September 14, 2023 • 45 mins
18-year-old Jessica Currin’s burned and decomposing body was discovered on August 1, 2000 behind Mayfield Middle School in Mayfield, KY. Jessica had lacerations on the back of her head, nose and chin, and stab wounds. The medical examiner also believed she had been strangled but there was no evidence to support this theory. The case went cold for a few years, until a couple of supposed eyewitnesses came forward, motivated by promises of reward money, and told inconsistent stories that they and multiple others had kidnapped, killed, and raped Jessica. They said Quincy Cross was one of the people involved, and that he was the person who hit and strangled Jessica. Based on this unreliable testimony, as well as a jailhouse snitch, and despite a lack of physical evidence connecting him to this crime, Quincy was convicted of the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jessica Currin and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Maggie Freleng talks to Quincy Cross and Miranda Hellman, Quincy's attorney.
To learn more and get involved, please visit:
https://www.change.org/p/free-quincy-cross
www.kentuckyinnocenceproject.org
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
On the morning of August first, two thousand, a woman's
partially burned and decomposing body was found behind a middle
school in Mayfield, Kentucky. Eighteen year old Jessica Current had
last been seen playing cards with friends on the previous
Saturday night, leaving a nearly three day gap where no
one claimed to have seen her. The crime was investigated
(00:24):
by local and state police, but after a couple of
years the trail went cold. Then, prompted by his citizen's
investigation conducted by a local housewife, one of Jessica's friends
came forward with a bizarre tale. In it she and
a group of friends had partied with Jessica that night,
then kidnapped, beaten, and raped her, and finally killed her.
(00:47):
The ringleader, she told police, was Quincy Cross. Quincy had
been at a party in Mayfield that night, but he
claimed never to have met Jessica or any of the
others involved. Still at trial, when others testify to the
events of that night, they two pointed to Quincy as
the murderer. But this is wrongful conviction, So welcome back
(01:26):
to wrongful conviction. I'm Maggie Freeling, host of wrongful conviction
with Maggie Freeling and I'm so excited to be sitting
in for Jason Flamm today and to share this story
with you today. I have Quincy Cross with me and
I also have Miranda Hellman, his attorney from the Kentucky
Innocence Project. Miranda, thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Quincy, Hey, how you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I am well. How do you feel about telling everyone
your story today? I know you haven't done that much.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It's a lot of things that I've been owing in
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Well, let's get to it. I want to hear your
story in detail, and usually I just like to start
with your life growing up? What was that like?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I grew up with sisters and brothers on both sides
my family, my mom's side, you know, my dad's side,
on my stepmom's side. You know what I'm saying, very old,
protected by my sisters, all of them, provider, protector, somebody
that they can come talk to, have the conversations that
they can't have with other people. And they know that.
(02:27):
And uh, and we have real good times. You know,
as kids, we did other things together. We used to
catch turtles and snakes and all that. We used to
go frog gigg We used to have you know, just
do what young kids do. I grew up in Union
City and I grew up in Willer Mills, Tennessee. So
you know, I'm a country guy, all right.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
You got to explain that to me, though, Quincy, I
grew up in New York City. What is growing up
in the country.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Like, Okay, country is a whole. That's a whole lot
of love in the country. You know, It's like we did.
We did small things like play tag and play baseball,
and you know, we just did it as a small community.
Then you got to tighten their family because it's a
lot of older people that raised you. They cooked for you.
You know, you wash their cars like more, their yawds
(03:08):
and things. Because we was tightening. There was a whole
lot of love in the community.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
You know what I'm saying, Quincy, When you were younger,
what did you What did you want to do with
your life? What were your hopes and dreams?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Sports was my thing. I wanted to be a good
football player. That's what I wanted to do. I want
to go to college and play football and help the
older people in my community. Look up. You know what
I'm saying and say he did something with his life,
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
So what was going on in your life in two thousand?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
It was up and down. Two thousand was up and
down because matter of fact, we had just had my
grandmama sileral on Mother's Day of ninety nine, and I
went through a spiral after that, you know, because that
was that was my heart.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
What do you mean by spiral? What did you what
was that like?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
I got off in the drugs, basically got off in
the drugs and using the man telling them I was
doing both.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
What kind of drugs?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Cokaine?
Speaker 1 (04:01):
So wondering if before the summer of two thousand did
you have any run ins with the law at all
when you were selling drugs, dealing drugs whatever it was.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Well, it was like small smile, petty crime like marijuana,
ca you know, cocaine case some day wouldn't get you
no time, you know, some thirty day, ninety days, you know,
some smile like that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
So Quincy, that summer you were living in Union City, Tennessee,
just south of the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. But
the crime that you were ultimately convicted of occurred in Mayfield, Kentucky,
which is about thirty five minutes away by car. So, Mirinda,
can you tell us a bit about what Mayfield was
like in two thousands so listeners can kind of get
the feel for it.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
So, Mayfield, Kentucky was and still is a very small
town in rural western Kentucky, a very predominantly white community.
The black population and minority population live on one side
of town, where you know, the white population lives in another.
So the police and really the city government in Mayfield
(05:05):
has had a few scandals throughout its time. The one
that I think is most connected to this case would
be the assistant police chief, Ronnie Lear.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
At the time of Quincy's drug arrest, Ronnie Lear had
already been under investigation for some time because of allegations
that he and some of the other police officers had
been selling confiscated drugs. Lear was later indicted for misconduct
charges after crack cocaine was found in his desk drawer.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
He was fired essentially from the Mayfield Police department some
time after this case occurred, and it appeared to be
a theory of the defense at the time of Quincy's trial.
Even in two thousand and eight that Ronnie Lear was
just a crooked cop and that this may have been
connected to it in some way.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, So, Quincy, can you tell me about the night
of July twenty ninth, two thousand. Who were you with
and how why did you wind up in Mayfield?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Were in Yana City. We had a party set.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
We was conning the house up for this party, and
Travis Jackson, Carlos Saxton and Gregg Store had pulled up.
So I've been knowing Travis before he could walk. So
he come down there looking for some drugs. So I
told him, you know, I could help him out.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Quincy, Travis, Carlos, and Greg drove around for a while
looking to score and picked up some drugs near his
hometown of Woodland Mills around nine point thirty. They stopped
at a liquor store, then headed back to Union City.
On the way, Travis suggested they head up to Kentucky.
He knew some folks that could sell to in Mayfield,
just over the state line.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
I'm like, man, I don't know nobody in Kentucky. Man,
I want to go to Kentucky. He was like, come on, man,
if you go, we'll bring you back later. On.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
It took some convincing, but eventually Quincy agreed and they
headed up to Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And the process to that, we hit these back so
many of these different back roads to where I don't
even know where we at.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
We pop up in Mayfield around midnight. They ended up
at a party on Chris Drive, somewhere on the outskirts
of town.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
They got them a girlfriends or whatever hanging out out there.
So we selling drugs out there, that's all. I don't
know nobody out there as you here.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Later on, a number of other people who were involved
in Quincy's case were alleged to have been at this
party on Chris Drive, including Carlos Saxton, but the only
one of them who was actually there was Carlos. The
night wore on and Quincy's friend showed no sign of
wanting to leave the party.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
But I keep asking them to take me home. I'm like, man,
I'm ready to go home. So I've used the phone,
the house phone. I called him uponder them back in,
said letting them know that I'm trying to get home,
and I know they waiting on men.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
You know, by now, the sun was starting to come up.
Quincy was getting hungry, so he borrowed Greg's car to
drive into Mayfield to get something to eat, but he
got lost on the way downtown and ended up driving
in circles around the back roads. Finally, around seven in
the morning, he ran out of gas. Quincy found a
gas can in the trunk of the car and was
(08:04):
about to pour some into the tank when someone drove
by and stopped to help out. It happened to be
the Mayfield deputy jailer on his way to work.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
This guy, he's standing right beside me, so he seen
me drop a couple of drumps of gas on my
parents laid But he's in the hareway to get to
work because he's late. So stay trooper with Mike Perkins
pulled up. So now he smelled the gas, but he
gave me a ride back to Chris Drag about a
mile up the street, and from now he dropped me off.
And then he said he went back to the car
(08:32):
and he's seeing marijuana, which was which was some some
black and mile and mile. It wasn't even marijuana, it
was black and man.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So you encountered Officer Perkins the morning of the thirtieth
and so when he found what he said was weed.
I know you said it was black and miles like,
which is like a cigar kind of thing. What happened
from there?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
So he come back to the to the house asking
me if he can search a car, Tell him the
car ain't mine. Then I got two empty baggage in
my pocket that I meant to throw away but day
in my pocket and then stay of Kentucky two forms
of prayer for negative automatic possession. So and two empty
baggies is what got me arrested.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
In all, ten of the people at the Chris Drive
party were arrested that morning for drug possession, including quincy.
He spent the next two years in the Kentucky Department
of Corrections as a result. So Miranda, this drug arrest
happened on the morning of July thirtieth. Meanwhile, a young
woman named Jessica Curran had been seen at a different
(09:31):
gathering with friends the night before, and then she went missing.
Her body was found a few days later, on Tuesday,
August first. So do we know what happened in the
time between.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
The timeline is difficult to nail down, and we don't
have a time of death, even a day of death.
For Jessica, partly because of the mishandling of the crime
scene and the autopsy medical examination. So Saturday night, which
would have been July twenty ninth, was the night that
Jessica was last seen. So through looking at the witness interviews,
(10:06):
I have the most accurate account of her leaving a
small get together with her cousin Vnesha around eleven o'clock
that night on Saturday.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And according to the witness statements, this was just a
few women playing cards at one of their friend's houses,
nothing to do with the party on Chris Drive.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So we know for certain that evening she was alive.
She was in Mayfield, and she left a small get
together at a friend's house. No one aside from Venetia
and Victoria Caldwell saw her anytime after eleven o'clock.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
But Venetia and Victoria Caldwell were to become major players
in Quincy's case. We'll hear more about that later. By
Sunday afternoon, Jessica's parents, who were watching her baby son, Zion,
were concerned. It wasn't like Jessica to not be up
and ready for chure. They started calling around, but they
didn't find anyone who had seen her since the night before.
(11:06):
By Tuesday, August first, nearly three days after Jessica had
last been seen, her parents filed a missing person's report
with the Mayfield Police.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
So as the missing person's report comes in, it's almost
at the exact same time that the call that this
body's been found behind the middle school comes in. So
the Mayfield Police dispatch out the Assistant Chief, Ronnie Lear,
and then the lead detective in this case, Tim Fortner.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Tim Fortner was a beat cop who had just been
promoted to lead detective. This was his first day on
the job. He'd never investigated a murder before, and the
investigation was disorganized from the start. So, Miranda, can you
describe the crime scene? What did the investigators find?
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So, Jessica's body was found pretty severely decomposed and burned.
She did not have clothing on. It was pretty clear
she had a dress on and just most of it
was burned off of the top, but there were pieces
of it underneath of her body. Her shoes were found
(12:11):
at the scene, but they weren't on her feet. She
had some jewelry on that was not burned off, and
that was actually how her mother identified from photos of
the jewelry that she was wearing.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Was there anything else found at the scene that they
thought was significant.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
The majority of the items that they attempted to test
or to look for evidence on were just so badly burned.
The fire had basically burned out, so there was very
little left at the crime scene that wasn't you know, charred.
And then additionally, they decided at autopsy they wouldn't keep
her clothing and they said it was too badly burned.
(12:47):
There was a small piece of a braided belp found
pretty close to the body. I'm gonna guess is about
two to four inches long. It's not on her, but
it is in the grass next to her, and it
does have a buckle still attached to it. So those
were collected and still remain in evidence.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
So there were two things that were later alleged to
connect Quincy to the crime. First the fragment of braided
belt and buckle, even though that style of belt was
common at the time. And second, the fact that the
body had been found partially burned, coupled with the smell
of gasoline that had spilled on Quincy's pants.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
There was definitely an accelerant used and the police follow
the assumption that it was gasoline, and they connected that
just by the word gasoline to Quincy, who was found
that next morning pouring gas out of a gas can
into the car that had no gasoline in it. The
deputy jailer saw that happen. He actually watched Quincy dump
(13:48):
the gas on himself and down the side of the car,
and that's why he pulled over and asked him for help.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
While the police were attempting to collect evidence, the crime
scene was getting more and more chaotic.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Are really starting to show up at the middle school
where they put tape up. It still wasn't a super
secure scene. In looking at the video that they made
that day. People are really coming and going.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
And one of those people was a local housewife named
Susan Galbreath.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
She describes herself as an overweight stay at home why though,
who solved a crime? So Susan Gailbrith was at the
scene the day Jessica's body was discovered. From her own writings,
she says that she was at a diner in downtown
Mayfield having breakfaster lunch and that she felt a higher
(14:36):
power calling her to the middle school because she felt
that there was a tragedy there, so she becomes essentially
obsessed with this case.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Tim Fortner headed up the Mayfield Police investigation, working with
the Kentucky State Police. Initially, the authorities had two main suspects,
both of whom were arrested in two thousand and one.
One was Carlos sa one of the guys who had
been to the Chris Drive party along with Quincy and
who had been dating the victim, Jessica Currn around that time.
(15:09):
The other was Jeremy Adams, the father of Jessica's son.
Jeremy's mother was a close friend of Susan Goalbreth's, so.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Once Jeremy's arrested, Susan Galbreth turns into kind of a
private sleuth, wanting to put the case together and figure
it out. So she's I mean, she's deeply involved and
very intertwined in the story to the point she's almost
acting as a fourth investigating agency, you know, alongside the
city police, the State Police, and the Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And Susan was getting inside information from one of the
State Police investigators on the case.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
That was Jamie Mills. They were exchanging information pretty freely,
so Jamie was actually giving this private citizen that wanted
to solve this crime information.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Thanks to Jamie and her other connections, Susan had access
to not only the police files, but also to Jeremy
Adams's entire attorney file. And in one of the police
files there was a mention of the drug arrest on
Chris Drive.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
There is a notation in Quincy's file about him being
booked in and him smelling like gas, and I think
she starts to weave the stories together. I believe that
that's why she started turning to Quincy. He was a
pretty easy mark as well. He was an outsider, which
I think is incredibly important to this case. He was
not from Mayfield, he had very few ties to Mayfield.
(16:30):
It was easy to point the finger at him because
he was kind of a nameless, faceless person that was
not her best friend's son.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
So, Quincy, when did you first hear the name Jessica Curran?
Speaker 3 (16:43):
First time I ever heard her name, I was locked up.
I was already locked up. We was in the back
of the jail and we ate bought a newspaper backer
and he found the body, a body behind the school.
I was like, man, that's bad, man. How they did
her man somebody, Ye, they need to convict somebody.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
While Quincy was still incarcerat in Mayfield on the drug charge,
he became acquainted with Tamra Caldwell, the sister of a
fellow prisoner. After his release in October of two thousand
and two, he began seeing Tamra and eventually moved in
with her in Mayfield. Tamra was the cousin of Victoria Caldwell. Then,
in February of two thousand and three, the two suspects,
(17:21):
Jeremy Adams and Carlos Saxton, both had their indictments dismissed
because of discovery violations by the Mayfield Police Department and
the local prosecutor. Although they had not been excluded from suspicion,
it was the police and prosecutor not responding to discovery
requests from their attorneys that led to their release. The
case went cold for a few years before it was
(17:41):
eventually picked up by the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation or KABI. Meanwhile,
Susan Galbreath was still hard at work on her citizen's investigation.
She had teamed up with a TV documentary production company
and was still being fed information by Jamie Mills. She
had also started a MySpace page of the case, publicly
calling out some people she thought were involved, including Quincy Cross,
(18:06):
which is how she drew the attention of Victoria Caldwell.
Victoria told Susan Goalbreath that she knew who had killed
Jessica because she had been there when it happened. Victoria
and Venetia had never met Quincy until he began seeing
Tamra in two thousand and two. Yet the pair wove
a bizarre story that implicated Quincy, Tamra, and an acquaintance
(18:30):
named Jeffrey Burton, and that ultimately became the basis of
the States case against Quincy.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So the ultimate theory that gets presented at trial by
Victoria and Venetia is that they were walking around in Mayfield, Victoria,
Venetia and Jessica, and that a car picked them up.
The car changes, the driver changes constantly. It's very hard
to pinpoint who this was supposed to be in the car.
(18:58):
It's supposed to be jeff Free Tamara, Quincy, Victoria, Venetia
and Jessica, and that Quincy was like making advances on
Jessica and she was not wanting those advances. They end
up at the party at Chris Drive.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
According to witnesses from the party, none of these people
were ever at the Chris Drive party except for Quincy
and Carlos, who had driven up together from Tennessee. Yet
at some point Victoria and Venetia folded Carlos into their
own narrative. Since those two were the people last seen
with Jessica, and since Carlos was seeing her at the
(19:34):
time and was a suspect in her murder, all three
of them had every motive to deflect suspicion from themselves,
which is likely how their stories ended up merging together.
Carlos Saxon later testified at the trial that at the party,
Quincy was seen swinging a brown braided leather belt around
like a rodeo writer, but this fact could have been
(19:56):
fed to him by the investigators to account for the
charred fragment belt found near Jessica's body and to fabricate
another connection between Quincy and Jessica. Victoria and Venicia's stories
get more outlandish from there.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Somehow they get from Chris Drive to Jeffrey Burton's house
back into town, and when they got there, Quincy knocked
Jessica out in the car, they carried her body in.
She was still alive, but they carried her body in,
put her in Jeffrey's bedroom, and they essentially had an
orgy where everyone was kind of coming and going in
(20:33):
and out of this bedroom while Jessica was coming in
and out of consciousness on the bed. Then they say
that some time after that, after she woke back up,
that Quincy hit her in the head. Again. They almost
exclusively say it's with a baseball bat, like a miniature
souvenir baseball bat, until they can't find the baseball bat
(20:55):
and they find something else.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
According to Victoria, she had buried the bat in her
sister of Rosy Christ's backyard, but when they searched the backyard,
the investigators could not find it. Instead, they uncovered an old,
rusty ratchet, And at that point Victoria's story suddenly changed.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And she says, Oh, it wasn't a bat, it was
a tool that makes a clicking noise. And they collect
the item and there's literally no evidence on it, nothing
that connects to the crime at all whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Nevertheless, that item later showed up as evidence at trial.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Victoria gets on the stand and says it's the murder weapon.
I buried it in the backyard along with some clothing,
and they never find the clothing. They never find the
baseball bat. They only find this ratchet, and it becomes
a key piece of evidence against Quincy.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
So, without a physical connection to the crime, and despite
the cause of death being undetermined at autopsy, this ratchet
was alleged to be the murder weapon based solely on
Victoria's word. The theory became that Quincy had allegedly hit
Jessica repeatedly in the head with not a bat but
this ratchet, and Victoria and Venetia's absurd tail continues after
(22:10):
Quincy supposedly delivered the final blow.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
They say that that final blow is what killed her,
and that they continued to have this orgy after she
had passed away, where Quincy forced everyone to perform sex
acts on Jessica after she had passed away. From there,
they say that morning broke they took her body and
put it in the garage, wrapped in a blanket and
(22:35):
just left it there for a few days, and it
wasn't until a smell started occurring that they decided they
were going to move the body to.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
The middle school, where it was found the following Tuesday morning,
August first, and autopsy was performed on Jessica's body, but
as with most of the investigation, it was badly botched
and inconclusive. Because the body was so badly decomposed and burned,
the medical examiner was unable to determine when or how
(23:01):
she died. In addition, items of her clothing had been discarded,
and no one thought to save a sample of her
DNA to potentially compare it with profiles found on other
crime scene evidence. So in two thousand and five, Jessica's
body was exhumed and re examined. Kentucky State Police hoped
that DNA samples would corroborate her alleged connection with Quincy,
(23:24):
who is by now their main suspect.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
One of the main pieces of evidence that they were
looking for was something that would have her DNA sample
in it. They had all of these items from the
crime scene that they wanted to use to connect Jessica
and Quincy together. They tried very hard and they were
never able to do that.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Meanwhile, Susan Golbreath continued with her campaign to throw suspicion
off her best friend's son, Jeremy Adams and onto someone else.
And by two thousand and seven, thanks to her citizen
detective theories, the weak threads of circumstantial evidence being used
to connect Quincy with the crime scene, combined with Victoria
and Venetia's absurd narrative, the state believed that they had
(24:06):
enough to make an arrest. By then, Quincy was living
with a woman named Melissa, who had two young boys.
One night, he and Melissa were lying in bed watching television.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
In my face stop up on the news, said, like newsworm,
I'm considered armed in dangers, so the first thing I
think about is in keyds. So she gave me a
look like, babe, what you gonna do? I said, I'm
gonna get the hell up out her here, because I
don't want to bring no guns up here. What he
sees it.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Quincy's friends and family immediately started calling, urging him to
get out of town. One friend offered to drive him
to California, another to Mississippi, but Quincy didn't want to
go on the run. He went to his dad's house
to find the police had already been there looking for him.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
So I tell my dad, I'm like, look, man, I'm
going to tell myself he and iigman Kentucky because I
ain't gonna do no running because I ain't need nothing.
But they got me considered armed in dangers. I know
they won't try to kill me. I think that they
wanted me dead so they can try to er up
and close his tase so they can just say, well,
we got the person that did and he's dead. And
you know that's what I think. So these these guys
(25:31):
from the so cappin Trucky brew up investigation on Lee,
Wires and O'Neill come to take me up from the
from the Apeman County jail and they take me to
a hotel room at the Duka and then Terry gave
me the whole time from from about leve them that
twelve that night till about sixty seven that morning. When
I keep telling them to take me to the jail, man,
I don't want to talk to y'all. Take me to
(25:52):
the jail.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Did you ask for a lawyer, Quincy? I did ask
for a lawyer twice, and they never gave you a lawyer.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
They never even act like they heard me say that
They had just told me that I was arrested anyway,
that's what they were telling me. I was arrested for
the murder of Jessica Karring.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
From the time that Jessica's body was found in two
thousand until Quincy was arrested in two thousand and seven,
the case went through several different investigations and a mind
boggling number of suspects. We don't have time to go
into all of that, but let's take a moment for
a little recap. So the case was investigated first by
(26:31):
the Mayfield Police Department, resulting in the arrest of Jeremy
Adams and Carlos Saxton. After their charges were dropped due
to discovery violations. Neither suspect was ever recharged or went
to trial. When Susan Golbreth got involved, working with Jamie
Mills and the Kentucky State Police, she was the one
who pushed Quincy forward to the exclusion of Jeremy and Carlos,
(26:54):
as well as several alternate suspects. Then the KBI picked
up the case, using Victoria and Venetia to solidify their
theory of the crime. This led them to Quincy, Tamra,
and Jeffrey, who were all charged with kidnapping, rape, murder
and abuse of a corpse.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
The prosecution's theory wasn't super clear. When you look at
this case. There are four different investigations that end in
four different outcomes with four different defendants, and so I
see why it was very difficult for them to figure out,
how are they actually going to try him for this
murder and let alone get a conviction.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Nevertheless, the trial began in March two thousand and eight, So.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
For a capital murder case to go to trial in
less than one year is to me unheard of. I
don't see how anyone could be prepared to go to
a capital trial in one year, especially in light of
the massive amounts of discovery that the prosecution was dumping
on them continually.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
The state, led by Special Prosecutor Barbara Waley, built its
case largely around the outlandish and inconsistent stories told by
Victoria and Venetia. Both women had pleaded guilty to corpse
abuse and evidence tampering, but as the prosecution star witnesses,
their sentencing was delayed until after they had testified in
(28:10):
Quincy's trial. After telling their stories in front of the jury,
Victoria Caldwell was sentenced to five years, but ultimately served
just under three months. Venisiha's Doublefield got a total of
seven years, but ended up serving only six months. Along
with their trial testimonies, which was the only direct evidence
against Quincy, the state presented a diary that Victoria had
(28:32):
supposedly written during the time of the murder, in which
she implicated Quincy.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
So this diary is supposed to be a document that
helps lend some truthfulness to the story that Victoria and
Venicia come up with. One of the entries essentially says
they found Jessica's body, Oh my god, what am I
going to do? And she says the phrase Q is
nowhere to be found.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Which is really odd. Remember, according to Quincy, Victoria did
not know him in two thousand. They didn't meet until
over a year later when Quincy was dating her cousin Tamra.
The prosecution also presented testimony from the medical examiner who
had performed the autopsy. Despite the burnt and decomposed condition
(29:19):
of the body, he said that he believed the cause
of death could possibly have been either strangulation or blunt
force trauma, but his theory appeared to be based more
on the evidence presented by the prosecution the piece of
belt and the story about the ratchet than on actual
medical evidence. In defense, Quincy's attorney Vince Eustace brought up
(29:39):
the former Chief Medical Examiner, doctor George Nichols as an
expert witness, but his testimony was also inconclusive.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
He essentially was just a witness to say they truly
can't say when this crime occurred. They can speculate as
to strangulation, they can speculate as to blunt force trauma.
But because of the decomposition the bach medical exam, together
with just the condition of the body, they absolutely, with certainty,
cannot tell you that this occurred here in this way
(30:07):
or that this was what actually caused her death.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
There was no medical evidence that Jessica had even been raped.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
There was no semen found anywhere, there was any any
other evidence of sexual assault. Maybe because it didn't happen,
maybe because of the fire, but we just certainly do
not know it.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Carlo Saxon testified about seeing Quincy swinging the belt around
at the Chris Drive party, and Victoria's sister Rosie Christ
took the stand for the prosecution to answer questions about
the ratchet found in her backyard.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
She's very quiet. She answers yes and no. She doesn't
say too much. She's a prosecution witness, but not super cooperative.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
And in fact, Rosie later returned to the stand to
testify for the defense, recanting her previous testimony.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Saying, they threatened me. They said they'd take my kids away,
I would go to prison for murder, and then they
paid me money to do it. And it really just
falls on deaf years and it gives us a little
bit of insight into exactly how the prosecutors and police
were treating the witnesses in this case, with their threats
and with their payments. And that was essentially the case.
(31:17):
Quincy did not testify. They they did very little to
cut a Victoria and Venetia's story. And it just at
the end of the day, I don't think it swayed
the jury. It wasn't enough to show that what they
were saying was a lie and that it was a
provable Ee.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Here's the question, Quincy. Didn't you have an alibi for
the time she was killed?
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Yeah, I did. My lawyer never used it. I was
on Cruze Draft. I never left Chris Draft that night,
and everybody in the house, they continued I never left
that house, and it's all came up.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
And then from Sunday morning on, you were in the
Mayfield Jail for weed possession. Correct.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
I couldn't sort the records. That's what it say is
I was already locked up. The first time I heard
Justica's name, I was locked up.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
I think some people might hear this, you didn't know Jessica,
you don't even know your co defendants, and some people
might just bee like, how did this happen?
Speaker 3 (32:09):
I still one of that, But I know how I know.
Now that I've been in concrated, you see a whole
lot of things that don't happen nowhere else but Kentucky,
in West Kentucky. Here. As long as I've been going
through from penitentiary to penitentiary, I've been letting other people
look at my paperwork, and they asked me the same thing, like, bro,
how had you even walked up? Like how you locked up?
(32:31):
And I'm like, man, I can't even explain it because
I don't even know. I don't know how I'm locked up.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
So when you're at trial Quincy, it's wrapping up, they're
given closing statements, and then you you hear you're convicted.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
I cried, man, I cried with my dad and I
kept telling my daddy, these people gonna have the audacity
to asked me to lie on camera. And Jeffrey, they
kind they came to me with a deal. They came,
they came to me with a deal, a fifteen year deal.
I just told my do that I ain't that type
because because I know they innocent. The reason I know
(33:04):
they're innocent because I know I'm innocent. So I didn't
I didn't even ask him what they wanted me to say,
none of that, because I ain't that type of person.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
So you were like, I will take a life sentence.
I'm not gonna lie about these people, right.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
You're exactly right, I will, And that's what I did.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Tamra and Jeffrey both took Alfred please and were given
ten and fifteen years, respectively, but Quincy refused to plead out,
and on May twenty first, two thousand and eight, he
was convicted of capital kidnapping, capital murder, rape, sodomy, and
abuse of a corpse. He was sentenced to life without
the possibility of parole.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
They rushed me straight out of the court room. They
had a race that A locked my leg because because
they thought I was gonna run as soon as the
first person said, gui do they I didn't even hear
what all the charges were. They rush they rushed me
up out of the court room. M hm. I was
(34:18):
very very angry, very very Angryus it's just what can
I do but make my own time hard? Understand what
I'm saying, because there was a lot of different things
going through my brain. But I don't want to react
to make everything harder than it was. Man, it's it's
it's it's it's hell for real, and every in every aspect,
(34:42):
any any any person that you can think of, that's
in hell. I'm surrounded by them every day. But just
imagine that. Imagine being innocent and going through that though.
Imagine being an innocent person going through the same going
through hell. So now you got to adjust to it.
I have to adjust to it. So now I have
(35:03):
to raise the little help my fail in order to
so for other people not to bother me. I have
to raid the little hell of my fail because you
got to adapt to it. If you don't adapt to it,
you know, you become a man of a mouse. At
that period. Ain't nothing between in my world.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Over the next ten years, Quincy filed a number of
appeals with the trial court and with the Kentucky Supreme Court.
All were denied, and then in twenty eleven, he received
a letter from an unlikely source, Jessica's father, Joe Curran.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
That he sent a message to me and told me
to write him a letter about how I was feeling
about everything that I was going through, and he wanted
to get with me, and he wanted to get a
better understanding about you know, what I'm going through and
what I feel because he knows that I'm in it
him and he seemed the facts of the case, and
he knew that I didn't have nothing to do with it.
Because you want to the actual person that murdered his daughter,
(36:00):
I want in prison. I will want him too. I
want to know who did it. I'm paid for it,
but it is. It's gonna haunt me to my grave
if I don't find that.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And Joe has continued to believe in Quincy's innocence and
to advocate for his release.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, that's a win for me though by my filf
that's just from the outside, from the inside looking out,
that's a win. Right there period. So so that means
he knows everything that I know, understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
And Joe Current wasn't the only one who believed in Quincy.
The Kentucky Innocence Project had started to work on his
case in twenty thirteen, but unfortunately they had to shelve
it a few years later due to funding concerns. Then
in twenty twenty, Miranda Hellman joined the Kentucky Innocence Project,
right around the time that the country found itself in
(36:53):
the grip of a worldwide pandemic.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
As COVID was hitting. I didn't have much else to do,
so I just started going through old dusty box and
I found this massive case. It had fourteen eighteen boxes
sitting on a shelf. It was very messy, it was
not in any order. I couldn't tell what I even
had to look at. So I started digging, and I
think probably from the first thirty minutes and looking in
the box and reading these memos from past staff, I
(37:17):
knew there was something to it.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
So the KIP team began seeking out documents on the case.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
It took us well over a year to get state
police documents and start to try to locate evidence. The
high profile nature of this case and the massive amount
of very well known and high ranking people that were
involved in it, from the investigation, through the prosecution, even
into the post conviction litigation made it very difficult for
(37:47):
us to get anything. So we fought for about a
year and a half to get records, and it's taken
about two and a half years just to try to
lay my eyes on the majority of what we have.
The prosecution did what I would call in civil litigation
a document dump, where they bury you in boxes and
boxes of paperwork so you can never get through it.
(38:07):
So we have about forty thousand pages of discovery from
the trial attorney file that we still to this day.
I go through every day just trying to pull out
what I think that we're going to need for post
conviction litigation.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
One detail that caught their attention right away was the
sketchy history behind Victoria's diary.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
So Victoria told the KBI officers that she kept diaries
her whole life, She wrote in them every day, and
she kept every single diary she ever wrote. So supposedly
KBI found parts of these diaries in the trash can
behind her apartment that she was living in in California.
It's a spiral bound notebook written in a combination of
(38:46):
pencil and blue ink. They're dated in two thousand, and
they only give eleven pages of this time period exactly
when the crime happens, late July to early August of
two thousand, so she dates these as two thousand, but
there is one entry that looks as if it was
two thousand and one or two thousand and seven that
(39:06):
she goes back and fixes and puts a zero over it.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
It turns out that prior to trial, the prosecution sent
the diaries to the Secret Service in Washington, DC for analysis.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
So the Secret Service comes back and says, we don't
have this ink in our library. So that means either
it's a really rare ink that we just have never collected,
or it's so new we haven't collected it yet.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
So it's not likely to be an ink that could
have been used in a two thousand diary entry. Yet,
despite its dubious authenticity, the diary was presented at trial
as evidence that Quincy was with Victoria and the others
that night.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
So in post conviction, a motion that will be filed
is a request of a reanalysis of that ink, either
by the Secret Service or by a private lab.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
So we mentioned the diary. Is there anything else, you know,
points that you guys are making out of these forty
thousand pages that you've read.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, somehow forty thousand pages didn't even tell the whole story.
So since I've come onto the case over the last year,
we've been able to obtain new documents that weren't part
of the original discovery or part of the initial investigation.
A lot of that is centered around Susan Galbrath. She
was communicating quite a bit with TV producers, friends, family,
(40:26):
and now we have those written documents, so we can
really show this missing piece. This investigation wasn't what it
looked like, and here's why it ended up where it
ended up. She was the person who put Quincy Cross
in prison. She's the person who handed the police their theory,
their investigation, and their star witnesses who had been prepped
and paid to give the testimony she wanted them to give.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
So Rosie Christ wasn't the only witness who was being
paid for testimony.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Both Victoria and Venisia received money from the KBI out
of a state fund that is set aside for witness protection,
and Victoria was moved from California to North Carolina. Her
living expenses were paid for about a year, and then
she was brought back to Kentucky and basically traveled all
(41:15):
on the dime of the state. She had told many people,
including her sister and Venetia that all testified that she
had said this, that they could make money by giving
these statements. So the combination of this payment to witnesses
how Susan was moving behind the scenes. We also have
a couple pieces of forensic evidence that could be tested
(41:38):
today that were never tested at the time of trial.
So that includes some items found at the crime scene,
some cigarette butts, a drink bottle that may or may
not have had accelerant in it. But until we find
out if there's a DNA profile on any of these
items that were found with her body, we really can't
say for certain. So much like asking for the release
(41:58):
of the diary, we're going to ask for really of
items of evidence to do some DNA testing.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Miranda and the KIP team are hopeful that all of
the new evidence and information they're now presenting will spur
the courts to take a look at what the jury
never got to see.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
And that really is going to be the beginning of
a new chapter of litigation for Quincy.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
So meanwhile, for listeners who want to know what can
they do to help, there are a.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Few petitions online that all support Quincy's innocence and call
officials to review the case, including the governor and the
Attorney General. I would strongly suggest anyone who wants more
information about the case look at those petitions. The information
that's been given.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Awesome, so we will link to those in the bio
so listeners can find them and also follow the case
for any updates. So now is the part of the
show we call closing arguments. I want to thank both
of you guys for joining us. Quincy, thank you so
much for sharing your story and Miranda for being here
helping out to tell it. And we'd just like to
ask your final thoughts, any takeaways, anything that you want
(43:06):
to share with listeners. Miranda, do you want to start
off and then we'll let Quincy finish.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Quincy's case and the murder of Jessica Kurrn are some
of the worst examples of official misconduct that I have
seen in any innocence cases that I've worked on. I
think that what is so unique about his case is
the long investigation, the many people involved in the investigation,
(43:33):
and the mishandling by an ept and untrained police officers
that led to his arrest and ultimate conviction.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
And Quincy, what about you? What do you want to
say to listeners?
Speaker 3 (43:45):
I want them to know an that I'm anything person,
you know, and I want them to look at the
fag that again. I want them to look at everything,
everything about this case. And that's what I want the
world to be because you know, I don't been through
I don't been through some heal trying to get the
truth out, and now that I got the opportunity to
(44:06):
get it out, it makes everything a whole lot better. Yeah,
it makes everything a whole lot better for me. That's
what I want the world to know. That I'm a
bad plus I'm a better person, believe it or not.
For a prison made me a better person. I have
a whole lot of love in my heart. That's one.
That's the biggest thing I want to know.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all Lava for Good podcast one week
early by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler,
and Kevin Wurtis for inviting me to sit in today,
and thanks to our production team Connor Hall and e Chelsea,
Lela Robinson and Kathleen Fink. The music in this production
(44:50):
was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can
also follow me on all platforms at maggie Freelink. Wrongful
Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
On the morning of August first, two thousand, a woman's
partially burned and decomposing body was found behind a middle
school in Mayfield, Kentucky. Eighteen year old Jessica Current had
last been seen playing cards with friends on the previous
Saturday night, leaving a nearly three day gap where no
one claimed to have seen her. The crime was investigated
(00:24):
by local and state police, but after a couple of
years the trail went cold. Then, prompted by his citizen's
investigation conducted by a local housewife, one of Jessica's friends
came forward with a bizarre tale. In it she and
a group of friends had partied with Jessica that night,
then kidnapped, beaten, and raped her, and finally killed her.
(00:47):
The ringleader, she told police, was Quincy Cross. Quincy had
been at a party in Mayfield that night, but he
claimed never to have met Jessica or any of the
others involved. Still at trial, when others testify to the
events of that night, they two pointed to Quincy as
the murderer. But this is wrongful conviction, So welcome back
(01:26):
to wrongful conviction. I'm Maggie Freeling, host of wrongful conviction
with Maggie Freeling and I'm so excited to be sitting
in for Jason Flamm today and to share this story
with you today. I have Quincy Cross with me and
I also have Miranda Hellman, his attorney from the Kentucky
Innocence Project. Miranda, thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Quincy, Hey, how you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I am well. How do you feel about telling everyone
your story today? I know you haven't done that much.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It's a lot of things that I've been owing in
for a long time.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Well, let's get to it. I want to hear your
story in detail, and usually I just like to start
with your life growing up? What was that like?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I grew up with sisters and brothers on both sides
my family, my mom's side, you know, my dad's side,
on my stepmom's side. You know what I'm saying, very old,
protected by my sisters, all of them, provider, protector, somebody
that they can come talk to, have the conversations that
they can't have with other people. And they know that.
(02:27):
And uh, and we have real good times. You know,
as kids, we did other things together. We used to
catch turtles and snakes and all that. We used to
go frog gigg We used to have you know, just
do what young kids do. I grew up in Union
City and I grew up in Willer Mills, Tennessee. So
you know, I'm a country guy, all right.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
You got to explain that to me, though, Quincy, I
grew up in New York City. What is growing up
in the country.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Like, Okay, country is a whole. That's a whole lot
of love in the country. You know, It's like we did.
We did small things like play tag and play baseball,
and you know, we just did it as a small community.
Then you got to tighten their family because it's a
lot of older people that raised you. They cooked for you.
You know, you wash their cars like more, their yawds
(03:08):
and things. Because we was tightening. There was a whole
lot of love in the community.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
You know what I'm saying, Quincy, When you were younger,
what did you What did you want to do with
your life? What were your hopes and dreams?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Sports was my thing. I wanted to be a good
football player. That's what I wanted to do. I want
to go to college and play football and help the
older people in my community. Look up. You know what
I'm saying and say he did something with his life,
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
So what was going on in your life in two thousand?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
It was up and down. Two thousand was up and
down because matter of fact, we had just had my
grandmama sileral on Mother's Day of ninety nine, and I
went through a spiral after that, you know, because that
was that was my heart.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
What do you mean by spiral? What did you what
was that like?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
I got off in the drugs, basically got off in
the drugs and using the man telling them I was
doing both.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
What kind of drugs?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Cokaine?
Speaker 1 (04:01):
So wondering if before the summer of two thousand did
you have any run ins with the law at all
when you were selling drugs, dealing drugs whatever it was.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Well, it was like small smile, petty crime like marijuana,
ca you know, cocaine case some day wouldn't get you
no time, you know, some thirty day, ninety days, you know,
some smile like that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
So Quincy, that summer you were living in Union City, Tennessee,
just south of the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. But
the crime that you were ultimately convicted of occurred in Mayfield, Kentucky,
which is about thirty five minutes away by car. So, Mirinda,
can you tell us a bit about what Mayfield was
like in two thousands so listeners can kind of get
the feel for it.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
So, Mayfield, Kentucky was and still is a very small
town in rural western Kentucky, a very predominantly white community.
The black population and minority population live on one side
of town, where you know, the white population lives in another.
So the police and really the city government in Mayfield
(05:05):
has had a few scandals throughout its time. The one
that I think is most connected to this case would
be the assistant police chief, Ronnie Lear.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
At the time of Quincy's drug arrest, Ronnie Lear had
already been under investigation for some time because of allegations
that he and some of the other police officers had
been selling confiscated drugs. Lear was later indicted for misconduct
charges after crack cocaine was found in his desk drawer.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
He was fired essentially from the Mayfield Police department some
time after this case occurred, and it appeared to be
a theory of the defense at the time of Quincy's trial.
Even in two thousand and eight that Ronnie Lear was
just a crooked cop and that this may have been
connected to it in some way.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, So, Quincy, can you tell me about the night
of July twenty ninth, two thousand. Who were you with
and how why did you wind up in Mayfield?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Were in Yana City. We had a party set.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
We was conning the house up for this party, and
Travis Jackson, Carlos Saxton and Gregg Store had pulled up.
So I've been knowing Travis before he could walk. So
he come down there looking for some drugs. So I
told him, you know, I could help him out.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Quincy, Travis, Carlos, and Greg drove around for a while
looking to score and picked up some drugs near his
hometown of Woodland Mills around nine point thirty. They stopped
at a liquor store, then headed back to Union City.
On the way, Travis suggested they head up to Kentucky.
He knew some folks that could sell to in Mayfield,
just over the state line.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
I'm like, man, I don't know nobody in Kentucky. Man,
I want to go to Kentucky. He was like, come on, man,
if you go, we'll bring you back later. On.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
It took some convincing, but eventually Quincy agreed and they
headed up to Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And the process to that, we hit these back so
many of these different back roads to where I don't
even know where we at.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
We pop up in Mayfield around midnight. They ended up
at a party on Chris Drive, somewhere on the outskirts
of town.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
They got them a girlfriends or whatever hanging out out there.
So we selling drugs out there, that's all. I don't
know nobody out there as you here.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Later on, a number of other people who were involved
in Quincy's case were alleged to have been at this
party on Chris Drive, including Carlos Saxton, but the only
one of them who was actually there was Carlos. The
night wore on and Quincy's friend showed no sign of
wanting to leave the party.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
But I keep asking them to take me home. I'm like, man,
I'm ready to go home. So I've used the phone,
the house phone. I called him uponder them back in,
said letting them know that I'm trying to get home,
and I know they waiting on men.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
You know, by now, the sun was starting to come up.
Quincy was getting hungry, so he borrowed Greg's car to
drive into Mayfield to get something to eat, but he
got lost on the way downtown and ended up driving
in circles around the back roads. Finally, around seven in
the morning, he ran out of gas. Quincy found a
gas can in the trunk of the car and was
(08:04):
about to pour some into the tank when someone drove
by and stopped to help out. It happened to be
the Mayfield deputy jailer on his way to work.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
This guy, he's standing right beside me, so he seen
me drop a couple of drumps of gas on my
parents laid But he's in the hareway to get to
work because he's late. So stay trooper with Mike Perkins
pulled up. So now he smelled the gas, but he
gave me a ride back to Chris Drag about a
mile up the street, and from now he dropped me off.
And then he said he went back to the car
(08:32):
and he's seeing marijuana, which was which was some some
black and mile and mile. It wasn't even marijuana, it
was black and man.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So you encountered Officer Perkins the morning of the thirtieth
and so when he found what he said was weed.
I know you said it was black and miles like,
which is like a cigar kind of thing. What happened
from there?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
So he come back to the to the house asking
me if he can search a car, Tell him the
car ain't mine. Then I got two empty baggage in
my pocket that I meant to throw away but day
in my pocket and then stay of Kentucky two forms
of prayer for negative automatic possession. So and two empty
baggies is what got me arrested.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
In all, ten of the people at the Chris Drive
party were arrested that morning for drug possession, including quincy.
He spent the next two years in the Kentucky Department
of Corrections as a result. So Miranda, this drug arrest
happened on the morning of July thirtieth. Meanwhile, a young
woman named Jessica Curran had been seen at a different
(09:31):
gathering with friends the night before, and then she went missing.
Her body was found a few days later, on Tuesday,
August first. So do we know what happened in the
time between.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
The timeline is difficult to nail down, and we don't
have a time of death, even a day of death.
For Jessica, partly because of the mishandling of the crime
scene and the autopsy medical examination. So Saturday night, which
would have been July twenty ninth, was the night that
Jessica was last seen. So through looking at the witness interviews,
(10:06):
I have the most accurate account of her leaving a
small get together with her cousin Vnesha around eleven o'clock
that night on Saturday.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And according to the witness statements, this was just a
few women playing cards at one of their friend's houses,
nothing to do with the party on Chris Drive.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
So we know for certain that evening she was alive.
She was in Mayfield, and she left a small get
together at a friend's house. No one aside from Venetia
and Victoria Caldwell saw her anytime after eleven o'clock.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
But Venetia and Victoria Caldwell were to become major players
in Quincy's case. We'll hear more about that later. By
Sunday afternoon, Jessica's parents, who were watching her baby son, Zion,
were concerned. It wasn't like Jessica to not be up
and ready for chure. They started calling around, but they
didn't find anyone who had seen her since the night before.
(11:06):
By Tuesday, August first, nearly three days after Jessica had
last been seen, her parents filed a missing person's report
with the Mayfield Police.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
So as the missing person's report comes in, it's almost
at the exact same time that the call that this
body's been found behind the middle school comes in. So
the Mayfield Police dispatch out the Assistant Chief, Ronnie Lear,
and then the lead detective in this case, Tim Fortner.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Tim Fortner was a beat cop who had just been
promoted to lead detective. This was his first day on
the job. He'd never investigated a murder before, and the
investigation was disorganized from the start. So, Miranda, can you
describe the crime scene? What did the investigators find?
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So, Jessica's body was found pretty severely decomposed and burned.
She did not have clothing on. It was pretty clear
she had a dress on and just most of it
was burned off of the top, but there were pieces
of it underneath of her body. Her shoes were found
(12:11):
at the scene, but they weren't on her feet. She
had some jewelry on that was not burned off, and
that was actually how her mother identified from photos of
the jewelry that she was wearing.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Was there anything else found at the scene that they
thought was significant.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
The majority of the items that they attempted to test
or to look for evidence on were just so badly burned.
The fire had basically burned out, so there was very
little left at the crime scene that wasn't you know, charred.
And then additionally, they decided at autopsy they wouldn't keep
her clothing and they said it was too badly burned.
(12:47):
There was a small piece of a braided belp found
pretty close to the body. I'm gonna guess is about
two to four inches long. It's not on her, but
it is in the grass next to her, and it
does have a buckle still attached to it. So those
were collected and still remain in evidence.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
So there were two things that were later alleged to
connect Quincy to the crime. First the fragment of braided
belt and buckle, even though that style of belt was
common at the time. And second, the fact that the
body had been found partially burned, coupled with the smell
of gasoline that had spilled on Quincy's pants.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
There was definitely an accelerant used and the police follow
the assumption that it was gasoline, and they connected that
just by the word gasoline to Quincy, who was found
that next morning pouring gas out of a gas can
into the car that had no gasoline in it. The
deputy jailer saw that happen. He actually watched Quincy dump
(13:48):
the gas on himself and down the side of the car,
and that's why he pulled over and asked him for help.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
While the police were attempting to collect evidence, the crime
scene was getting more and more chaotic.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Are really starting to show up at the middle school
where they put tape up. It still wasn't a super
secure scene. In looking at the video that they made
that day. People are really coming and going.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
And one of those people was a local housewife named
Susan Galbreath.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
She describes herself as an overweight stay at home why though,
who solved a crime? So Susan Gailbrith was at the
scene the day Jessica's body was discovered. From her own writings,
she says that she was at a diner in downtown
Mayfield having breakfaster lunch and that she felt a higher
(14:36):
power calling her to the middle school because she felt
that there was a tragedy there, so she becomes essentially
obsessed with this case.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Tim Fortner headed up the Mayfield Police investigation, working with
the Kentucky State Police. Initially, the authorities had two main suspects,
both of whom were arrested in two thousand and one.
One was Carlos sa one of the guys who had
been to the Chris Drive party along with Quincy and
who had been dating the victim, Jessica Currn around that time.
(15:09):
The other was Jeremy Adams, the father of Jessica's son.
Jeremy's mother was a close friend of Susan Goalbreth's, so.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Once Jeremy's arrested, Susan Galbreth turns into kind of a
private sleuth, wanting to put the case together and figure
it out. So she's I mean, she's deeply involved and
very intertwined in the story to the point she's almost
acting as a fourth investigating agency, you know, alongside the
city police, the State Police, and the Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And Susan was getting inside information from one of the
State Police investigators on the case.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
That was Jamie Mills. They were exchanging information pretty freely,
so Jamie was actually giving this private citizen that wanted
to solve this crime information.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Thanks to Jamie and her other connections, Susan had access
to not only the police files, but also to Jeremy
Adams's entire attorney file. And in one of the police
files there was a mention of the drug arrest on
Chris Drive.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
There is a notation in Quincy's file about him being
booked in and him smelling like gas, and I think
she starts to weave the stories together. I believe that
that's why she started turning to Quincy. He was a
pretty easy mark as well. He was an outsider, which
I think is incredibly important to this case. He was
not from Mayfield, he had very few ties to Mayfield.
(16:30):
It was easy to point the finger at him because
he was kind of a nameless, faceless person that was
not her best friend's son.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
So, Quincy, when did you first hear the name Jessica Curran?
Speaker 3 (16:43):
First time I ever heard her name, I was locked up.
I was already locked up. We was in the back
of the jail and we ate bought a newspaper backer
and he found the body, a body behind the school.
I was like, man, that's bad, man. How they did
her man somebody, Ye, they need to convict somebody.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
While Quincy was still incarcerat in Mayfield on the drug charge,
he became acquainted with Tamra Caldwell, the sister of a
fellow prisoner. After his release in October of two thousand
and two, he began seeing Tamra and eventually moved in
with her in Mayfield. Tamra was the cousin of Victoria Caldwell. Then,
in February of two thousand and three, the two suspects,
(17:21):
Jeremy Adams and Carlos Saxton, both had their indictments dismissed
because of discovery violations by the Mayfield Police Department and
the local prosecutor. Although they had not been excluded from suspicion,
it was the police and prosecutor not responding to discovery
requests from their attorneys that led to their release. The
case went cold for a few years before it was
(17:41):
eventually picked up by the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation or KABI. Meanwhile,
Susan Galbreath was still hard at work on her citizen's investigation.
She had teamed up with a TV documentary production company
and was still being fed information by Jamie Mills. She
had also started a MySpace page of the case, publicly
calling out some people she thought were involved, including Quincy Cross,
(18:06):
which is how she drew the attention of Victoria Caldwell.
Victoria told Susan Goalbreath that she knew who had killed
Jessica because she had been there when it happened. Victoria
and Venetia had never met Quincy until he began seeing
Tamra in two thousand and two. Yet the pair wove
a bizarre story that implicated Quincy, Tamra, and an acquaintance
(18:30):
named Jeffrey Burton, and that ultimately became the basis of
the States case against Quincy.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
So the ultimate theory that gets presented at trial by
Victoria and Venetia is that they were walking around in Mayfield, Victoria,
Venetia and Jessica, and that a car picked them up.
The car changes, the driver changes constantly. It's very hard
to pinpoint who this was supposed to be in the car.
(18:58):
It's supposed to be jeff Free Tamara, Quincy, Victoria, Venetia
and Jessica, and that Quincy was like making advances on
Jessica and she was not wanting those advances. They end
up at the party at Chris Drive.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
According to witnesses from the party, none of these people
were ever at the Chris Drive party except for Quincy
and Carlos, who had driven up together from Tennessee. Yet
at some point Victoria and Venetia folded Carlos into their
own narrative. Since those two were the people last seen
with Jessica, and since Carlos was seeing her at the
(19:34):
time and was a suspect in her murder, all three
of them had every motive to deflect suspicion from themselves,
which is likely how their stories ended up merging together.
Carlos Saxon later testified at the trial that at the party,
Quincy was seen swinging a brown braided leather belt around
like a rodeo writer, but this fact could have been
(19:56):
fed to him by the investigators to account for the
charred fragment belt found near Jessica's body and to fabricate
another connection between Quincy and Jessica. Victoria and Venicia's stories
get more outlandish from there.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Somehow they get from Chris Drive to Jeffrey Burton's house
back into town, and when they got there, Quincy knocked
Jessica out in the car, they carried her body in.
She was still alive, but they carried her body in,
put her in Jeffrey's bedroom, and they essentially had an
orgy where everyone was kind of coming and going in
(20:33):
and out of this bedroom while Jessica was coming in
and out of consciousness on the bed. Then they say
that some time after that, after she woke back up,
that Quincy hit her in the head. Again. They almost
exclusively say it's with a baseball bat, like a miniature
souvenir baseball bat, until they can't find the baseball bat
(20:55):
and they find something else.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
According to Victoria, she had buried the bat in her
sister of Rosy Christ's backyard, but when they searched the backyard,
the investigators could not find it. Instead, they uncovered an old,
rusty ratchet, And at that point Victoria's story suddenly changed.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And she says, Oh, it wasn't a bat, it was
a tool that makes a clicking noise. And they collect
the item and there's literally no evidence on it, nothing
that connects to the crime at all whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Nevertheless, that item later showed up as evidence at trial.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Victoria gets on the stand and says it's the murder weapon.
I buried it in the backyard along with some clothing,
and they never find the clothing. They never find the
baseball bat. They only find this ratchet, and it becomes
a key piece of evidence against Quincy.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
So, without a physical connection to the crime, and despite
the cause of death being undetermined at autopsy, this ratchet
was alleged to be the murder weapon based solely on
Victoria's word. The theory became that Quincy had allegedly hit
Jessica repeatedly in the head with not a bat but
this ratchet, and Victoria and Venetia's absurd tail continues after
(22:10):
Quincy supposedly delivered the final blow.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
They say that that final blow is what killed her,
and that they continued to have this orgy after she
had passed away, where Quincy forced everyone to perform sex
acts on Jessica after she had passed away. From there,
they say that morning broke they took her body and
put it in the garage, wrapped in a blanket and
(22:35):
just left it there for a few days, and it
wasn't until a smell started occurring that they decided they
were going to move the body to.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
The middle school, where it was found the following Tuesday morning,
August first, and autopsy was performed on Jessica's body, but
as with most of the investigation, it was badly botched
and inconclusive. Because the body was so badly decomposed and burned,
the medical examiner was unable to determine when or how
(23:01):
she died. In addition, items of her clothing had been discarded,
and no one thought to save a sample of her
DNA to potentially compare it with profiles found on other
crime scene evidence. So in two thousand and five, Jessica's
body was exhumed and re examined. Kentucky State Police hoped
that DNA samples would corroborate her alleged connection with Quincy,
(23:24):
who is by now their main suspect.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
One of the main pieces of evidence that they were
looking for was something that would have her DNA sample
in it. They had all of these items from the
crime scene that they wanted to use to connect Jessica
and Quincy together. They tried very hard and they were
never able to do that.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Meanwhile, Susan Golbreath continued with her campaign to throw suspicion
off her best friend's son, Jeremy Adams and onto someone else.
And by two thousand and seven, thanks to her citizen
detective theories, the weak threads of circumstantial evidence being used
to connect Quincy with the crime scene, combined with Victoria
and Venetia's absurd narrative, the state believed that they had
(24:06):
enough to make an arrest. By then, Quincy was living
with a woman named Melissa, who had two young boys.
One night, he and Melissa were lying in bed watching television.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
In my face stop up on the news, said, like newsworm,
I'm considered armed in dangers, so the first thing I
think about is in keyds. So she gave me a
look like, babe, what you gonna do? I said, I'm
gonna get the hell up out her here, because I
don't want to bring no guns up here. What he
sees it.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Quincy's friends and family immediately started calling, urging him to
get out of town. One friend offered to drive him
to California, another to Mississippi, but Quincy didn't want to
go on the run. He went to his dad's house
to find the police had already been there looking for him.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
So I tell my dad, I'm like, look, man, I'm
going to tell myself he and iigman Kentucky because I
ain't gonna do no running because I ain't need nothing.
But they got me considered armed in dangers. I know
they won't try to kill me. I think that they
wanted me dead so they can try to er up
and close his tase so they can just say, well,
we got the person that did and he's dead. And
you know that's what I think. So these these guys
(25:31):
from the so cappin Trucky brew up investigation on Lee,
Wires and O'Neill come to take me up from the
from the Apeman County jail and they take me to
a hotel room at the Duka and then Terry gave
me the whole time from from about leve them that
twelve that night till about sixty seven that morning. When
I keep telling them to take me to the jail, man,
I don't want to talk to y'all. Take me to
(25:52):
the jail.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Did you ask for a lawyer, Quincy? I did ask
for a lawyer twice, and they never gave you a lawyer.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
They never even act like they heard me say that
They had just told me that I was arrested anyway,
that's what they were telling me. I was arrested for
the murder of Jessica Karring.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
From the time that Jessica's body was found in two
thousand until Quincy was arrested in two thousand and seven,
the case went through several different investigations and a mind
boggling number of suspects. We don't have time to go
into all of that, but let's take a moment for
a little recap. So the case was investigated first by
(26:31):
the Mayfield Police Department, resulting in the arrest of Jeremy
Adams and Carlos Saxton. After their charges were dropped due
to discovery violations. Neither suspect was ever recharged or went
to trial. When Susan Golbreth got involved, working with Jamie
Mills and the Kentucky State Police, she was the one
who pushed Quincy forward to the exclusion of Jeremy and Carlos,
(26:54):
as well as several alternate suspects. Then the KBI picked
up the case, using Victoria and Venetia to solidify their
theory of the crime. This led them to Quincy, Tamra,
and Jeffrey, who were all charged with kidnapping, rape, murder
and abuse of a corpse.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
The prosecution's theory wasn't super clear. When you look at
this case. There are four different investigations that end in
four different outcomes with four different defendants, and so I
see why it was very difficult for them to figure out,
how are they actually going to try him for this
murder and let alone get a conviction.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Nevertheless, the trial began in March two thousand and eight, So.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
For a capital murder case to go to trial in
less than one year is to me unheard of. I
don't see how anyone could be prepared to go to
a capital trial in one year, especially in light of
the massive amounts of discovery that the prosecution was dumping
on them continually.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
The state, led by Special Prosecutor Barbara Waley, built its
case largely around the outlandish and inconsistent stories told by
Victoria and Venetia. Both women had pleaded guilty to corpse
abuse and evidence tampering, but as the prosecution star witnesses,
their sentencing was delayed until after they had testified in
(28:10):
Quincy's trial. After telling their stories in front of the jury,
Victoria Caldwell was sentenced to five years, but ultimately served
just under three months. Venisiha's Doublefield got a total of
seven years, but ended up serving only six months. Along
with their trial testimonies, which was the only direct evidence
against Quincy, the state presented a diary that Victoria had
(28:32):
supposedly written during the time of the murder, in which
she implicated Quincy.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
So this diary is supposed to be a document that
helps lend some truthfulness to the story that Victoria and
Venicia come up with. One of the entries essentially says
they found Jessica's body, Oh my god, what am I
going to do? And she says the phrase Q is
nowhere to be found.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Which is really odd. Remember, according to Quincy, Victoria did
not know him in two thousand. They didn't meet until
over a year later when Quincy was dating her cousin Tamra.
The prosecution also presented testimony from the medical examiner who
had performed the autopsy. Despite the burnt and decomposed condition
(29:19):
of the body, he said that he believed the cause
of death could possibly have been either strangulation or blunt
force trauma, but his theory appeared to be based more
on the evidence presented by the prosecution the piece of
belt and the story about the ratchet than on actual
medical evidence. In defense, Quincy's attorney Vince Eustace brought up
(29:39):
the former Chief Medical Examiner, doctor George Nichols as an
expert witness, but his testimony was also inconclusive.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
He essentially was just a witness to say they truly
can't say when this crime occurred. They can speculate as
to strangulation, they can speculate as to blunt force trauma.
But because of the decomposition the bach medical exam, together
with just the condition of the body, they absolutely, with certainty,
cannot tell you that this occurred here in this way
(30:07):
or that this was what actually caused her death.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
There was no medical evidence that Jessica had even been raped.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
There was no semen found anywhere, there was any any
other evidence of sexual assault. Maybe because it didn't happen,
maybe because of the fire, but we just certainly do
not know it.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Carlo Saxon testified about seeing Quincy swinging the belt around
at the Chris Drive party, and Victoria's sister Rosie Christ
took the stand for the prosecution to answer questions about
the ratchet found in her backyard.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
She's very quiet. She answers yes and no. She doesn't
say too much. She's a prosecution witness, but not super cooperative.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
And in fact, Rosie later returned to the stand to
testify for the defense, recanting her previous testimony.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Saying, they threatened me. They said they'd take my kids away,
I would go to prison for murder, and then they
paid me money to do it. And it really just
falls on deaf years and it gives us a little
bit of insight into exactly how the prosecutors and police
were treating the witnesses in this case, with their threats
and with their payments. And that was essentially the case.
(31:17):
Quincy did not testify. They they did very little to
cut a Victoria and Venetia's story. And it just at
the end of the day, I don't think it swayed
the jury. It wasn't enough to show that what they
were saying was a lie and that it was a
provable Ee.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Here's the question, Quincy. Didn't you have an alibi for
the time she was killed?
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Yeah, I did. My lawyer never used it. I was
on Cruze Draft. I never left Chris Draft that night,
and everybody in the house, they continued I never left
that house, and it's all came up.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
And then from Sunday morning on, you were in the
Mayfield Jail for weed possession. Correct.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
I couldn't sort the records. That's what it say is
I was already locked up. The first time I heard
Justica's name, I was locked up.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
I think some people might hear this, you didn't know Jessica,
you don't even know your co defendants, and some people
might just bee like, how did this happen?
Speaker 3 (32:09):
I still one of that, But I know how I know.
Now that I've been in concrated, you see a whole
lot of things that don't happen nowhere else but Kentucky,
in West Kentucky. Here. As long as I've been going
through from penitentiary to penitentiary, I've been letting other people
look at my paperwork, and they asked me the same thing, like, bro,
how had you even walked up? Like how you locked up?
(32:31):
And I'm like, man, I can't even explain it because
I don't even know. I don't know how I'm locked up.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
So when you're at trial Quincy, it's wrapping up, they're
given closing statements, and then you you hear you're convicted.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
I cried, man, I cried with my dad and I
kept telling my daddy, these people gonna have the audacity
to asked me to lie on camera. And Jeffrey, they
kind they came to me with a deal. They came,
they came to me with a deal, a fifteen year deal.
I just told my do that I ain't that type
because because I know they innocent. The reason I know
(33:04):
they're innocent because I know I'm innocent. So I didn't
I didn't even ask him what they wanted me to say,
none of that, because I ain't that type of person.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
So you were like, I will take a life sentence.
I'm not gonna lie about these people, right.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
You're exactly right, I will, And that's what I did.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Tamra and Jeffrey both took Alfred please and were given
ten and fifteen years, respectively, but Quincy refused to plead out,
and on May twenty first, two thousand and eight, he
was convicted of capital kidnapping, capital murder, rape, sodomy, and
abuse of a corpse. He was sentenced to life without
the possibility of parole.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
They rushed me straight out of the court room. They
had a race that A locked my leg because because
they thought I was gonna run as soon as the
first person said, gui do they I didn't even hear
what all the charges were. They rush they rushed me
up out of the court room. M hm. I was
(34:18):
very very angry, very very Angryus it's just what can
I do but make my own time hard? Understand what
I'm saying, because there was a lot of different things
going through my brain. But I don't want to react
to make everything harder than it was. Man, it's it's
it's it's it's hell for real, and every in every aspect,
(34:42):
any any any person that you can think of, that's
in hell. I'm surrounded by them every day. But just
imagine that. Imagine being innocent and going through that though.
Imagine being an innocent person going through the same going
through hell. So now you got to adjust to it.
I have to adjust to it. So now I have
(35:03):
to raise the little help my fail in order to
so for other people not to bother me. I have
to raid the little hell of my fail because you
got to adapt to it. If you don't adapt to it,
you know, you become a man of a mouse. At
that period. Ain't nothing between in my world.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Over the next ten years, Quincy filed a number of
appeals with the trial court and with the Kentucky Supreme Court.
All were denied, and then in twenty eleven, he received
a letter from an unlikely source, Jessica's father, Joe Curran.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
That he sent a message to me and told me
to write him a letter about how I was feeling
about everything that I was going through, and he wanted
to get with me, and he wanted to get a
better understanding about you know, what I'm going through and
what I feel because he knows that I'm in it
him and he seemed the facts of the case, and
he knew that I didn't have nothing to do with it.
Because you want to the actual person that murdered his daughter,
(36:00):
I want in prison. I will want him too. I
want to know who did it. I'm paid for it,
but it is. It's gonna haunt me to my grave
if I don't find that.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And Joe has continued to believe in Quincy's innocence and
to advocate for his release.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, that's a win for me though by my filf
that's just from the outside, from the inside looking out,
that's a win. Right there period. So so that means
he knows everything that I know, understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
And Joe Current wasn't the only one who believed in Quincy.
The Kentucky Innocence Project had started to work on his
case in twenty thirteen, but unfortunately they had to shelve
it a few years later due to funding concerns. Then
in twenty twenty, Miranda Hellman joined the Kentucky Innocence Project,
right around the time that the country found itself in
(36:53):
the grip of a worldwide pandemic.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
As COVID was hitting. I didn't have much else to do,
so I just started going through old dusty box and
I found this massive case. It had fourteen eighteen boxes
sitting on a shelf. It was very messy, it was
not in any order. I couldn't tell what I even
had to look at. So I started digging, and I
think probably from the first thirty minutes and looking in
the box and reading these memos from past staff, I
(37:17):
knew there was something to it.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
So the KIP team began seeking out documents on the case.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
It took us well over a year to get state
police documents and start to try to locate evidence. The
high profile nature of this case and the massive amount
of very well known and high ranking people that were
involved in it, from the investigation, through the prosecution, even
into the post conviction litigation made it very difficult for
(37:47):
us to get anything. So we fought for about a
year and a half to get records, and it's taken
about two and a half years just to try to
lay my eyes on the majority of what we have.
The prosecution did what I would call in civil litigation
a document dump, where they bury you in boxes and
boxes of paperwork so you can never get through it.
(38:07):
So we have about forty thousand pages of discovery from
the trial attorney file that we still to this day.
I go through every day just trying to pull out
what I think that we're going to need for post
conviction litigation.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
One detail that caught their attention right away was the
sketchy history behind Victoria's diary.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
So Victoria told the KBI officers that she kept diaries
her whole life, She wrote in them every day, and
she kept every single diary she ever wrote. So supposedly
KBI found parts of these diaries in the trash can
behind her apartment that she was living in in California.
It's a spiral bound notebook written in a combination of
(38:46):
pencil and blue ink. They're dated in two thousand, and
they only give eleven pages of this time period exactly
when the crime happens, late July to early August of
two thousand, so she dates these as two thousand, but
there is one entry that looks as if it was
two thousand and one or two thousand and seven that
(39:06):
she goes back and fixes and puts a zero over it.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
It turns out that prior to trial, the prosecution sent
the diaries to the Secret Service in Washington, DC for analysis.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
So the Secret Service comes back and says, we don't
have this ink in our library. So that means either
it's a really rare ink that we just have never collected,
or it's so new we haven't collected it yet.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
So it's not likely to be an ink that could
have been used in a two thousand diary entry. Yet,
despite its dubious authenticity, the diary was presented at trial
as evidence that Quincy was with Victoria and the others
that night.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
So in post conviction, a motion that will be filed
is a request of a reanalysis of that ink, either
by the Secret Service or by a private lab.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
So we mentioned the diary. Is there anything else, you know,
points that you guys are making out of these forty
thousand pages that you've read.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, somehow forty thousand pages didn't even tell the whole story.
So since I've come onto the case over the last year,
we've been able to obtain new documents that weren't part
of the original discovery or part of the initial investigation.
A lot of that is centered around Susan Galbrath. She
was communicating quite a bit with TV producers, friends, family,
(40:26):
and now we have those written documents, so we can
really show this missing piece. This investigation wasn't what it
looked like, and here's why it ended up where it
ended up. She was the person who put Quincy Cross
in prison. She's the person who handed the police their theory,
their investigation, and their star witnesses who had been prepped
and paid to give the testimony she wanted them to give.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
So Rosie Christ wasn't the only witness who was being
paid for testimony.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Both Victoria and Venisia received money from the KBI out
of a state fund that is set aside for witness protection,
and Victoria was moved from California to North Carolina. Her
living expenses were paid for about a year, and then
she was brought back to Kentucky and basically traveled all
(41:15):
on the dime of the state. She had told many people,
including her sister and Venetia that all testified that she
had said this, that they could make money by giving
these statements. So the combination of this payment to witnesses
how Susan was moving behind the scenes. We also have
a couple pieces of forensic evidence that could be tested
(41:38):
today that were never tested at the time of trial.
So that includes some items found at the crime scene,
some cigarette butts, a drink bottle that may or may
not have had accelerant in it. But until we find
out if there's a DNA profile on any of these
items that were found with her body, we really can't
say for certain. So much like asking for the release
(41:58):
of the diary, we're going to ask for really of
items of evidence to do some DNA testing.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Miranda and the KIP team are hopeful that all of
the new evidence and information they're now presenting will spur
the courts to take a look at what the jury
never got to see.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
And that really is going to be the beginning of
a new chapter of litigation for Quincy.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
So meanwhile, for listeners who want to know what can
they do to help, there are a.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Few petitions online that all support Quincy's innocence and call
officials to review the case, including the governor and the
Attorney General. I would strongly suggest anyone who wants more
information about the case look at those petitions. The information
that's been given.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Awesome, so we will link to those in the bio
so listeners can find them and also follow the case
for any updates. So now is the part of the
show we call closing arguments. I want to thank both
of you guys for joining us. Quincy, thank you so
much for sharing your story and Miranda for being here
helping out to tell it. And we'd just like to
ask your final thoughts, any takeaways, anything that you want
(43:06):
to share with listeners. Miranda, do you want to start
off and then we'll let Quincy finish.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Quincy's case and the murder of Jessica Kurrn are some
of the worst examples of official misconduct that I have
seen in any innocence cases that I've worked on. I
think that what is so unique about his case is
the long investigation, the many people involved in the investigation,
(43:33):
and the mishandling by an ept and untrained police officers
that led to his arrest and ultimate conviction.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
And Quincy, what about you? What do you want to
say to listeners?
Speaker 3 (43:45):
I want them to know an that I'm anything person,
you know, and I want them to look at the
fag that again. I want them to look at everything,
everything about this case. And that's what I want the
world to be because you know, I don't been through
I don't been through some heal trying to get the
truth out, and now that I got the opportunity to
(44:06):
get it out, it makes everything a whole lot better. Yeah,
it makes everything a whole lot better for me. That's
what I want the world to know. That I'm a
bad plus I'm a better person, believe it or not.
For a prison made me a better person. I have
a whole lot of love in my heart. That's one.
That's the biggest thing I want to know.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all Lava for Good podcast one week
early by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler,
and Kevin Wurtis for inviting me to sit in today,
and thanks to our production team Connor Hall and e Chelsea,
Lela Robinson and Kathleen Fink. The music in this production
(44:50):
was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms
at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can
also follow me on all platforms at maggie Freelink. Wrongful
Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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