove, just tell us. And I'm like, man, I didn't have anything to do with this stuff.
00:23:14
Speaker 4: Now charge me with whatever you want to.
00:23:16
Speaker 16: I did not know her, and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. This can't be real life.
00:23:24
Speaker 2: You can't be And I know.
00:23:25
Speaker 16: That that right there was a crock of shit, But that makes me think that all this is freaking fake as hell.
00:23:29
Speaker 4: Man.
00:23:33
Speaker 1: But the kbi's tactics worked. After weeks of interrogations at the hotel and elsewhere, they got the confessions they were looking for, first from Victoria, who, over the course of at least six interviews with the KBI, goes from having only heard about the murder and possible suspects to actually witnessing the kidnapping, rape and killing of Jessica and anticipating in the abuse of her dead body then Venetia for seven years. Venetia told police that she did not see Jessica after they said goodbye that Saturday night in two thousand. Now after at least two separate days of KBI interrogations. Her story resembles Victoria's.
00:24:24
Speaker 4: Uh has glinsely done anything just to just.
00:24:28
Speaker 1: She says she actually went looking for Jessica that night, then ran into Tamra Victoria, Jeff and Quincy and that he was rubbing honor and touching on her and.
00:24:39
Speaker 3: Stuff and told her if she hadn't cooperated, he was gonna put him that toy.
00:24:44
Speaker 1: Venetia is slumped in her chair. She looks exhausted, shrunken, and you can hear her trying to find the right words.
00:24:53
Speaker 4: Nobody struca nobody did anything hit her.
00:24:58
Speaker 11: Women, you didn't say that though I asked you, Oh, I asked you what happened to.
00:25:06
Speaker 4: Just in that car?
00:25:08
Speaker 1: Changing her answers, according to the response from agents O'Neill and Wise.
00:25:13
Speaker 4: Suck it's Quincy Steer, Well, thank you.
00:25:21
Speaker 1: She eventually says they did drugs and took Jessica to Jeff's house. Then Quincy and the others raped her. But the agents are not satisfied with just saying rape. They need details, graphic details.
00:25:43
Speaker 4: I want you to see it. What was he doing to her?
00:25:48
Speaker 1: And they keep asking about semen.
00:25:51
Speaker 4: I'm a sa was on her body? Who put it there?
00:25:57
Speaker 7: I love?
00:25:59
Speaker 1: I want to point out that this line of questioning might make sense in a rape case where a body was covered in fluids.
00:26:07
Speaker 11: Coincident ejaculated all over our body, right, and y'all still kissing on them, rubbing on the ride?
00:26:15
Speaker 4: Am a right?
00:26:16
Speaker 8: Yes?
00:26:18
Speaker 1: But in the case of Jessica Curran, there was no evidence of rape or a sexual assault on Jessica's body, and especially no seamen. There are glaring inconsistencies in Victoria and Venetia's statements, like Venetia cannot confidently say if Quincy, jeff Or Tamra struck Jessica with any object, but Victoria says Quincy hits Jessica in the head with a mini baseball bat while in the car, and they buried the bat in her sister Rosy's yard. But when the KBI went to search Rosy's yard, they only found a wrench, to which Victoria then changes her story to add that Quincy also hit Jessica with a wrench in the house. The bat was never recovered. A note on this timeline of the crime, though Quincy had to have committed the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Jessica current in the time he left the party at daybreak and when he was spotted by the deputy jailer around seven forty a m possible, sure, but very tight and there are big holes in the kbis theory that all these people assaulted and killed Jessica. First, there were no fingerprints or DNA linking any of them to the murder. In fact, Quincy's DNA and clothing were tested shortly after Jessica's death in two thousand and nothing from Quincy matches the crime scene. On top of that, the only thing that links to the scene of the crime is the fragment of a braided belt found near Jessica's neck, Yet we don't know for a fact that's Quincy's belt, and investigators desperately tried to find evidence to prove their theory of the crime, searching everywhere from vehicles to houses. Law enforcement even exhumed Jessica's body to retest for evidence, and nothing. None exists matching any of these people to Jessica's death or crime scene. And there's one other glaring red flag.
00:28:40
Speaker 13: I didn't know Quincy into two thousand and two, so how could I have something to do with it?
00:28:44
Speaker 1: In this case? Happened in two thousand Remember I told you Tamar and Quincy met while she was visiting her brother in jail. That was two years after Jessica's death. Quincy and Tamra maintained and to this day they did not know each other. In two thousand and I feel don't know Jeff Burton Quincy Cross.
00:29:07
Speaker 16: I didn't know him, didn't hang around him.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Jeff says he had never even met Quincy and he only knew Tamra from school. Despite there being no physical evidence, flimsy stories, inconsistencies suspects not even knowing each other at the time of the murder, and adamant claims of innocence. The KBI brought that case to the Attorney General's office, and under Greg Stumbo's leadership, the state of Kentucky moved forward to try Quincy Cross as a depraved evil man.
00:29:46
Speaker 9: There's no doubt in my mind that we called the right person. There's no evidence that would lead you anywhere else. I mean, you have a direct eyewitness account.
00:29:57
Speaker 2: Of what happened.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: Seven years after Jessica Curran was killed, Venetia Stubblefield, Victoria Caldwell, Tamra Caldwell, Jeff Burton, and Quincy Cross were arrested, charged and indicted based largely on the accounts of two girls and circumstantial evidence. That's it. That's all the prosecution had. And at trial, cracks in those stories start to split, until the entire prosecution's case is left with gaping holes.
00:30:39
Speaker 8: That's after the break.
00:31:03
Speaker 2: All right, good morning, let me go through the rome.
00:31:05
Speaker 14: Make sure we've got everyone here that's supposed to be here.
00:31:09
Speaker 1: Quincy was the first to go to trial in spring of two thousand and eight. By then, news of Jessica's death and the salacious story behind it had spread through Graves County, so the judge agreed to move the trial to Hickman County to avoid any kind of bias the jury from Graves could have.
00:31:28
Speaker 4: All right, is Commonwealth ready to proceed?
00:31:31
Speaker 1: The small courthouse was full and it was tense. On one side there was Quincy's relatives sitting in complete disbelief that he was being accused of such crimes, and on the other Jessica's loved ones with eight years of pent up frustration and pain.
00:31:50
Speaker 2: Commonwealthlack to make an opening statement.
00:31:56
Speaker 1: The lead prosecutor on Quincy's case was Assistant Attorney General Barbara Mainz Whaley, but it.
00:32:03
Speaker 13: Took a long long time to get people to talk about this because of their fear.
00:32:10
Speaker 1: Waaley is a career prosecutor. She's been Assistant Attorney General since nineteen eighty two and is said to be one of the most experienced prosecutors in the Commonwealth. Some people may know her from being one of the special prosecutors to investigate police officers in the twenty twenty killing of Breonna Taylor. Wailey was seeking the death penalty against Quincy. His defense attorneys only had about a year to prepare, and the prosecution didn't make it easy. They dumped thousands of documents on the defense in the run up to trial.
00:32:49
Speaker 17: We're the dates of the items that there are given us go back as much as seven years.
00:32:55
Speaker 1: Quincy's attorney is complaining to the judge. He says, it's been virtually impossible to get through all the files to properly prepare for a death penalty case.
00:33:05
Speaker 17: I don't know if it's a Chinese warded torture or death by ten thousand cuts one or two.
00:33:12
Speaker 1: But the judge denied a motion for more time and the trial continued on schedule. And despite the advantage over the defense, Waley knew this would be a hard case because of how many players and stories there were. In her opening statement, she prepares the jury for this.
00:33:32
Speaker 3: Rumors build on rumors and more winners and talks read like wildfire.
00:33:42
Speaker 1: They field, but the agents with the KBI were allegedly able to find the truth that on the early hours of Sunday, July thirtieth, two thousand, Tamer Caldwell, Victoria Caldwell, Venetia Stubblefield, Jeff Burton, and Quincy Cross picked up Jessica Curran and took her to Jeff Burton's house, where they raped and killed her in a drug fueled haze. Quincy then forced the girls to have sex with Jessica's dead body. Then they stored her body in Jeff's garage until she was moved and set on fire with gas lane and set on fire outside the middle school a day later.
00:34:24
Speaker 4: On the Monday following.
00:34:26
Speaker 1: She was found the following day on Tuesday. One of the first witnesses, Barbara Willie Calls, is the state medical examiner at the time of Jessica's death. He says, besides being burned.
00:34:38
Speaker 2: And there were traumatic injuries on the head and face, and there were lacerations on the back.
00:34:45
Speaker 4: Of the head.
00:34:46
Speaker 1: He says Jessica also had injuries similar to that of a stab wound, but he ruled her likely manner of death was blunt injury and strangulation. He admits there's no actual evidence of strength, but he says the other injuries on Jessica were not significant enough to cause death alone, plus the piece of belt found near her neck suggested strangulation.
00:35:12
Speaker 2: Basically, when everything was completed and looked at that, I thought was very significant in her cause.
00:35:20
Speaker 4: Death good toldly makes you waitness, please Nisa so Field.
00:35:29
Speaker 1: Jessica's friends and family are called school personnel investigators and locals from around town. They have partygoers from Chris Drive testify about seeing Quincy wave his belt around and talk about wanting to go find girls. But Victoria and Venetia are Whaley's star witnesses, and much like in their interrogations, their testimonies differ in key aspects at trial. After that we all got out the corn when I said that. Else In Venetia's story, Jessica walks in Jeff Burton's house.
00:36:06
Speaker 4: How did you get in the house?
00:36:09
Speaker 1: He might, I'll walk in there. Victoria, on the other hand, testifies that Jessica was knocked out and then carried inside the house.
00:36:19
Speaker 10: Quincy and Jeff carrie Jessica's body to the side at the side door.
00:36:30
Speaker 1: Discrepancies are to be expected when a case is eight years old and the women testifying routines at the time of the crime. But I will say messing up details like whether or not you carried an unconscious body inside the house is kind of major. But the prosecution had back up. They called Rosie to confirm what Victoria told the KBI that Quincy threatened Victoria to stay quiet. You heard the call earlier.
00:37:03
Speaker 3: I remember that he said he was gonna kill my sister. I remember that Victoria.
00:37:08
Speaker 1: And the prosecution had another key piece of evidence, a diary that Victoria allegedly kept where she detailed her life and the crime.
00:37:20
Speaker 4: And read August first. What does it say?
00:37:26
Speaker 10: It says, damn, they found the body. I'm not sure what the other word says. I hope they don't find out it was us. Fuck man, it says Q is nowhere to be found. JEP don't want to talk to me. This is bullshit, says fuck. I am out.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: The defense strategy was to question the validity of everything, from the diary to the prosecution circle substantial evidence to witness testimonies, and they were successful in some areas, like poking holes in Victoria's numerous stories on.
00:38:14
Speaker 10: Some parts, yes, some parts now.
00:38:17
Speaker 1: The defense also called their own expert, the former Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner, to refute the questionable findings of strangulation.
00:38:27
Speaker 17: Are you able to provide in the jury a cause of death.
00:38:31
Speaker 4: In this case?
00:38:32
Speaker 15: No, sir, I am not. There's no anatomic cause of death determined in this case. I can tell you that she could have been strangled, but there is no evidence that she was strangled.
00:38:46
Speaker 1: The defense's medical expert explains that a telltale sign of strangulation is bruising and a broken hyoid bone in the neck, which there was not.
00:38:57
Speaker 15: That there's no external documentation of any injury on the skin or the sucutaneous tissues deep to the skin that shows any evidence that trauma was applied.
00:39:07
Speaker 2: To the area.
00:39:09
Speaker 15: Now you can get strangulation injuries.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: The defense wanted to make four main points. First, the only thing tying Quincy to Jessica's death in any physical manner is a belt. Yet there's no evidence it's Quincy's. It was an extremely common two thousands belts. Even a witness at trial is wearing a similar belt and he points to it.
00:39:37
Speaker 4: Yes, certain sluck his rider.
00:39:40
Speaker 1: Second, if there's no certainty Jessica was strangled, then the jury cannot convict Quincy on the prosecution's theory of the case. Third, according to Victoria and Venetia, Jessica was killed early Sunday morning and they put her body in Jeff's garage before driving her to the metal school and lighting her on fire Monday night. By the prosecution's own timeline, Quincy was in jail by the time they disposed and burned Jessica's body. He'd been arrested that Sunday morning on drug charges and stayed in jail for over a year. So their entire theory that Quincy's smelling like gas linked him to Jessica makes no sense. In this timeline, him smelling like gas is meaningless. And fourth, law enforcement coerced witnesses into lying on Quincy. To prove that point. They called Rosie Christ's, Victoria's sister, and the prosecution's witness back on the stand was correct. The defense knew something important about Rosie that they wanted the jury to know.
00:41:00
Speaker 3: I was trying to tell them that I didn't have nothing to do and I didn't know nothing about this case or nothing like that.
00:41:06
Speaker 1: They told me I was lying before trial, Rosie says, she tried to recant to law enforcement, and you.
00:41:13
Speaker 4: Kept trying to tell them the truth, and they wouldn't have said it.
00:41:16
Speaker 1: Yes, she testifies that they made her a lie, implicating Jeff Burton, her own cousin, Tamra Caldwell, and Quincy Cross.
00:41:24
Speaker 17: Quincy cross every threatened you no.
00:41:30
Speaker 4: A goodreat, Victorian, did you know? No? That's all I had.
00:41:36
Speaker 1: When Prosecutor Scott Sutherland counters, Rosie is defiant.
00:41:41
Speaker 4: Oh miss christ.
00:41:44
Speaker 3: Today, I really don't care about going to jail, Scott, So you can ask me what you wanted to up Jack, Let me approach you.
00:41:51
Speaker 1: Rosie shifts in her chair, shakes her head and scrunches her face in anger, but she stands her ground.
00:41:59
Speaker 4: So I'm gonna ask you again. Are you lying today? Are you lying the other day about the other day? Now?
00:42:06
Speaker 2: I'm not lying today.
00:42:07
Speaker 3: And I wanted to touch you all the time.
00:42:09
Speaker 1: You guys have to stop me. But in such a long trial, with so many facts and discrepancies, it becomes nearly impossible to follow what is going on, especially with so many objections, redirects and sidebars.
00:42:29
Speaker 2: Objection, objection, objection, objection, objection.
00:42:34
Speaker 1: With so much confusion, the prosecution new to always direct the attention back to the belt, a.
00:42:42
Speaker 3: Distinctive belt, not a unique belt by any means.
00:42:46
Speaker 1: And the gas medlie strongly and Gaslene, don't look at the distractions, the different stories, the half truths, the recantation. Look here, look at the guy who was talking about finding girls, waving his belt around, smelling like gas. And so, after deliberating for only three hours and forty five minutes, eleven white jurors and one black juror found beyond a reasonable doubt that Quincy Cross murdered Jessica currn.
00:43:32
Speaker 14: Well.
00:43:35
Speaker 5: I cried, man, I cried with my dad. They let my dad in in a room in the back, and I cried with my dad.
00:43:46
Speaker 1: At Quincy's sentencing, Assistant prosecutor Scott Sutherland asked the jury to show Quincy no mercy. He said, I would ask you to look at this heinous crime and ask yourselves, if not now, then when. If not Quincy Cross, then who He deserves nothing less than the ultimate punishment, in this case, a sentence of death.
00:44:13
Speaker 2: I don't believe in the death penalty, but.
00:44:15
Speaker 1: That's not what Joe Kurrn, Jessica's father, wanted.
00:44:20
Speaker 2: I don't feel like a person should die killing another person because another person died, don't bring back the person that died. If I killed somebody else and that brang my daughter back, I killed the first person I see because I want her back that bad. But he's not going to bring her back.
00:44:37
Speaker 1: Ultimately, Quincy was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Quincy says before trial, prosecutors offered him a deal of twenty five years. What did they want you to say?
00:44:50
Speaker 5: A low Camra and Jeffrey. I didn't even ask him what they wanted me to say, none of that. So we didn't even get that far because I ain't that type of person.
00:44:59
Speaker 1: And after trial, Quincy's attorney asked him if you wanted to see if the deal was still good, but he said no. So you were like, I will take a life sentence. I'm not gonna lie about these people.
00:45:13
Speaker 5: Right, You're exactly right, I will, and that's what I did.
00:45:20
Speaker 1: Tamra and jeff were set to go to trial after Quincy, and they were scared.
00:45:26
Speaker 4: You know.
00:45:26
Speaker 16: At first I was gung hole, like, yeah, you know, let's stay lying on me all this stuff. I'm ready to face whatever. And then after that I just broke my spirit. I'm like, oh my god, they're gonna do the same thing to me. I ain't never gonna get out of here. And if my kids ain't all this different shit, you know what I mean. So now I'm like starting a question. Man, even though you didn't say you are going to prison. They don't fucking matter. So they kind of broke my spirit a lot, Like it really took a lot out of me.
00:45:56
Speaker 1: Jeff and Tamra decided to take plea deals to avoid a life sentence and possibly the death penalty. Jeff was sentenced to fifteen years and Tamera ten. Victoria and Venetia pled guilty. Victoria was sentenced to a total of five years and Venetia seven. They only served a few months. After years of fighting, Jessica Kerrn's family finally saw her accused killers punished, but instead of feeling a sense of relief, Joe Kurran felt uneasy.
00:46:35
Speaker 2: I felt in my gut that something wasn't right.
00:46:40
Speaker 1: That's because something wasn't that's after the break. Do you ever have moments where you forget that this is part of your life?
00:47:15
Speaker 10: No, mailwell, mailwell.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: After the trial and conviction, Quincy's family was left to reckon with their own loss.
00:47:24
Speaker 14: It's just like toting them two thousand pound weight on your back every day. No, never forget it, never.
00:47:31
Speaker 9: Off my mind.
00:47:34
Speaker 1: On any given date, you can find Quincy's dad sitting on his porch. Hosted. Behind where he sits is a sign that reads private property owner is too old to fight, too fat to run, too lazy to argue. The image is of two handguns. David Cross isn't fat or lazy, though old is fair. He's in his early seventies now, but his hair, styled in a flat top, is still perfectly jet black. David grew up here right on Cross Street, forty minutes outside of Mayfield, just over the border, in a small town in Tennessee.
00:48:14
Speaker 14: My grandparents just lived down there at the end.
00:48:17
Speaker 1: Of the street, David says. Cross Street is named after his family. They've been here for generations.
00:48:24
Speaker 2: That was our school house right around the corner.
00:48:28
Speaker 1: He points to an abandoned cottage down the little dirt road.
00:48:32
Speaker 10: This was it.
00:48:33
Speaker 14: See, he was segregation back then, you know. This was the black school.
00:48:38
Speaker 2: This is where I went to school for eight years.
00:48:44
Speaker 1: David raised his kids here. Quincy grew up roaming the fields, playing with tadpoles and snapping turtles. David Cross's boy, who he hasn't seen since before the pandemic. Quincy's in prison four hundred and fifty miles away on the other side of Kentucky bordering Virginia. So getting there is difficult.
00:49:08
Speaker 14: You can't imagine, you know, you just want to break down and cry, but it would.
00:49:13
Speaker 6: Do no good.
00:49:16
Speaker 1: Instead, like Joe Curran, David Cross decided to fight. He's spent thousands of dollars defending Quincy. He's hired lawyers and private investigators to try and prove his son is innocent. Darro Woman, my trusted source, is one of the people David worked with to help clear Quincy's name. When Dara found Quincy's case, it came with his whole family, with loved ones who stood by him through the years, which I can tell you from my experience in this line of work, it's actually rare. Incarcerated people are usually forgotten, but instead Quincy has gained new family.
00:50:01
Speaker 14: She's really something special. I gotta say that, she's really something special.
00:50:06
Speaker 18: For over three years now, we've spoken literally almost.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: Every day, I will say every day, but she's persist.
00:50:18
Speaker 2: I got a question we ask out.
00:50:21
Speaker 1: If you're noticing it sounds like there's an audience, it's because there is. On one of these visits, I didn't just meet with David alone on my first trip. He brought the whole gang, his wife, Mary, Quincy's biological mom, Quincy's sister. I think an aunt and a cousin were there too. There were also at least two private investigators and Dara on the floor sitting cross leg filming like a proud mom. And there was another person there. All right, So Joe, we're going to be over here joke.
00:51:01
Speaker 2: I like to think we got the right person because he's been in a lot of time in prison, but evidence don't show he's the right person.
00:51:08
Speaker 14: Mister Karen, I knew he knew something was wrong, him and his family knew something was wrong.
00:51:16
Speaker 1: After trial, Joe Kurran should have felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulders his daughter's murderer convicted, But the nagging feeling wouldn't leave him.
00:51:28
Speaker 2: Then when you start looking to the case, Quincy's from another town, he didn't know my daughter. You got to have a motive, You got to have an opportunity, you got to have I like his five things or the case is not a case. Well, I just couldn't figure out five things on him that would make him from another town, hadn't been involved with her, didn't know her, but he's supposed to come up here and killed her.
00:51:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, so early on you were like this doesn't make sense.
00:51:58
Speaker 2: It didn't make sense.
00:52:03
Speaker 1: A few years after the conviction, David hired a private investigator and had him reach out to Joe. He wanted the investigator to show Joe some of the concerns he had about his son killing Joe's daughter.
00:52:17
Speaker 14: So when we started sharing information and really looking at what the evidence really was, then I think we started talking.
00:52:28
Speaker 1: You know, they would get together and go over everything, would you say, your friends?
00:52:35
Speaker 14: Yes, And a lot of people think that me and mister Karen are an odd couple. But here's the way I see it. Here's my definition of it. Me and mister Karen want the same thing. Mister Karen won't justice for his daughter Jessica, and I want justice for my son, Quincy Cross.
00:53:03
Speaker 2: If Quincy Cross didn't do this, he's the last person I want in there. And I don't want the others to have went through what they went through if they innocent. So if he didn't do it, who did.
00:53:18
Speaker 1: Over the years, Joe, David and their team of pis including Dara, went back to the beginning, to the original investigation, and they think they pinpointed where things derailed.
00:53:32
Speaker 14: I'm sure you done read a whole lot about Susan Gallbert, oh lady with a big mouth that spewed nothing but lie.
00:53:43
Speaker 1: They discovered Susan wasn't just a busy body housewife looking for something to do. I told you that in the immediate aftermath of Jessica's death, Victoria came forward with a story different than the one she told at trial. But it wasn't just a different version of the trial story. She actually implicated two completely different people. I've been told that the answers in this case are somewhere in the beginning in the first cops to look into Jessica's death and the very first people arrested for this crime. But the investigation into those people ended when Susan Goalbreath homed in on Quincy Cross.
00:54:30
Speaker 14: She just kept writing scenarios till they thought it fit the scenario how this thing played.
00:54:37
Speaker 1: Out, and the KBI and prosecution ran with her stories.
00:54:43
Speaker 18: What bothers me is it comes back to the fact that the police, the Commonwealth, the state of Kentucky, they let her have all of this power. As far as I'm concerned, Susan galv Thank got a goddamn thing to do with fucking shit with this case, other than being a roadblock for there to be actual justice.
00:55:10
Speaker 1: Susan Golbreeth also knew there were two people arrested in the initial Mayfield Police investigation, and one of those people she had close ties to. That's next time. 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 Burtis are executive producers. Our editor is Martina Abraham's Ilunga. Dania Suleiman is our fact checker. Sound design and mixing by Joe Plored. Music created by Wrench. Our theme song is the Gangstagrass version of The One Who's Holding the Star by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick. Darrel Wolman is investigative producer. Our head of Marketing and Operations is Jeff Cliburn. Ismani Guarderama 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.
00:57:00
Speaker 4: Ye
Speaker 1: Heads up, this series contains graphic descriptions of violence. So Quincy, I have a couple questions that are going to be difficult questions. It basically comes down to.
00:00:12
Speaker 2: That night jivy Ill Jiv.
00:00:16
Speaker 1: In one of my calls with Quincy Cross, I brought up the concerns you heard last episode about the gas, the belt, and his demeanor the night Jessica went missing. These three things made Citizen Investigator Susan Galbreath home in on Quincy and make him suspect number one on her list. Not only that prosecutors would use these details in their case against Quincy as proof of his guilt.
00:00:46
Speaker 3: He was pouring gas into the car when Debbie Herkins bandied, and he didn't have a belt.
00:00:55
Speaker 4: Or shirt.
00:01:01
Speaker 1: When I spoke to Quincy, his story remained relatively unchanged. He went to a small party, borrowed a car, and left around daybreak to go find something to eat. He got lost and then the car broke down. Where did you get the gas can?
00:01:18
Speaker 2: Don't cash?
00:01:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm failed.
00:01:20
Speaker 2: I found at it was a pall and something else.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: It's just shat, he says. He got the can and started filling the tank. Then a deputy jailer stopped by to help and saw him spilling gas on his pants. As far as wanting to find girls that night, he says, yeah, he brought that up at the party. It was full of guys, like a whole bunch of boots, so maybe that's what people at the party remembered. And the missing belt, he thinks maybe he left it at the house when he dozed off on the couch.
00:02:03
Speaker 5: That wanted to get it off the edge of the couch and kill on the couch.
00:02:09
Speaker 1: These answers are unsatisfying, and they don't look great if I'm being honest, But they would concern me more if the case against Quincy weren't so flimsy, Because when you look deeper into the actual evidence presented at Quincy's trial and the story the prosecution told about how Jessica was killed, these two details lose their damning power, and I'd go as far as saying they don't even matter at all. This is Graves County, Chapter three, Persons of Interest. After interviewing Quincy under false pretenses, Susan Goalbreath was going to get him for Jessica Curran's murder. She knew it was him. The gas the belt. It made too much sense. I just needed to figure out how, why, and with whom. One of the things Susan did next was find the names of exactly who all had been at the party at Chris Drive, the same one Quincy was at the night of the murder. It was a small gathering, but it was one of many on that street that night, so people came and went. Susan started by going over original police interviews from the days after Jessica's body was found on August first, two thousand.
00:04:30
Speaker 6: I immediately started laying out the transcripts, and if I've talked too much, I apologize.
00:04:36
Speaker 2: I have a bad habit of it.
00:04:38
Speaker 1: But during trial, Susan recalls that in the transcripts, partygoers mentioned two guests whose names remained a mystery.
00:04:47
Speaker 6: These two white boys stopped by five minutes then Chris Try So for some reason, I thought they were so they were important because they kept asking about him.
00:04:57
Speaker 1: One party goer told police that the two guys had come from a nearby gathering, but they only stayed for a minute or two.
00:05:07
Speaker 2: I caught.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: Through some digging, Susan says, she managed to identify them. Then she called the Kentucky State Police.
00:05:17
Speaker 6: I had called Sam Steer and I said, look, I said, I got the name of those two white boys with Jeffrey Burton.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Jeff Burton, a scrawny guy from around town who was close to his mom. Grew up going to church and playing baseball, though like many in Mayfield, he went through a rough patch. He quit high school, got busted for drugs, and got into fights. But by the time Susan found his name, he was in his mid twenties with a wife and three kids, getting his life together and mostly keeping to himself. In a two thousand and seven email to journalist Tom Mangold, Susan reveals what had interest at her about Jeff. A colleague will be reading Susan's emails.
00:06:05
Speaker 7: I had found out earlier that Burton's house was near the middle school. I quit focusing on what I already knew and went after what I didn't know.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Jeff's house was close to the middle school where Jessica's body was found. Susan writes that she went to Jeff's house ready to knock on the door. She wanted to know what he was up to the night of the murder.
00:06:27
Speaker 7: Long story short, I finally found Burton's house. I was so excited I pulled.
00:06:32
Speaker 1: But when Susan arrived to the house, there was no one living there. It was completely abandoned, she writes Tom.
00:06:41
Speaker 7: As I walked around the house, I saw a garage. It was so eerie I could see inside the house.
00:06:49
Speaker 1: She walks back to the garage.
00:06:51
Speaker 7: The air was still. There were houses close by, but it felt as though time stood still. The driveway and garage were totally surrounded by brush and foliage.
00:07:02
Speaker 1: She creeps closer.
00:07:04
Speaker 7: I crept over to the door and was overwhelmed with the feeling of dread. I didn't go in for fear of changing the scene. I was so excited. I knew I had finally found where they had Jessica. I knew this house was connected to her. It's hard to.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: Explain another spiritual moment. Perhaps up until then, the police had maintained that Jessica was attacked and killed at the middle school, according to records I've reviewed. Susan also had it as the crime scene in her murder theories, but in this email to Tom, Susan expresses that once she got to Jeff's house, she just knew it was connected to Jessica's death.
00:07:53
Speaker 7: I told Lee Wise about everything, and he told me he would check into it on his next trip into town.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: Susan shared her new thing theory with law enforcement, and sure enough that winter agents also visited Jeff's house.
00:08:06
Speaker 4: We're in the city of Mayfield, Kentucky present and the vehicle is myself, David James, Agent bib O'Neil, Agent Lee Wise.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: The agents recorded the visit, but by that time it had been demolished.
00:08:20
Speaker 2: This would be the house where Jeff Burton resided. The house is now gone.
00:08:25
Speaker 1: And what you hear in these tapes seven years after Jessica's murder is a shift in the official murder theory. The crime scene is no longer the middle school.
00:08:38
Speaker 2: This is a house where they took Jessica to she was allegedly killed.
00:08:43
Speaker 1: Also, up until this point, the police didn't have a reason to believe Jessica had been raped or sexually assaulted. They hadn't found any physical evidence of it, like trauma on her body that suggested assault or seamen. Because because her underwear was found ripped laying next to her, it was a possibility one that Susan and Tom jumped onto and which you heard last episode.
00:09:12
Speaker 7: We were pretty certain by now that Quincy Cross, together with other accomplices, had murdered Jessica in a sex and drugs frenzy.
00:09:20
Speaker 1: But they hadn't been able to corroborate their hunch. So in two thousand and seven, when Victoria Caldwell responded to Susan's friend request on MySpace, Susan was elated and let Victoria.
00:09:32
Speaker 7: Know, you just gave me goosebumps.
00:09:34
Speaker 8: Hun.
00:09:34
Speaker 7: Of course I can help you, she replied to Victoria. I'll do anything I can for you. I promise you. I'm sitting here with tears rolling down my face. I had no idea. I have friends in high places, Hun, and I can probably help you a lot. In fact, I know I can.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: Susan was convinced Victoria was the key to cracking the case against Quincy Cross. Yes, because Victoria had been tangentially involved in this case from the beginning.
00:10:07
Speaker 9: I met the Make That High School in the conference room outside of time for Rogers President as myself, Detective camp Fortner, and also have Victoria Caldwell.
00:10:17
Speaker 1: Just days after Jessica's death, Victoria told police she heard people talking about killing.
00:10:24
Speaker 10: Jessica at the core because that'll it.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: But then she moved to California and virtually disappeared from the case until two thousand and six, when she emerged again. First, she called the state police to say she'd overheard relevant information about the Jessica Current murder. Then she made contact with Susan, saying she knew things that could put her in danger. By this time, a third investigative agency had taken over the case, the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation, or KBI. Susan built a rapport with them like she did with our predecessors, and on Susan's tip, the KBI traveled to California to interview Victoria Caldwell.
00:11:12
Speaker 4: The age day it is more than twelve, two thousand and seven and it's you.
00:11:21
Speaker 11: I'll visit to the Santo Marea and trying to flow in adiators too in that this interview with was Victoria Barwell.
00:11:30
Speaker 1: Victoria Caldwell sounds and looks like a young girl, even though she was twenty two when the KBI first spoke to her. There's an innocence to her tone.
00:11:40
Speaker 12: Oh norma start from beginning, Yeah, okay.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: She has a bashful gaze and chubby cheeks that enhance her childlike features. During the interview, Victoria says she felt unsafe in Mayfield. She tells the KBI Quincy had threatened her over the phone to stay quiet about anything she may have over herd about Jessica's murder.
00:12:02
Speaker 12: Yeah, you know, you know it was my belt around her neck. You met it was And I was just like, no, no, I don't know anything. And you just got said you know, you know, he said you mad, you make you disappear, And I was like, okay, Like that's why I got a panic.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: In this interview, Victoria told the KBI that he'd been threatening her for over a year, and even though she didn't have his threats on tape, there was a recording of her sister Rosie, telling Victoria that Quincy was after her. In May two thousand and six. Rosie is saying, Quincy is going to kill your motherfucking ass. The KBI took these threats seriously, so the agents moved Victoria from California to North Carolina and into state witness protection, and soon after, authorities would blast Quincy's face and name in the local news as an armed and dangerous suspect wanted for the murder of Jessica current. Hello, mister Sumbo, get.
00:13:10
Speaker 4: To see you.
00:13:11
Speaker 9: Hi, Maggie, how are you.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: I am well, so, like Rebecca said, my internet's kind of slow over here, so I'm probably.
00:13:16
Speaker 8: Going to turn.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: The reason these state agents got involved in the first place was Greg Stumbo.
00:13:22
Speaker 9: Mayfield's not known for having violent crimes, and it's a little sleepy town in Kentucky, or you know, everybody sort of knows everybody. It's a farming community, and this type of crime was obviously not something that happens very very often.
00:13:41
Speaker 1: Stumbo served thirty six years in public office, including four as the Attorney General of Kentucky from two thousand and four to two thousand and eight, the years when Susan started looking into the case and working with the state police. While on the campaign trail, Stumbo met Jessica's dad, Joe Curran, at a political events, and.
00:14:01
Speaker 9: Joe sought me out and told me about his daughter's tragic death and it hadn't been solved.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: Joe had been marching and demanding that law enforcement solve his daughter's case.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: We went to see the county attorney, We went to see the police chief, We went to see.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: The sheriff, and now he had the ear of the potential state attorney general. Stumbo made a promise to Joe and.
00:14:26
Speaker 9: I told Joe Current that day, I said, if I'm elected, I will do my best to solve that case.
00:14:32
Speaker 1: Stumbo won and he did exactly that.
00:14:35
Speaker 2: This guy decided to do something on it, so we would have regular meetings with my KBI Commissioner, David James.
00:14:46
Speaker 1: Stumbo revamped the investigative unit the Attorney General's office had at the time.
00:14:53
Speaker 9: We changed the name. I like the name, the Kentucky Breau Investigation and make them a more effective investigating unit.
00:15:04
Speaker 1: They tackled major crimes like drug trafficking, fraud, and public corruption. The KBI wasn't formed to solve homicides, but Stumbo had made a promise to Joe Kurrent, the KBI was on it. The man Stumbo chose to lead the agency happened to be black, and he thought it would be beneficial to send black agents to Mayfield. He figured black agents would have more success getting people to open up than the previous white law enforcement officers.
00:15:37
Speaker 9: But just so happened we had two very good African American agents and they were big guys, you know, big impressive footing gas. We sent them down there, and sure enough, the local people in the African American community who had knowledge about that crime, who were afraid to talk to the Mayfield police about it or the Kentucky State pleaseers began spill into veins.
00:16:03
Speaker 1: Like Victoria Caldwell.
00:16:05
Speaker 2: They confronted her.
00:16:06
Speaker 9: She wrote down, tell the whole story.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: The story that would end up implicating herself. Jeff Burton, Tammer, Caldwell, Venetia Stubblefield, and Quincy Cross. But the agents had never investigated a homicide. They were two former narcotics cops who used a series of unorthodox tactics to elicit several confessions. And these tactics start with the place they conducted some of their key interviews and.
00:16:39
Speaker 11: Presently located in the conference room of the Dry Sweets located in.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: Paducah, Kentucky, the Drury Inn and Suites in Paducah, Kentucky. Not a police station, but a modest hotel about thirty minutes from Mayfield, the kind of place with free hot breakfast, seventy style looking conference rooms, and limited surveillance.
00:17:03
Speaker 13: They never did bring me my rights or anything. They just had me get in the car and I was like, well, where am I going? They would not tell me where I was going at all until I got there.
00:17:14
Speaker 1: I thought that I was going to the police station. Tammer Caldwell was among their persons of interest. She's Victoria's cousin, the homebody who never went anywhere without her babies and who dated Quincy Cross. He was great with her kids. Victoria had implicated both of them and her interviews with the KBI, and now they were being questioned by law enforcement, including two agents who made it clear that they already knew the truth. They just needed their suspects to confirm it.
00:17:46
Speaker 4: Don't you know we already know?
00:17:48
Speaker 1: I know y'all know what Lee Wise takes the lead, imposing and commanding.
00:17:55
Speaker 11: You look so pathetic, faking those who rocking in that and telling them lie, girl, Look, I don't.
00:18:03
Speaker 14: Know a fool.
00:18:06
Speaker 1: Agent. Babo'neil is mild mannered and more reserved.
00:18:10
Speaker 2: Okay, Quincy, you have the right to remain silent.
00:18:13
Speaker 15: Anything you say Cannon will be held against you in the court.
00:18:16
Speaker 4: With these rights in mind, do you wish to talk with us now? Sure?
00:18:21
Speaker 2: All right?
00:18:22
Speaker 1: Quincy actually turned himself in after seeing his name and face on the news, so you.
00:18:28
Speaker 11: Know, And I ain't never been the type of drong, so I ain't dope.
00:18:31
Speaker 5: So I'll bet I'll turn to myself in you know what I mean, I'd rather come to you instead.
00:18:35
Speaker 4: Have you look for me.
00:18:40
Speaker 1: Quincy and everyone else who was taken to the drury and in sweets went willingly. No one was under arrest, and no one had an attorney present. Tammer tells me she was questioned for hours on end forever. I'm talking about like nineteen hot words. The interviews turned interrogations are confusing, chaotic and taxing.
00:19:03
Speaker 4: You hear what I said, you crying, but your eyes.
00:19:07
Speaker 11: You're sitting there doing what you've got done for your entire life. If you're lying and you're not accustomed to be hailed accountable for your actions.
00:19:25
Speaker 1: In this clip, they're yelling at Tamera while she weeps. She's wearing a collared blue and white pinstriped shirt, her hair is in a side pony, and she looks like a little girl. She's trapped alone in a hotel room with law enforcement, thirty minutes from home and very few people. If anyone knows she's there, oh, terrified.
00:19:53
Speaker 2: That would tell me.
00:19:54
Speaker 13: If you don't tell the truth, you're gonna get shipped up the river. You're never gonna get to see your kids graduate, You're never going to maup to anything.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: The KBI also brought in Rosie, Victoria's sister as a corroborating witness against Jeff Quincy and Tamra. Rosie says they interrogated her for two days.
00:20:14
Speaker 3: They told me I was lying, he kept telling me to shut up, and then they told me that they could take my kids away from me.
00:20:23
Speaker 1: And the line of questioning is also disturbingly focused on the women's sex lives.
00:20:29
Speaker 11: What type of sex did he like or was he did he enjoy?
00:20:33
Speaker 4: Or sex or sex?
00:20:35
Speaker 8: Yes?
00:20:35
Speaker 2: What's your sexual preference?
00:20:37
Speaker 4: Are you by sex? Or you're lesbian?
00:20:40
Speaker 1: Especially about the women being lesbians?
00:20:43
Speaker 4: You considered yourself a lesbian?
00:20:45
Speaker 13: No, you know, I think right after that, right after he asked me if I was, when he stuck his hand up on the table and was rubbing on my leg.
00:20:55
Speaker 1: Jeff Burton was also brought in The White Kid, Susan Golbroth had found I don't want to go to jail.
00:21:03
Speaker 16: I don't want to go to jail, but I don't want to sit here and listen to this lies.
00:21:06
Speaker 12: I don't want to listen to these lies, man, I don't want to.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: And they squeezed him, all of them for confessions.
00:21:12
Speaker 2: It's gonna be your word against five or six other people.
00:21:15
Speaker 4: And you know what it takes. You know what it takes. All it takes is for jury to either the jury to believe what you say or what they say. That's messed up. That's messed up.
00:21:28
Speaker 16: If that's the case, and that's how it goes down, and that is messed up.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: To me, it sounds like the agents learned how to be detectives from watching Law and Order.
00:21:38
Speaker 4: And I hope you a good surfer, baby. I'm giving you one wave.
00:21:42
Speaker 11: You better ride this way until you done, because you're not gonna get another way from me. Okay, yes, So if you can't surf, you better lay down on that board.
00:21:51
Speaker 4: And hope it.
00:21:56
Speaker 1: In these KBI videos, only the interview he is visible. All law enforcement are off camera. We don't know what they were or were not doing out a frame, or who is in the hotel room. Think of videos you see in police stations. The camera is usually above. You can see the whole room. Everyone in it that didn't happen here. Plus video and tape recorders were turned on and off frequently.
00:22:23
Speaker 13: They would ask me questions and they would cut the recorder off.
00:22:27
Speaker 4: We're gonna go off record for about ten minutes, and.
00:22:32
Speaker 13: And he go in this room and he come back in and unpiles the record or whatever and start talking crazy to.
00:22:38
Speaker 4: Me, and we're back on record.
00:22:44
Speaker 1: At one point during Jeff's interrogation, Rosie is brought into the room to identify.
00:22:49
Speaker 4: Him Jeff Burton, Jeff Burton.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: If you know anything about witness identification or lineups, this is absolutely not how it's done. Looking back, Jeff says, the whole thing was mind boggling.
00:23:07
Speaker 16: I feel like they're telling me that, you know, we already got to prove, just tell us. And I'm like, man, I didn't have anything to do with this stuff.
00:23:14
Speaker 4: Now charge me with whatever you want to.
00:23:16
Speaker 16: I did not know her, and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. This can't be real life.
00:23:24
Speaker 2: You can't be And I know.
00:23:25
Speaker 16: That that right there was a crock of shit, But that makes me think that all this is freaking fake as hell.
00:23:29
Speaker 4: Man.
00:23:33
Speaker 1: But the kbi's tactics worked. After weeks of interrogations at the hotel and elsewhere, they got the confessions they were looking for, first from Victoria, who, over the course of at least six interviews with the KBI, goes from having only heard about the murder and possible suspects to actually witnessing the kidnapping, rape and killing of Jessica and anticipating in the abuse of her dead body then Venetia for seven years. Venetia told police that she did not see Jessica after they said goodbye that Saturday night in two thousand. Now after at least two separate days of KBI interrogations. Her story resembles Victoria's.
00:24:24
Speaker 4: Uh has glinsely done anything just to just.
00:24:28
Speaker 1: She says she actually went looking for Jessica that night, then ran into Tamra Victoria, Jeff and Quincy and that he was rubbing honor and touching on her and.
00:24:39
Speaker 3: Stuff and told her if she hadn't cooperated, he was gonna put him that toy.
00:24:44
Speaker 1: Venetia is slumped in her chair. She looks exhausted, shrunken, and you can hear her trying to find the right words.
00:24:53
Speaker 4: Nobody struca nobody did anything hit her.
00:24:58
Speaker 11: Women, you didn't say that though I asked you, Oh, I asked you what happened to.
00:25:06
Speaker 4: Just in that car?
00:25:08
Speaker 1: Changing her answers, according to the response from agents O'Neill and Wise.
00:25:13
Speaker 4: Suck it's Quincy Steer, Well, thank you.
00:25:21
Speaker 1: She eventually says they did drugs and took Jessica to Jeff's house. Then Quincy and the others raped her. But the agents are not satisfied with just saying rape. They need details, graphic details.
00:25:43
Speaker 4: I want you to see it. What was he doing to her?
00:25:48
Speaker 1: And they keep asking about semen.
00:25:51
Speaker 4: I'm a sa was on her body? Who put it there?
00:25:57
Speaker 7: I love?
00:25:59
Speaker 1: I want to point out that this line of questioning might make sense in a rape case where a body was covered in fluids.
00:26:07
Speaker 11: Coincident ejaculated all over our body, right, and y'all still kissing on them, rubbing on the ride?
00:26:15
Speaker 4: Am a right?
00:26:16
Speaker 8: Yes?
00:26:18
Speaker 1: But in the case of Jessica Curran, there was no evidence of rape or a sexual assault on Jessica's body, and especially no seamen. There are glaring inconsistencies in Victoria and Venetia's statements, like Venetia cannot confidently say if Quincy, jeff Or Tamra struck Jessica with any object, but Victoria says Quincy hits Jessica in the head with a mini baseball bat while in the car, and they buried the bat in her sister Rosy's yard. But when the KBI went to search Rosy's yard, they only found a wrench, to which Victoria then changes her story to add that Quincy also hit Jessica with a wrench in the house. The bat was never recovered. A note on this timeline of the crime, though Quincy had to have committed the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Jessica current in the time he left the party at daybreak and when he was spotted by the deputy jailer around seven forty a m possible, sure, but very tight and there are big holes in the kbis theory that all these people assaulted and killed Jessica. First, there were no fingerprints or DNA linking any of them to the murder. In fact, Quincy's DNA and clothing were tested shortly after Jessica's death in two thousand and nothing from Quincy matches the crime scene. On top of that, the only thing that links to the scene of the crime is the fragment of a braided belt found near Jessica's neck, Yet we don't know for a fact that's Quincy's belt, and investigators desperately tried to find evidence to prove their theory of the crime, searching everywhere from vehicles to houses. Law enforcement even exhumed Jessica's body to retest for evidence, and nothing. None exists matching any of these people to Jessica's death or crime scene. And there's one other glaring red flag.
00:28:40
Speaker 13: I didn't know Quincy into two thousand and two, so how could I have something to do with it?
00:28:44
Speaker 1: In this case? Happened in two thousand Remember I told you Tamar and Quincy met while she was visiting her brother in jail. That was two years after Jessica's death. Quincy and Tamra maintained and to this day they did not know each other. In two thousand and I feel don't know Jeff Burton Quincy Cross.
00:29:07
Speaker 16: I didn't know him, didn't hang around him.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Jeff says he had never even met Quincy and he only knew Tamra from school. Despite there being no physical evidence, flimsy stories, inconsistencies suspects not even knowing each other at the time of the murder, and adamant claims of innocence. The KBI brought that case to the Attorney General's office, and under Greg Stumbo's leadership, the state of Kentucky moved forward to try Quincy Cross as a depraved evil man.
00:29:46
Speaker 9: There's no doubt in my mind that we called the right person. There's no evidence that would lead you anywhere else. I mean, you have a direct eyewitness account.
00:29:57
Speaker 2: Of what happened.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: Seven years after Jessica Curran was killed, Venetia Stubblefield, Victoria Caldwell, Tamra Caldwell, Jeff Burton, and Quincy Cross were arrested, charged and indicted based largely on the accounts of two girls and circumstantial evidence. That's it. That's all the prosecution had. And at trial, cracks in those stories start to split, until the entire prosecution's case is left with gaping holes.
00:30:39
Speaker 8: That's after the break.
00:31:03
Speaker 2: All right, good morning, let me go through the rome.
00:31:05
Speaker 14: Make sure we've got everyone here that's supposed to be here.
00:31:09
Speaker 1: Quincy was the first to go to trial in spring of two thousand and eight. By then, news of Jessica's death and the salacious story behind it had spread through Graves County, so the judge agreed to move the trial to Hickman County to avoid any kind of bias the jury from Graves could have.
00:31:28
Speaker 4: All right, is Commonwealth ready to proceed?
00:31:31
Speaker 1: The small courthouse was full and it was tense. On one side there was Quincy's relatives sitting in complete disbelief that he was being accused of such crimes, and on the other Jessica's loved ones with eight years of pent up frustration and pain.
00:31:50
Speaker 2: Commonwealthlack to make an opening statement.
00:31:56
Speaker 1: The lead prosecutor on Quincy's case was Assistant Attorney General Barbara Mainz Whaley, but it.
00:32:03
Speaker 13: Took a long long time to get people to talk about this because of their fear.
00:32:10
Speaker 1: Waaley is a career prosecutor. She's been Assistant Attorney General since nineteen eighty two and is said to be one of the most experienced prosecutors in the Commonwealth. Some people may know her from being one of the special prosecutors to investigate police officers in the twenty twenty killing of Breonna Taylor. Wailey was seeking the death penalty against Quincy. His defense attorneys only had about a year to prepare, and the prosecution didn't make it easy. They dumped thousands of documents on the defense in the run up to trial.
00:32:49
Speaker 17: We're the dates of the items that there are given us go back as much as seven years.
00:32:55
Speaker 1: Quincy's attorney is complaining to the judge. He says, it's been virtually impossible to get through all the files to properly prepare for a death penalty case.
00:33:05
Speaker 17: I don't know if it's a Chinese warded torture or death by ten thousand cuts one or two.
00:33:12
Speaker 1: But the judge denied a motion for more time and the trial continued on schedule. And despite the advantage over the defense, Waley knew this would be a hard case because of how many players and stories there were. In her opening statement, she prepares the jury for this.
00:33:32
Speaker 3: Rumors build on rumors and more winners and talks read like wildfire.
00:33:42
Speaker 1: They field, but the agents with the KBI were allegedly able to find the truth that on the early hours of Sunday, July thirtieth, two thousand, Tamer Caldwell, Victoria Caldwell, Venetia Stubblefield, Jeff Burton, and Quincy Cross picked up Jessica Curran and took her to Jeff Burton's house, where they raped and killed her in a drug fueled haze. Quincy then forced the girls to have sex with Jessica's dead body. Then they stored her body in Jeff's garage until she was moved and set on fire with gas lane and set on fire outside the middle school a day later.
00:34:24
Speaker 4: On the Monday following.
00:34:26
Speaker 1: She was found the following day on Tuesday. One of the first witnesses, Barbara Willie Calls, is the state medical examiner at the time of Jessica's death. He says, besides being burned.
00:34:38
Speaker 2: And there were traumatic injuries on the head and face, and there were lacerations on the back.
00:34:45
Speaker 4: Of the head.
00:34:46
Speaker 1: He says Jessica also had injuries similar to that of a stab wound, but he ruled her likely manner of death was blunt injury and strangulation. He admits there's no actual evidence of strength, but he says the other injuries on Jessica were not significant enough to cause death alone, plus the piece of belt found near her neck suggested strangulation.
00:35:12
Speaker 2: Basically, when everything was completed and looked at that, I thought was very significant in her cause.
00:35:20
Speaker 4: Death good toldly makes you waitness, please Nisa so Field.
00:35:29
Speaker 1: Jessica's friends and family are called school personnel investigators and locals from around town. They have partygoers from Chris Drive testify about seeing Quincy wave his belt around and talk about wanting to go find girls. But Victoria and Venetia are Whaley's star witnesses, and much like in their interrogations, their testimonies differ in key aspects at trial. After that we all got out the corn when I said that. Else In Venetia's story, Jessica walks in Jeff Burton's house.
00:36:06
Speaker 4: How did you get in the house?
00:36:09
Speaker 1: He might, I'll walk in there. Victoria, on the other hand, testifies that Jessica was knocked out and then carried inside the house.
00:36:19
Speaker 10: Quincy and Jeff carrie Jessica's body to the side at the side door.
00:36:30
Speaker 1: Discrepancies are to be expected when a case is eight years old and the women testifying routines at the time of the crime. But I will say messing up details like whether or not you carried an unconscious body inside the house is kind of major. But the prosecution had back up. They called Rosie to confirm what Victoria told the KBI that Quincy threatened Victoria to stay quiet. You heard the call earlier.
00:37:03
Speaker 3: I remember that he said he was gonna kill my sister. I remember that Victoria.
00:37:08
Speaker 1: And the prosecution had another key piece of evidence, a diary that Victoria allegedly kept where she detailed her life and the crime.
00:37:20
Speaker 4: And read August first. What does it say?
00:37:26
Speaker 10: It says, damn, they found the body. I'm not sure what the other word says. I hope they don't find out it was us. Fuck man, it says Q is nowhere to be found. JEP don't want to talk to me. This is bullshit, says fuck. I am out.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: The defense strategy was to question the validity of everything, from the diary to the prosecution circle substantial evidence to witness testimonies, and they were successful in some areas, like poking holes in Victoria's numerous stories on.
00:38:14
Speaker 10: Some parts, yes, some parts now.
00:38:17
Speaker 1: The defense also called their own expert, the former Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner, to refute the questionable findings of strangulation.
00:38:27
Speaker 17: Are you able to provide in the jury a cause of death.
00:38:31
Speaker 4: In this case?
00:38:32
Speaker 15: No, sir, I am not. There's no anatomic cause of death determined in this case. I can tell you that she could have been strangled, but there is no evidence that she was strangled.
00:38:46
Speaker 1: The defense's medical expert explains that a telltale sign of strangulation is bruising and a broken hyoid bone in the neck, which there was not.
00:38:57
Speaker 15: That there's no external documentation of any injury on the skin or the sucutaneous tissues deep to the skin that shows any evidence that trauma was applied.
00:39:07
Speaker 2: To the area.
00:39:09
Speaker 15: Now you can get strangulation injuries.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: The defense wanted to make four main points. First, the only thing tying Quincy to Jessica's death in any physical manner is a belt. Yet there's no evidence it's Quincy's. It was an extremely common two thousands belts. Even a witness at trial is wearing a similar belt and he points to it.
00:39:37
Speaker 4: Yes, certain sluck his rider.
00:39:40
Speaker 1: Second, if there's no certainty Jessica was strangled, then the jury cannot convict Quincy on the prosecution's theory of the case. Third, according to Victoria and Venetia, Jessica was killed early Sunday morning and they put her body in Jeff's garage before driving her to the metal school and lighting her on fire Monday night. By the prosecution's own timeline, Quincy was in jail by the time they disposed and burned Jessica's body. He'd been arrested that Sunday morning on drug charges and stayed in jail for over a year. So their entire theory that Quincy's smelling like gas linked him to Jessica makes no sense. In this timeline, him smelling like gas is meaningless. And fourth, law enforcement coerced witnesses into lying on Quincy. To prove that point. They called Rosie Christ's, Victoria's sister, and the prosecution's witness back on the stand was correct. The defense knew something important about Rosie that they wanted the jury to know.
00:41:00
Speaker 3: I was trying to tell them that I didn't have nothing to do and I didn't know nothing about this case or nothing like that.
00:41:06
Speaker 1: They told me I was lying before trial, Rosie says, she tried to recant to law enforcement, and you.
00:41:13
Speaker 4: Kept trying to tell them the truth, and they wouldn't have said it.
00:41:16
Speaker 1: Yes, she testifies that they made her a lie, implicating Jeff Burton, her own cousin, Tamra Caldwell, and Quincy Cross.
00:41:24
Speaker 17: Quincy cross every threatened you no.
00:41:30
Speaker 4: A goodreat, Victorian, did you know? No? That's all I had.
00:41:36
Speaker 1: When Prosecutor Scott Sutherland counters, Rosie is defiant.
00:41:41
Speaker 4: Oh miss christ.
00:41:44
Speaker 3: Today, I really don't care about going to jail, Scott, So you can ask me what you wanted to up Jack, Let me approach you.
00:41:51
Speaker 1: Rosie shifts in her chair, shakes her head and scrunches her face in anger, but she stands her ground.
00:41:59
Speaker 4: So I'm gonna ask you again. Are you lying today? Are you lying the other day about the other day? Now?
00:42:06
Speaker 2: I'm not lying today.
00:42:07
Speaker 3: And I wanted to touch you all the time.
00:42:09
Speaker 1: You guys have to stop me. But in such a long trial, with so many facts and discrepancies, it becomes nearly impossible to follow what is going on, especially with so many objections, redirects and sidebars.
00:42:29
Speaker 2: Objection, objection, objection, objection, objection.
00:42:34
Speaker 1: With so much confusion, the prosecution new to always direct the attention back to the belt, a.
00:42:42
Speaker 3: Distinctive belt, not a unique belt by any means.
00:42:46
Speaker 1: And the gas medlie strongly and Gaslene, don't look at the distractions, the different stories, the half truths, the recantation. Look here, look at the guy who was talking about finding girls, waving his belt around, smelling like gas. And so, after deliberating for only three hours and forty five minutes, eleven white jurors and one black juror found beyond a reasonable doubt that Quincy Cross murdered Jessica currn.
00:43:32
Speaker 14: Well.
00:43:35
Speaker 5: I cried, man, I cried with my dad. They let my dad in in a room in the back, and I cried with my dad.
00:43:46
Speaker 1: At Quincy's sentencing, Assistant prosecutor Scott Sutherland asked the jury to show Quincy no mercy. He said, I would ask you to look at this heinous crime and ask yourselves, if not now, then when. If not Quincy Cross, then who He deserves nothing less than the ultimate punishment, in this case, a sentence of death.
00:44:13
Speaker 2: I don't believe in the death penalty, but.
00:44:15
Speaker 1: That's not what Joe Kurrn, Jessica's father, wanted.
00:44:20
Speaker 2: I don't feel like a person should die killing another person because another person died, don't bring back the person that died. If I killed somebody else and that brang my daughter back, I killed the first person I see because I want her back that bad. But he's not going to bring her back.
00:44:37
Speaker 1: Ultimately, Quincy was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Quincy says before trial, prosecutors offered him a deal of twenty five years. What did they want you to say?
00:44:50
Speaker 5: A low Camra and Jeffrey. I didn't even ask him what they wanted me to say, none of that. So we didn't even get that far because I ain't that type of person.
00:44:59
Speaker 1: And after trial, Quincy's attorney asked him if you wanted to see if the deal was still good, but he said no. So you were like, I will take a life sentence. I'm not gonna lie about these people.
00:45:13
Speaker 5: Right, You're exactly right, I will, and that's what I did.
00:45:20
Speaker 1: Tamra and jeff were set to go to trial after Quincy, and they were scared.
00:45:26
Speaker 4: You know.
00:45:26
Speaker 16: At first I was gung hole, like, yeah, you know, let's stay lying on me all this stuff. I'm ready to face whatever. And then after that I just broke my spirit. I'm like, oh my god, they're gonna do the same thing to me. I ain't never gonna get out of here. And if my kids ain't all this different shit, you know what I mean. So now I'm like starting a question. Man, even though you didn't say you are going to prison. They don't fucking matter. So they kind of broke my spirit a lot, Like it really took a lot out of me.
00:45:56
Speaker 1: Jeff and Tamra decided to take plea deals to avoid a life sentence and possibly the death penalty. Jeff was sentenced to fifteen years and Tamera ten. Victoria and Venetia pled guilty. Victoria was sentenced to a total of five years and Venetia seven. They only served a few months. After years of fighting, Jessica Kerrn's family finally saw her accused killers punished, but instead of feeling a sense of relief, Joe Kurran felt uneasy.
00:46:35
Speaker 2: I felt in my gut that something wasn't right.
00:46:40
Speaker 1: That's because something wasn't that's after the break. Do you ever have moments where you forget that this is part of your life?
00:47:15
Speaker 10: No, mailwell, mailwell.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: After the trial and conviction, Quincy's family was left to reckon with their own loss.
00:47:24
Speaker 14: It's just like toting them two thousand pound weight on your back every day. No, never forget it, never.
00:47:31
Speaker 9: Off my mind.
00:47:34
Speaker 1: On any given date, you can find Quincy's dad sitting on his porch. Hosted. Behind where he sits is a sign that reads private property owner is too old to fight, too fat to run, too lazy to argue. The image is of two handguns. David Cross isn't fat or lazy, though old is fair. He's in his early seventies now, but his hair, styled in a flat top, is still perfectly jet black. David grew up here right on Cross Street, forty minutes outside of Mayfield, just over the border, in a small town in Tennessee.
00:48:14
Speaker 14: My grandparents just lived down there at the end.
00:48:17
Speaker 1: Of the street, David says. Cross Street is named after his family. They've been here for generations.
00:48:24
Speaker 2: That was our school house right around the corner.
00:48:28
Speaker 1: He points to an abandoned cottage down the little dirt road.
00:48:32
Speaker 10: This was it.
00:48:33
Speaker 14: See, he was segregation back then, you know. This was the black school.
00:48:38
Speaker 2: This is where I went to school for eight years.
00:48:44
Speaker 1: David raised his kids here. Quincy grew up roaming the fields, playing with tadpoles and snapping turtles. David Cross's boy, who he hasn't seen since before the pandemic. Quincy's in prison four hundred and fifty miles away on the other side of Kentucky bordering Virginia. So getting there is difficult.
00:49:08
Speaker 14: You can't imagine, you know, you just want to break down and cry, but it would.
00:49:13
Speaker 6: Do no good.
00:49:16
Speaker 1: Instead, like Joe Curran, David Cross decided to fight. He's spent thousands of dollars defending Quincy. He's hired lawyers and private investigators to try and prove his son is innocent. Darro Woman, my trusted source, is one of the people David worked with to help clear Quincy's name. When Dara found Quincy's case, it came with his whole family, with loved ones who stood by him through the years, which I can tell you from my experience in this line of work, it's actually rare. Incarcerated people are usually forgotten, but instead Quincy has gained new family.
00:50:01
Speaker 14: She's really something special. I gotta say that, she's really something special.
00:50:06
Speaker 18: For over three years now, we've spoken literally almost.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: Every day, I will say every day, but she's persist.
00:50:18
Speaker 2: I got a question we ask out.
00:50:21
Speaker 1: If you're noticing it sounds like there's an audience, it's because there is. On one of these visits, I didn't just meet with David alone on my first trip. He brought the whole gang, his wife, Mary, Quincy's biological mom, Quincy's sister. I think an aunt and a cousin were there too. There were also at least two private investigators and Dara on the floor sitting cross leg filming like a proud mom. And there was another person there. All right, So Joe, we're going to be over here joke.
00:51:01
Speaker 2: I like to think we got the right person because he's been in a lot of time in prison, but evidence don't show he's the right person.
00:51:08
Speaker 14: Mister Karen, I knew he knew something was wrong, him and his family knew something was wrong.
00:51:16
Speaker 1: After trial, Joe Kurran should have felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulders his daughter's murderer convicted, But the nagging feeling wouldn't leave him.
00:51:28
Speaker 2: Then when you start looking to the case, Quincy's from another town, he didn't know my daughter. You got to have a motive, You got to have an opportunity, you got to have I like his five things or the case is not a case. Well, I just couldn't figure out five things on him that would make him from another town, hadn't been involved with her, didn't know her, but he's supposed to come up here and killed her.
00:51:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, so early on you were like this doesn't make sense.
00:51:58
Speaker 2: It didn't make sense.
00:52:03
Speaker 1: A few years after the conviction, David hired a private investigator and had him reach out to Joe. He wanted the investigator to show Joe some of the concerns he had about his son killing Joe's daughter.
00:52:17
Speaker 14: So when we started sharing information and really looking at what the evidence really was, then I think we started talking.
00:52:28
Speaker 1: You know, they would get together and go over everything, would you say, your friends?
00:52:35
Speaker 14: Yes, And a lot of people think that me and mister Karen are an odd couple. But here's the way I see it. Here's my definition of it. Me and mister Karen want the same thing. Mister Karen won't justice for his daughter Jessica, and I want justice for my son, Quincy Cross.
00:53:03
Speaker 2: If Quincy Cross didn't do this, he's the last person I want in there. And I don't want the others to have went through what they went through if they innocent. So if he didn't do it, who did.
00:53:18
Speaker 1: Over the years, Joe, David and their team of pis including Dara, went back to the beginning, to the original investigation, and they think they pinpointed where things derailed.
00:53:32
Speaker 14: I'm sure you done read a whole lot about Susan Gallbert, oh lady with a big mouth that spewed nothing but lie.
00:53:43
Speaker 1: They discovered Susan wasn't just a busy body housewife looking for something to do. I told you that in the immediate aftermath of Jessica's death, Victoria came forward with a story different than the one she told at trial. But it wasn't just a different version of the trial story. She actually implicated two completely different people. I've been told that the answers in this case are somewhere in the beginning in the first cops to look into Jessica's death and the very first people arrested for this crime. But the investigation into those people ended when Susan Goalbreath homed in on Quincy Cross.
00:54:30
Speaker 14: She just kept writing scenarios till they thought it fit the scenario how this thing played.
00:54:37
Speaker 1: Out, and the KBI and prosecution ran with her stories.
00:54:43
Speaker 18: What bothers me is it comes back to the fact that the police, the Commonwealth, the state of Kentucky, they let her have all of this power. As far as I'm concerned, Susan galv Thank got a goddamn thing to do with fucking shit with this case, other than being a roadblock for there to be actual justice.
00:55:10
Speaker 1: Susan Golbreeth also knew there were two people arrested in the initial Mayfield Police investigation, and one of those people she had close ties to. That's next time. 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 Burtis are executive producers. Our editor is Martina Abraham's Ilunga. Dania Suleiman is our fact checker. Sound design and mixing by Joe Plored. Music created by Wrench. Our theme song is the Gangstagrass version of The One Who's Holding the Star by Leo Schofield and Kevin Herrick. Darrel Wolman is investigative producer. Our head of Marketing and Operations is Jeff Cliburn. Ismani Guarderama 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.
00:57:00
Speaker 4: Ye
