The Fishing Trip: The Unsolved Disappearance of Walter "Greg" Fowler

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
On this podcast, I often share cases filled with mystery,
where there are multiple suspects, possible outcomes, and unanswered questions
about what happened or who was responsible. But for every
one of those cases, there are just as many where
both the loved ones of the missing murdered person and
law enforcement feels certain they know what happened, they just

(00:32):
don't have the evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable
doubt in court. In the summer of nineteen ninety nine,
a Kentucky man takes the day off from work to
go on an overnight fishing trip and never comes home.
Early signs point to a possible accident while out on
the water, but it doesn't take too long for certain
clues to not add up and police announce they are

(00:55):
investigating his case as a homicide. Despite very suspicious, circumstantial evidence,
nobody has been held accountable for his death, and his
body has never been found. I'm your host, Megan and
Each week on a Simpler Time True Crime, I cover
older unsolved cases and challenge the idea that a simpler

(01:16):
time means a safer time. This week, I'm bringing to
you the unsolved disappearance of Walter Greg Fowler just as

(01:44):
a quick reminder, opinions expressed in the podcast are my own,
and all parties mentioned are innocent until proven.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Guilty in a court of law.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Nestled in Warren County, just northeast of Bowling Green, Smith's Grove, Kentucky,
is a small town with deep roots and quiet charm.
Though it covers less than a square mile, it's rich
in history, from its early days as a railroad town
in the mid eighteen hundreds to its collection of historic
buildings that still stand today. Smith's Grove offers that classic

(02:18):
small town feel with antique shops, old churches, and a
tight knit community. It's also known to some horror vans
as the namesake for the fictional Smith's Grove Sanitarium in Halloween,
a nod from filmmaker John Carpenter, who grew up nearby.
It's a small home rule class city of around seven.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Hundred and fifty people.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
A home rule class city in Kentucky refers to a
city that has the broad authority to govern itself as
long as its laws do not conflict.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
With state or federal law.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
There's variations of this in about ten other states as well,
and it's also the place where a man named Walter
Greg Fowler called home. He went by Greg, so I'm
going to refer to him by his middle name for
the remainder.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Of this episode.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Greg was born in Louisville on April twenty seventh, nineteen
fifty five, to Walter and Mary Fowler. Greg was the
baby of the family, with an older sister, Peggy, and
two older brothers, Wayne and Gary.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Gary moved away to live.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
In Texas, but his other siblings lived in nearby cities.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
From early adulthood.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
He got a job working as alignment for the Farmer's
Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation, or FRACC. He was very well
liked by his colleagues and he was a very hard worker.
His colleague Terry Jeffries, shared that Greg was the type
to laugh at your jokes, even if they weren't funny,
just so you wouldn't feel uncomfortable or bad. He was

(03:45):
also known to be a very positive presence in anyone's lives.
His sister told the Glasgow Daily Times quote, we used
to laugh and cut up. He was just that type
of person. You never saw him without a smile on
his face. Greg also had his share of hobbies. When
the weather was good. He would spend the majority of
his weekends in any given month doing some golf, with

(04:07):
his favorite course being Park Mammoth Golf Club in Park City, Kentucky.
He also enjoyed hunting trips, particularly turkey hunting.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Another thing I.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Learned about Greg Fowler that made him endearing to me
was just he was one of those guys who could
never sit still. He was always working on something. He
would help friends out in his spare time and do
electrical work on houses, and he'd just do other mechanical
work for fun. Donald Harbison, who worked as Greg's colleague
and then his supervisor at FRACC, told the Glasgow Daily

(04:40):
Times quote he was always working on old cars, pulling
a motor out or something. Greg never had any biological
children of his own, but in February of nineteen eighty nine,
Greg married a woman named Deborah Edwards. Greg was thirty
three and Deborah was thirty two, and she had a son,
Mac from a previous relationship, and he was around eleven

(05:02):
or twelve when they got married. The family lived on
a rural property in the town of Smith's Grove. According
to Debra, her son Max stayed primarily on her parents'
family farm nearby. She was young when she gave birth
to him, and it sounds like based on the source material,
Max's grandparents played a larger role in raising him than her.

(05:23):
Greg continued his work at FRACC, working alongside some of
his colleagues for decades. Then in nineteen ninety seven, when
Greg was forty two years old, he suffered a significant
heart attack. He was told he had to make some
changes and take it easy, but he did recover and
was able to resume his job. His health didn't completely

(05:44):
improve by any stretch though. In fact, in the summer
of ninety nine, he began experiencing some issues with his
colon and he was undergoing testing and treatment, and that
summer of nineteen ninety nine was when everything would change.

(06:09):
That change started on Friday, June eighteenth, nineteen ninety nine,
when Greg Fowler called off of work. This in and
of itself was strange. At the company Christmas party the
previous year, Greg Fowler won a special award for having
missed zero days of work in nineteen ninety eight. He
had recently missed a few days in ninety nine though,

(06:30):
because of those colon issues. I mentioned the structure of
time off at FRICC was that after ten years with
the company, employees earned one sick day and one and
a half vacation days per month. It also said in
the papers that he had an unknown procedure just two
weeks prior to this, so he had dipped into that

(06:51):
quite a bit and was trying to build it back up.
Just as a side note, I think that's an atrocious
time off policy. That's really bad. Others really like this place.
They his coal workers are mentioned a lot in the
source material, and you could tell they really cared about him.
But that's some bad petio right there. So the story

(07:11):
was that Greg Fowler had to miss work to take
his wife Deborah to a doctor's appointment that day because
she was ill. Then, according to Debrah, on Saturday the nineteenth,
Greg left to go fishing.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
She said.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
He drove away in his black nineteen eighty six Chevy Astravan,
which was towing his john boat. For those unfamiliar, a
john boat is a small, flat bottomed vessel, usually made
of aluminium or wood, designed for calm, shallow waters like lakes, rivers.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Or swamps. You are not going to want to take
this out into something that.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Is filled with waves or try it out in the
ocean or anything. Its flat design makes it incredibly stable,
perfect for fishing, hunting, or quietly navigating those areas where
larger boats just can't fit. So Greg had one of these,
and his boat was al aluminum. Deborah reported that Greg
said he was going to go on this fishing trip overnight,

(08:06):
and that he was going with a colleague named Tommy
p who I'm redacting his last name for privacy purposes,
and with another man whom she only knew was Paul,
and she didn't know that person. They were going to
fish at the Barren River Lake. Now this gets a
little confusing, so I just want to take a moment
to explain the difference. Kentucky has the Barren River, which

(08:27):
is a natural waterway in the area. It's a tributary
of the Green River and it flows through several counties.
Barron River Lake is a man made reservoir created by
damming the Barren River, which happened in the nineteen sixties.
It's about ten thousand acres of water surface and it's
surrounded by dense vegetation and coves. It is a popular

(08:49):
recreation area and adjacent to it is the Barren River
Lake State Reservoir Park with campgrounds, a marina, trails, and
a lodge, and so they were supposed to be setting
up in this area. When Greg didn't return home as
expected the next day, Deborah began driving around looking for him,

(09:09):
but she couldn't find him, so, she said, she started
calling around to family and friends to see if they
had heard from him, but nobody had. She did this
all evening on Saturday the nineteenth and into the early
morning hours of Sunday the twentieth, before heading home and trying.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
To get a few hours of sleep.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Worried, she phoned the Warren County Sheriff's Department first thing
in the morning, and they told her she needed to
wait at least twenty four hours to fill out a
missing person's report. Deborah did not want to wait. She
contacted a state official who worked at Barron River Lake,
and this person agreed to meet her there and try
to help her look for Greg. En route to the lake,

(09:49):
Deborah had to drive over the Barren River in her
vehicle on a bridge on Kentucky one oh one. There's
a couple different variations of what happened next, and since
I don't know which one is accurate.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
I'll tell you both.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
One version says that Deborah was driving over this bridge
on Kentucky one oh one over the Barren River and
spotted her husband's aluminum boat. In this version of events,
there was a nearby prison work group doing highway cleanup
or something of the sort, and she flagged down a
supervisor and shared that her husband was missing and that
she was just sure she.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Had spotted his boat below.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Then her and that supervisor went down to the river
and he helped her to try to pull the boat
back in and call authorities. In another version, years later,
it was stated that Deborah drove over the bridge to
park and then had to walk back over the bridge
as a pedestrian anyways to get to that meeting spot
to begin the search where she was meeting up with

(10:46):
that worker.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
And as she.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Was walking back over as a pedestrian, she spotted Greg's boat.
And then at that time that man who was supposed
to meet her happened to meet up with her right
in that spot, and she pointed the boat out to him.
The second version is only found in source material twelve
years after he went missing, and the first one was
reported multiple times early on. In addition, the boat was

(11:09):
found on the Barren River, not the Barren River Lake
Reservoir that was actually a couple of miles away. So
the first version makes more sense from a geography standpoint,
because why else would that guy be meeting her two
miles away from their meeting spot. Either way, what we
do know is that Greg's boat was found floating there
on the Barren River, near that bridge that goes over

(11:32):
with Kentucky one on one. Curiously, the boat was missing
its motor and oars. It was just floating. Some source
material lists the boat as capsized, which by definition would
imply that the boat was tipped over. But the information
is conflicting depending on which source material you read, and
most of it talks about it just floating there without

(11:54):
its motor and ores, not tipped over.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
It's an occupation hazard of mine covering old cold cases.
Conflicting source material can always be on your simpler time
true crime bingo board, and trust me, it frustrates me
too to be responsible. That's why I always just share
what I come across, and if I come across conflicting material,
I don't try to guess I just share both and

(12:21):
take for it what you will. With the discovery of
Greg's boat, police jumped into action ahead of the twenty
four hour mark because there is now evidence to suggest
that Greg may have encountered an accident while fishing. They
begin tracking down people to talk to, searching for witnesses,
and searching the waterway, frustratingly.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Coming up empty.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
But on that same afternoon, while exploring different places Greg
Fowler may have launched his boat, authorities made another discovery,
Greg Fowler's astravan. I'm not going to lie. I Google

(13:04):
mapped the road his van was found on, and it's
supposedly a popular road locals used to drive down and
launch their boat. But it made my blood run cold.
I think I've watched one too many scary movies. But nevertheless,
I'll share a photo of it on the Instagram page
at Simple Time Crime Pod. There were no signs of
Greg Fowler in the van, and the van wasn't exactly

(13:26):
left in the condition that Greg typically left it in.
You see, the van was pristine and clean, and Greg
wasn't known to be the most tidy of housekeepers or
vehicle keepers for that matter. This was actually his work
van and his colleagues actually joked about it. They said
that the back was always full of scraps of electrical.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Wiring and all of his tools, and whenever one of
them asked if he.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Could borrow a tool, Fowler would just start digging through
all his stuff and they'd remember. He would just say,
hang on, I've got it in here somewhere, which I
can just picture. So the fact that this was perfectly
tidy and clean was just off. They also couldn't find
any overnight provisions that would indicate he was planning on

(14:13):
taking an overnight trip, and so that also fell odd,
but the search continued. Law enforcement and friends continued to
search for Greg Fowler. On Monday, July twenty first, two
searchers launched at the water and they went in at
the Three Forks Modern Woodmen of America Lodge and took

(14:33):
their boats in opposite directions, looking for any signs of Greg.
At the time of his disappearance, he was five foot
eight inches tall and around two hundred and twenty pounds.
Debbor said he was wearing a Great Kentucky Wildcats T shirt,
black and khaki shorts, and Adidas sneakers. The searchers noted
that the river was mostly shallow and full of litter

(14:55):
and debris. The banks were incredibly overgrown. In some spots,
the water was so shallow they had to abandon their
boats and wigdhe in the water to search, and that
search ended up being fruitless. Dog teams and searchers combed
the banks of the river and came up empty as well.
The same thing happened the next day when a local

(15:16):
kayaking club joined in on the search, and they also
couldn't find anything. By June thirtieth, ten days after Deborah
first raised the alert about Greg, Warren County Sheriff's Department
Detective Roger Castle said quote, if there had been a body,
I feel like we would have found it by now,
and with good reason. Most of the river is pretty shallow,

(15:37):
and bodies tend to float to the surface quickly if
they're thrown in when they're not breathing, and a little
slower if they are alive when they are thrown in.
It's dark to think about, I know, but it's helpful
and understanding why they were thinking what they were. What's
interesting is in that June thirtieth article by the Park
City Daily News, Greg Fowler's co said he hadn't mentioned

(16:02):
any plans of going phishing, certainly not with them, which
directly contradicts Deborah's story.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Eventually, the search of the river.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Stopped, they couldn't dedicate any more resources to it, and
they had to pursue what might have happened to Greg
Fowler outside of the river, and by August the Sheriff's
department had a bombshell announcement. I want to take a

(16:35):
moment to thank you for listening.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
To this week's episode.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
I research, write, record, and promote each episode independently. If
you could leave a five star review and share the
podcast on social media, you'd help me so much in
my effort to reach new audiences with these cold cases.
Case suggestions can be sent to Simpler timecrimepod at gmail
dot com. You can also use the text to me

(16:59):
function in show notes.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
I read all of them.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Just be aware that my hosting platform is set up
in a way where I can't text back, but I
appreciate everyone who has reached out in that way, and
please continue to do so. Now back to the show.

(17:23):
By August of nineteen ninety nine, about six weeks after
Greg Fowler disappeared, on a fishing trip. Authorities announced that
they were shifting the case to a homicide investigation castle
in Warren County Sheriff, a man named Jerry Peanuts Gaines,
said that his team was going to revisit the area
off Osborne Ford Road where Greg's truck was found, as

(17:45):
well as use a helicopter above the water in the
area where the boat was found. He said, quote, We've
been concentrating on a two mile stretch, and we've expanded
it to about fifteen miles along the waterway end quote.
One interesting thing I want you to make note of
is that in this August of ninety nine article, Debra
tells reporter Justin Willis that her and her twenty one

(18:06):
year old son Mac Wright were not doing well at all,
that they were having a hard time with Greg's disappearance.
She said, quote, we are not doing well at all.
We're hoping he'll walk in any time. We're hoping he's
somewhere confused or has been knocked over the head or something.
This is not a very nice world to get out
into anymore.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
On its own, this seems like a reasonable and understandable
quote from someone who is married to a missing person,
but I'll circle back to this later. On September twenty fourth,
nineteen ninety nine, reports came out that Greg Fowler's colleagues
had raised money for a reward in his case, a
total of five thousand dollars. Employees at the FRICC stated

(18:49):
that the money would go to individuals who quote provided
information that leads to the arrest of anyone who may
have contributed to the criminal conduct which resulted in Greg's dis.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Appearance end quote.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
And not only did they put up a reward, but
the FRECC team decided to conduct their own outdoor search.
The Sheriff's department said all the places the colleagues were
searching had been searched, but that they were welcome to
search again. That search was, as you predicted, unsuccessful.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
In two thousand, on.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
The one year anniversary of Greg Fowler's disappearance, a news
article released in the Glasgow Daily Times gave a lot
of context to the suspicions people were feeling and all
the details that weren't adding up. The article gave a

(19:45):
lot of perspective of the coworkers and dropped some information
that previously hadn't been released to the public. For instance,
Greg Fowler's missing Persons poster was on the doors of
the business of the frecc so anybody coming in to
pay their electric bill saw his face. Detective Roger Castle
was frustrated at the time. He told the paper they

(20:07):
had run out of leeds and that he wished he
had some.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
Big update, but he didn't.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Still, what was released painted a very different picture than
what Deborah Fowler had shared. For instance, you'll recall that
the mystery had started when Greg Fowler called in on Friday,
June eighteenth, nineteen ninety nine. But as it turns out,
Greg didn't call in. His step son Mac called in
for him to the electric company, stating that his stepfather

(20:35):
Greg wouldn't make it into work that day because he
was helping his ill mother go to a doctor's appointment.
For all the other times that Greg had missed work
because of his heart or his colon issues, it was
Greg himself.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Who had called his supervisor. So this was very out
of the ordinary.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Not only that police investigated this so called appointment and
illness and found out there wasn't one. Another thing that
stood out was the fishing trip altogether. One of his coworkers,
a man named gene Owen stated that Greg Fowler had
never used that aluminum boat.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Once in all the time he knew him.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Another colleague and friend of his, a man named John Redford,
told the paper that Greg actually wasn't much of a fisherman.
He said, quote, he went fishing with me, and I
went hunting with him, but he didn't fish and I
didn't hunt. Not even one of them had heard him
say that he was going on a fishing trip, and

(21:33):
he certainly wasn't fishing with them, as I already mentioned.
In fact, the very last time they saw Greg Fowler
on that Thursday afternoon, he told them he was planning
to go home and leave his wife. Detective Castle stated
in the article that he had requested a polygraph from
three people, Deborah Mac and an unnamed acquaintance. Detective Castle

(21:58):
stated that the unnamed acquaintance passed the polygraph test. He
said that Deborah took the polygraph test, but he wouldn't
release the results, and he said that Mac refused, and
then after that Deborah and Mac refused to cooperate any
further and requested that everything go through their attorneys. During

(22:19):
the course of the investigation leading up to this Detective
Castle talked about what the department had done. As is
with many cases, his team received tips that didn't lead anywhere.
Maybe Greg's body was in an old well or cistern,
so they went out and searched plenty of those. There
was also a rumor that Fowler was buried under the

(22:39):
floorboards of his own house, so believe it or not,
investigators removed part of the flooring. There was also said
to be an old cistern under the residence Greg Fowler
lived in at the time of his disappearance, but that
it was caved in. There was another cistern on the
property that had a huge concrete slab over it, and

(23:00):
shared that it would require a record to lift it
as it was several hundred pounds and it sounds like
that never happened and nothing came of it. One other
town rumor was that residents had noticed a large bonfire
burning near the Fowler property shortly after Greg's disappearance, but
in looking into it, this was a dead end as

(23:20):
it turned out to just be people burning garbage, and
Castle shared that the fire wasn't large enough to creamy
a whole body. Finally, in this same one year anniversary article,
Castle shared one more chilling clue. A cassette tape was
retrieved from Fowler's company truck that he had told coworkers
was there if anything ever happened to him. Castle would

(23:44):
not release any information about what was on that tape,
other than to say that it was a telephone conversation
between two people. So I'm dying to know what was
on the tape. Who did Greg Fowler feel concerned enough

(24:07):
about that he recorded a conversation and told coworkers to
find this tape should something happen to him. Of course
I know why investigators are not sharing. That's huge evidence
that they have to keep under wraps, but does make
you wonder. Even though investigators won't say what's on the tape,
the direction of their investigation is pretty telling. It was

(24:30):
heavily focused on Deborah Fowler, who later would be known
as Deborah Kessinger and her son Mac. They also came
forward and said that because of the size of Greg
Fowler and his two hundred and twenty pound frame, it
likely would have taken more than one person to be
involved in his disappearance. In July of two thousand and one,

(24:50):
Roger Castle gave another update in the case, and he
said that he continued to investigate it, and he'd gone
as far as to investigate that Fowler had been killed
and moved out of stay, and he investigated all the
way through that possibly he was living in the mountains
off grid. He said, quote, I hope that at some
time these people who do know what happened to him

(25:10):
will come forward and say something. This case will remain open,
even if I don't work for the Sheriff's office, until
we come to some good explanation for his disappearance.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Despite his efforts, after this, the case went cold. The
next time Greg's name came up was when a body
was found in the same river in March of two
thousand and five. Investigators were struggling at identifying who this
could be, and mentioned that the only person to disappear
near the river was Greg Fowler, But this was almost
six years later and the body found was not a

(25:44):
great match for Greg, not only that it was clear
the body was recently placed there. Days later, the body
was identified as a man named Michael Robertson. He was
new to the area and so he wasn't on police's radar,
hence the delay and identification. He had been murdered and
thrown in the river, and his case still remains unsolved.

(26:07):
I actually reached out to his family to try to.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
Help elevate his case as well. So more to come
on that.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
This is slightly out of order with some of the
things I still need to tell you, but I want
to tell you about the one other body that was
found that was briefly considered to be that of Greg Fowler.
In twenty eleven, skeletal remains were found alongside a nearby highway,
and because Greg was one of the only people missing
in the area, it was briefly thought this could be him,

(26:34):
but they were female remains and turned out to be
those of a missing woman out of Indianapolis. Karma Purpura
went missing in two thousand and seven and was abducted
at a rest stop. The truck stop killer, Bruce Mendenhall,
was charged with her murder and found guilty a few
months ago. It took several years for her identity to

(26:54):
come to fruition and for her case to be solved,
but finally it has been so now that I've told
you about the moments where human remains were thought to
be Greg's let's pivot back to Deborah and her movements.

(27:17):
In two thousand and eight, Greg was legally declared dead,
and with that came a sizable life insurance policy in
Greg's retirement, with the beneficiary being none other than you
guessed it, Deborah Kessinger. Deborah claimed to be shocked by
this and said she had no idea about any life
insurance policy or any retirement funds. Oh, in one small

(27:39):
detail I should probably mention here, it turns out that
Greg and Deborah were two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
in debt at the time he went missing. I don't
know the full detail of what that encompassed, but I
know that their home was in the process of being repossessed.
In June of twenty eleven, for the twelve your anniversary

(28:01):
of Greg's disappearance, Deborah finally broke her silence for an
interview with Susan Tebbin from the Glasgow Daily Times, and
she had a lot to say. She said, quote, they
have openly accused me of murder and my son, and
it's not the truth. I don't think they're even trying
to investigate Greg's death. I think it's all about notoriety

(28:22):
for themselves end quote. She also claimed that police had investigated,
or rather failed to investigate, all the possibilities she had
brought to them. She said that she believed that there
was involvement from drug dealers, of whom she'd been informing
the Bowling Green Warren County Drug Task Force. She claimed
to be an informant, and she also mentioned a family

(28:45):
member with whom she and Greg had a financial problem with,
and she said they could have been a person of
interest in the case too, But she was pretty honed
in on this fact that someone was targeting Greg because
they wanted to take something out on her because she
was drug informant. In this article, Deborah downplayed the relationship
she had with her son Mac. She talked about how

(29:07):
he was raised by her parents on their farm and
that they weren't close. She said, quote, we don't have
the relationship where I could say, okay, Mac, I need
you to help me kill Greg, and when I have
him declared dead in twelve years, I might give you
some money.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
But you'll recall that kind of contradicts the ninety nine articles.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Remember it was Mac who.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Allegedly called Greg into work sick on that Friday the eighteenth,
and when his case was reclassified as a homicide in
August of ninety nine, Deborah talked about how torn up
she and Mac were and how they were really struggling.
As for the money, Deborah scoffed at those allegations as well.
She said it was Greg's siblings, so we even let

(29:49):
her know there was money in a bank account, and
that she truly didn't know about it until after he
was declared legally dead. She told the paper quote, Greg
was very unhappy. I was unhappy, but we were a
quarter of a million dollars in debt. There is no
life insurance money to cover that amount of bills. My
benefit would be for Greg to stay around and help

(30:12):
me pay off all these bills. Debora also offered alternative scenarios,
such as Greg running away to Montana to escape his troubles.
She said he was recently put in charge of his
late mother's twenty eight thousand dollars estate, something that stressed
him out. It wasn't his forte and she said that
he had previously expressed a desire to go to Montana.

(30:33):
She thought maybe he just ran away and started a
new life. Debora again mentioned that they were experiencing financial
issues with a relative and that on the day Greg
left to go fishing, this relative showed up looking for him,
and she said he wasn't there, and said that he
went fishing, and that this relative turned out of the
house in his vehicle in the direction of where he

(30:55):
was fishing. She shared that Greg's own family pressured her
to have him declared dead and that she didn't want
to because she wanted to believe he was still alive
and out there. I'm going to censor her expletives here,
mainly because the paper did. And I don't know which
one she used. I have a good idea, but I
don't want to guess, so anyway, she said, quote Greg

(31:16):
was a nice person, but he could also be in blank,
just like everybody else. And if you live with a
man for X many years, they're a blank every once
in a while.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Deborah may have seen more convincing if she didn't take
the steps she did next, but her future actions would
leave many wondering just how far she could go and
how deadly she could be with her deceit. The week

(31:49):
after that article was released, on June twenty seventh, twenty eleven,
a fire broke out at a Dollar General store in
Horse Cave, Kentucky.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
The manager of the.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Store was none other than Deborah Kessinger of Note an
inventory in books Audit was scheduled for June twenty ninth,
twenty eleven. Two days after the fire broke out, Cassinger
told Deputy State Fire Marshal Todd Price that she went
to the safe in the store's office to retrieve the
cash deposit to take to the bank that morning when

(32:23):
she heard what she described as clicking noises coming from
another part of the store. She said she didn't have
enough time to investigate what was going on, and when
she turned back toward the breakroom to retrieve the cash
deposit box she had placed, she heard a big boom
and noticed the room was on fire. That same night,
she called the fire marshal back and added a layer

(32:46):
to the story. She claimed she was a drug informant
and that people in the local drug underworld were trying
to kill her with an explosion, which is similar to
what she offered up in her husband's case, indicating that
her being a drug informant left to something happening to Greg.
According to reporting in the Park City Daily News. Price
testified that he explained to Cassinger that there is no

(33:10):
evidence that an explosion took place at the store, but
instead is more likely that the precursor to a backdraft,
in which a potentially deadly combustion occurs when oxygen is
rapidly reintroduced to a fire in an environment delayed of oxygen.
Witnesses in the area began seeing smoke coming out of
the Dollar General store on that morning and saw a

(33:30):
woman matching Cassenger's description walking away from it.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
And it only gets.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Worse for Deborah from here. Tina Napier, a regional manager,
said she had been informed of a significant issue with
shrinkage at that location, which is the loss of inventory
through means other than sales. When she heard about the fire,
she showed up and expected to find Deborah there, being
the store manager in all, but she was strangely missing.

(33:57):
Deborah would claim that she had sought treatment for chest
pains morning at the local medical center, but that they
wouldn't see her because she forgot her driver's license, and
the more she went on, the more she dug her
own grave. Assistant US attorney Joshua Judd placed several still
photos depicting footage from the store's security cameras on a

(34:18):
projector during trial. Cassinger is seen in the pictures collected
from the night before the fire with a package of
fireworks taken from a display near the front of the store,
and also handling a bag of charcoal from a separate display.
Fire investigators found remnants of fireworks and charcoal in the
debris collected from the breakroom after the fire was put out,

(34:41):
and several pictures showed Cassinger in the store's office with
two days of store earnings to be prepared for deposit,
appearing to be counting cash. Former colleagues of hers testified
that she didn't properly account for cash and checks from
customers and allowed inventory to accumulate in the stock room
while shelves were not fully stick Truthfully, this is just

(35:02):
the tip of the iceberg, because I don't want to
get too far off from Greg's case. But if you're
interested in reading just the depths of her fraud with this,
feel free to check out the articles I.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
Linked in the show. Note.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Kessinger was found guilty and sentenced to six years in
prison in twenty fifteen. Concurrent to that investigation, she was
also charged with bankruptcy fraud. You see, she had taken
proceeds from the life insurance policy in retirement and hid
that money with relatives and secret bank accounts, along with
properties she owned and additional purchases, all while filing for bankruptcy.

(35:39):
In the end, she was found guilty here too, and
between the cases she was ordered to pay nearly eight
million dollars in restitution. A cold case unit took another
stab at Greg Fowler's case in twenty fourteen, but didn't

(36:01):
make any measurable progress that they shared, at least with
the media, and in twenty twenty, Deborah was released from jail.
To this day, there have been no further developments in
what happened to Greg. Did he wander off and start
a new life. If he did, he was pretty planned
out about it. His social Security number and name, and

(36:22):
nothing about him has come up in the year since
his disappearance. Did he suffer an accident while out fishing.
If so, his body is never resurfaced, something seemingly impossible
with the landscape. And is there any weight to Deborah's
story about being a drug informant or about that relative
that they were having money issues with It seems odd

(36:44):
to me that he'd be killed for a money issue
with a relative, because if I'm that relative, it's going
to be hard to get my money back from a
dead person. But you know, and lastly, was it someone
close to home? Someone who could have benefited from him
being dead? I do find it interesting that Deborah was
insistent about the timing of the investigation, not waiting the

(37:06):
twenty four hours, which would seem like an eager and
carrying spouse at the service level, except that the timing
lent itself to finding his abandoned boat in that exact moment.
Perhaps she thought that the empty boat would be proof
enough to declare him dead from an accident.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Right then.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
The only person who knows that is Deborah, or perhaps
someone who helped with the crime knows, or someone close
to the person who is responsible for Greg's disappearance. If
that person is you, it's not too late to come forward.
This week will mark twenty six years since Greg Fowler's

(37:45):
sudden disappearance, and there are people out there who still
deeply care in one answers if you have any information
on the disappearance and presumed homicide of Greg Fowler. Please
contact the FBI's VI CAP Team at eight hundred sixty
three four four zero ninety seven. You can also contact

(38:07):
the Warren County Sheriff's Office out of Bowling Green, Kentucky,
at two seven nine eight four two one six three three.
This has been another episode of a simpler time true crime.
If you appreciate the work I'm doing, please leave a
five star review. Join me next Monday as I dive

(38:28):
into another cold case, and as always, thank you so
much for listening.

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