In Bone Valley Season 3 | GRAVES COUNTY, Maggie Freleng takes us to a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, where a terrible discovery on the front lawn of a middle school invites a string of amateur and professional investigators to try to solve a murder. Maggie is the latest investigator to get pulled in. And she’ll take all of us along as she teases out this complicated web of rumors and lies, and perhaps even the truth.
In this special preview of Episode 1, we hear from Victoria Caldwell. Her account of the killing of Jessica Currin would become the driving force in the conviction of Quincy Cross and others for the murder of Jessica Currin.
To hear this chapter in its entirety, visit Lava for Good/Graves County
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.
Graves County is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.
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Episode Transcript
Hey, y'all, it's Maggie.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm here to tell you about a new show I've
been working on for the past two years. It's called
Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder
of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far
our legal system will go in order to find someone
to blame.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Here's a preview of the first episode. I am so
excited for you all to hear it.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Heads up, this series contains graphic descriptions of violence. There's
a saying I heard on a recent trip to the South,
A half truth is a whole lie. And if there's
a place that breathes life into that proverb, it's the
town of Mayfield in Graves County, Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
A horrific murder when unsolved for six years in Mayfield, Kentucky,
a town of ten thousand people, then one local residence
decided to take matters into her own hands.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
On August first, two thousand, the body of Jessica Curran
was found outside of the Mayfield Middle School. It appeared
as though she'd been beaten and set on fire. Jessica
was just eighteen years old, a new mom and the
daughter of a lieutenant with the Mayfield Fire Department, and
her case would go unsolved for years.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
When police in Mayfield, Kentucky found a body, Susan Galbreth
found a purpose. She had to know who murdered Jessica Current.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Until a local homemaker and a handful of girls came
forward with a story, a story that police would use
to convict six people, lending Susan Goalbreath in the newspapers
and the radio and on national TV.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Galbreath was a housewife, married three times and drifting. She
had no law enforcement training, and she'd never even met
Jessica Curran. But whatever her wouldn't let go.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Somebody had to do something, and if somebody was me.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
So be it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Years later, the Kentucky Attorney General would even honor Susan
with an Outstanding Citizen Award for finding the key witness
in the Jessica Current case.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
It's a made for TV story.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Ordinary woman help solve murder, brings justice to a small town.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
Susan Gallibreth was named Citizen of the Year by the
Kentucky Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 6 (02:31):
And to know that I had just the slightest part
and it just I feel like I was meant.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
To Susan Gallibreath has done more than just proved one
person really can make a difference through sheer, persistence and nerve.
This Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Current catnip for the press, and who could blame them?
It's a good one, maybe too good to be true,
because this story will go beyond one woman. It's about
the lengths our legal system, our communities and the press
(03:12):
will go in order to find someone to blame. And
it's about the tales we tell and choose to believe
in pursuit of justice, the repercussions of which have uprooted lives,
shattered families, and exposed a deep rought in Kentucky's halls
of power. This is Graves County, Chapter one, Something Stinks.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
My name is Maggie Freeling.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I'm a Pulitzer winning journalist and producer who has spent
years reporting on the criminal legal system. That's how I
first heard about this case and about Susan Galbreath.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I didn't get a chance to meet Susan in person.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
She died in twenty eighteen at the age of fifty eight.
A lot of what I've learned about Susan comes from
her interviews with the press and her own writings emails
I've had the chance to review, and from her testimony
in the trial for the murder of Jessica Currn.
Speaker 6 (04:52):
When I was a child, I either wanted to be
a comedian or a police officer. So I wn't neither,
of course, but I've just always had fascination with the
law and things like that.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Susan Galbreath was born in Chicago and moved to Mayfield, Kentucky,
in her early thirties. She liked living in a small
town with a tight knit community, and she had a
son she loved. But by the time her fortieth birthday.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Hit, Susan was in a rut.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
A self described cigarette smoking, busybody. She was on her
third marriage to a man who drank too much, and
she'd lost her job from an injury she was aimless.
On top of that, she had a string of deaths
in her family.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
In nineteen ninety nine, I had the death of my brother, father,
and mother, so it was a real rough year for me.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Here she is talking to a local public radio station
WKMS in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
And I think that I've always felt that I was
meant to be there today that they've found Jessica's body,
and I often refer to it as through her, somehow
got my purpose back, because it was a real rough
year in ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
In her telling, Susan was sitting at a restaurant on
a summer day when she overheard a waitress saying that
police had found a body. What happened after that can
only be described as spiritual, an epiphany of sorts. She
just had to go to the scene of the crime
and see it for herself, and what she found horrified
(06:32):
and captivated her. She would spend every waking hour wondering
what kind of monster could have done such a thing.
But time passed and the case went unsolved, and after
four years, the police had little to show for their
work except for some failed leads and a string of
rumors about what had happened to Jessica Curran. That's when
(06:57):
Susan says her curiosity turned into an obsession. If the
cops weren't going to crack the case, she would she'd
play detective and string tidbits of information together chase leeds
find the truth. But this amateur sleuth needed help, so
she started emailing people important people like Oprah and Julia Roberts,
(07:20):
anyone who could connect her to resources or give this
case much needed attention, but she heard nothing.
Speaker 7 (07:29):
A federal investigation in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And then on TV one day she saw a British
investigative journalist by the name of Tom Mingled.
Speaker 7 (07:38):
Bobbie revealing how they'd blind to see the manipulated the
truth for forty years.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
So she wrote him as well, Date four four, two
thousand and four from Susan g It chartered that net.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
This is Susan reading part of that email for a
radio piece Tom produced for the BBC in twenty twelve.
It was a retrospective on the work Susan ended up
doing for the case.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Hello, mister Mangold, I am writing concerning a murder in
a small town in the state of Kentucky here in
the US.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
The victim a beautiful eighteen year old black girl.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Tom flew to Kentucky about a month after getting that
email in two thousand and four. It was the beginning
of a year's long partnership with Susan and the launch
of their investigation.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
They were an odd duo.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Here are segments on how they describe each other in
Tom's radio piece.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
When I first met Tom, I thought he was prim
and proper, like he had to stick up his ass.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
I mean, he was just really formal, you know.
Speaker 7 (08:42):
When I first met Susan, I liked her on site.
She's chubby, lively, great sense of humor, sexy, deep voice,
and passionate about the one thing she needed to be
passionate about the murder of Jessica current.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Tom, then in his late sixties, said he brought his
experience as a seasoned investigative report and taught Susan how
to parse gossip from truth. They drank bottles of Sauvignon
blanc together, Chase Leeds discuss theories, and eventually they pinpointed
a local girl who turned out to be key to
(09:15):
solving the case.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Victoria Caldwell.
Speaker 8 (09:19):
Doors Victoria Caldwell, and what did people call you? Victoria?
Speaker 2 (09:24):
She came forward saying she was an accomplice to the crime,
and she ended up being the state's key witness.
Speaker 8 (09:32):
So in July too Fatus Power was here fifteen years old.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Victoria's account about what happened to Jessica Curran would be
the driving force in the conviction of her accused killers.
Speaker 6 (09:47):
Cavalovell Firsi's Quinsey Omar Crouch.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
This was the story Victoria told.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
We've edited her statements for length and warning it contains
descriptions of physical and sexual violence.
Speaker 7 (10:03):
Vamos Victoria Bill.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
On a summer night in two thousand, Victoria says she
was hanging out with a few kids from around town,
including Jessica Curran and Venetia Stubblefield, all of them teenagers
at the time. According to Victoria, they eventually ended up
in a car with some older kids, all in their
early twenties, including Victoria's cousin Tamra, Tamra's boyfriend Quincy Cross,
(10:28):
and a guy they need from school named Jeff Burton,
the only white person in the group.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Well, whence he started passing out the drugs.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Coke, She says. They did cocaine and other drugs in the.
Speaker 8 (10:42):
Car, yes, ecstasy.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Tamra and Quincy were driving in the front with Jessica
and they started touching her.
Speaker 8 (10:51):
Quincy and Tamar were rubbing on Justica's legs. She was
told them to stop and no.
Speaker 6 (10:58):
Did they stop?
Speaker 7 (11:00):
No?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I didn't want that.
Speaker 8 (11:03):
Then when we got to the driveway of jeff house,
Quincy he wreked under the seat, and he had a
bat and he hit her in her head.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
From Lava for Good, this has been a preview of
Graves County, a new story of corruption and the fight
for truth. Listen to the entirety of Graves County in
the Bone Valley, feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the
entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus
on Apple Podcasts,
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