Are you ready for an adrenaline-fueled journey into the heart of a chilling murder investigation? As we plunge into the fourth installment of our series on the Goldie Massey case, we guarantee you'll be on the edge of your seat. Together, we'll navigate the gruesome discovery of a human torso and break down the remarkable forensic breakthroughs that led to its identification.
Joined by our guest Steve McCowen and Chris Schoonover , we'll explore the granular details of this complex case. We'll put you in the shoes of the law enforcement officers serving on the frontlines, working round the clock to piece together a puzzle that is as baffling as it is horrifying. We delve into the intricate strategies that were employed to obtain a search warrant and coax the initially hesitant Paris into conversation. Each step of this journey is fraught with tension, each development a cliffhanger. So, buckle up, lean in, and prepare to be immersed in a whirlwind of suspense, mystery, and the relentless pursuit of truth and justice.
Shop for Murder Police Podcast swag by clicking HERE today! 10% of ALL swag and merch proceeds are donated to the DNA Doe Project.
See what you have been missing on YouTube!
Are you ready for an adrenaline-fueled journey into the heart of a chilling murder investigation? As we plunge into the fourth installment of our series on the Goldie Massey case, we guarantee you'll be on the edge of your seat. Together, we'll navigate the gruesome discovery of a human torso and break down the remarkable forensic breakthroughs that led to its identification.
Joined by our guest Steve McCowen and Chris Schoonover , we'll explore the granular details of this complex case. We'll put you in the shoes of the law enforcement officers serving on the frontlines, working round the clock to piece together a puzzle that is as baffling as it is horrifying. We delve into the intricate strategies that were employed to obtain a search warrant and coax the initially hesitant Paris into conversation. Each step of this journey is fraught with tension, each development a cliffhanger. So, buckle up, lean in, and prepare to be immersed in a whirlwind of suspense, mystery, and the relentless pursuit of truth and justice.
Shop for Murder Police Podcast swag by clicking HERE today! 10% of ALL swag and merch proceeds are donated to the DNA Doe Project.
See what you have been missing on YouTube!
And so December 6th a torso was found.
Steve McCown:December 6th we get a call from Jasmine County Sheriff's Office that a human torso has now washed up on the Jasmine County side of the Kentucky River and it's the torso from about the bottom of the rib cage no head, no arms. So you have down to about the shoulders and from the neck down just below the breastbone. So that's what washes up.
Wendy Lyons:Warning. The podcast you're about to listen to may contain graphic descriptions of violent assaults, murder and adult language. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to the Murder Police podcast the murder of Goldie Massey, part four.
Chris Schoonover:We started researching it because Steve said no, I think there's new. And back in that day and I'd seen this.
Steve McCown:I'd seen him rehydrate fingers before you know, injecting them with water. But what you have to understand is is this arm had been in water the whole time. So it was, if you've ever seen like when you had git dishpan hands, yeah, so you know. They said we just, you know it's not good enough. So we were like, okay, we'll take you at your word.
Chris Schoonover:Yeah, but something interesting that we did find out about where it was severed was yeah Well, not at that point.
Steve McCown:We knew that it had been severed, and cleanly though. Yeah, so actually the medical examiner at that point had ruled that arm had was a subject of a. They had ruled it as a homicide based upon discovery facts, what they saw in it. So they had. They knew that an arm couldn't exist in the condition that it was in without as being a result of homicide, and it goes back to the whole corner's office criminal side of it. Corner's office can only be homicide. Homicide, suicide, accident, natural or other.
Chris Schoonover:For listeners. So that's not a murder, yeah.
Steve McCown:Figure out a, figure out a category to throw it in, and you throw it in that category, so homicide fit. So that's, that's how that medical examiner's report read.
Chris Schoonover:So that that's so that could be from a boat propeller, right, Right. We don't know what the state of the sever is at that point. We know that it was ruled a homicide. So Steve is still not on this case, so I have still. I still have other detectives working at that are next up. And so a few days go by, December 6th is when the female upper human torso nothing was done in between because we're communicating with the Louisville state medical examiner's office trying to get fingerprints from this and so December 6th, a torso was found.
Steve McCown:December 6th we get a call from Jesmin County Sheriff's office that a human torso has now washed up on the Jesmin County side of the Kentucky River and it's the torso from about the bottom of the rib cage no head, no arms. So you have down to about the shoulders and from the neck down just below the breastbone. So that's what washes up on them.
Chris Schoonover:Which is curious, right, dave? So if you remember when I first started and you were already there, landfill Linda Right.
David Lyons:Yeah.
Chris Schoonover:Perfect example. That's exactly what it looked like, except for she had a little bit more toward the other one.
David Lyons:Yeah, yeah, that's exactly yeah, and you know what's unique about that, too, is that's actually a pretty small part of a torso, so was it pretty intact.
Steve McCown:Yeah, it was, and we talked about this earlier. I have all of this in my case file, obviously fairly gruesome pictures, but for me, working again going back to my coroner's office, just intriguing, right Sure. I mean just what's going to lead you to fact, absolutely, and what was important about it is it appeared that those limbs that had been severed, the arms, had been severed. So it was kind of leaning us in a direction. You know what I mean, because now we had an arm, we had a left arm in.
Steve McCown:Lockport. Now we have a torso missing an arm.
Steve McCown:A torso which we believe to be female. Now Dr Bill Rawson, who we took the, he was in Frankfurt at the time. He I think he's now the Chief Medical Examiner's office in Kentucky, but he was working out of Frankfurt at the time. Yes, we took it up to him. Well, the coroner's office took it up to him. He wasn't convinced at that time that it was female, but in the end he felt more like female because it was in fairly poor shape. But it was just super, super.
Wendy Lyons:Who found that another fisherman?
Steve McCown:I believe it was another fisherman or somebody that was down there Was it the fisherman there and someone just that was out on Lockport. It was one or the other, but I remember a fisherman found one of the parts.
David Lyons:Right. Any idea just where in Jessman County the torso Just? Below the locks Just below the locks.
Steve McCown:Nine, right yeah, past Valley View down there. Wow yeah, not far from my house.
David Lyons:Yeah, I was going to say exactly, it would have to be.
Wendy Lyons:Yeah, so when this was found it didn't contain breast, it was just kind of in a real poor shape.
Steve McCown:Yeah, it appeared female, but you couldn't assume at that point. You know what I mean. We I mean Dr Rawson wasn't comfortable in saying 100% female.
David Lyons:Yeah.
Steve McCown:Certainly leaning that way, but because we didn't have head, we didn't have arms or anything like that. He couldn't say for certain.
David Lyons:Yeah, they'll stay on the fence on something like that till they're 100%. Yeah, right, yeah Because that and it's probably good for the listeners because you describe it all the breastbone and everything Right. It's like no, these things are more difficult to do. They're not. They don't look like mannequins usually, especially if time's gotten old of them.
Chris Schoonover:So so I'd like to describe the detective's point of view. You, the listeners, may think, yes, all right, yes, we found Goldie. No, yeah, I was going to say there's a ton of work. We have an arm in Henry County, we have a torso in Jesmond County. How many missing people across the state are there at one point?
David Lyons:That is so true. We did the case of Michael Gorely just south of here missing, and just about a week ago some human remains were found in Garrett County or in Crab Orchard and in the fur, and that's relatively close to where he was missing from and and I and immediately I think that the family they latch on to that too, and but then you start realizing too and you learn that there's a lot of adult missing people from that January too.
David Lyons:So while we hope maybe it has a resolution for the Gorely family, the reality of it is is, who knows?
Steve McCown:Right and for us, and for us really. I mean, you're talking about, you're talking 120 miles away from Lexington.
David Lyons:So logic start. That's a long way to go.
Steve McCown:Yeah, it's a long way to go, but it's both in the river Right. I mean this isn't like one on a piece of property.
Wendy Lyons:Yes, the other one is.
Steve McCown:So, so both are in the river, so we, we just are hopeful.
Chris Schoonover:So here's yeah, so liaisoning is very important in our line of work. So in the meantime I'm still talking with Louisville medical examiners office saying, okay, what have you tried to get these fingerprints? What have you done? And luckily, on my birthday, december 10th, they call and say hey, we've got prints.
Steve McCown:Well, I think. I think back up to that, though, is when we took the torso to Dr Ralston, he he immediately did DNA between the arm and the torso and matched it. So we knew at that point the torso and arm match. So we're like gosh, we need that fingerprint.
David Lyons:You think about back before DNA, where you'd be, I mean right.
Steve McCown:Oh yeah.
David Lyons:Well, we kind of lived it, so I mean you know, back when Mighty Conner was just becoming a thing and touched DNA.
Chris Schoonover:Well, you had to have a quarter size of blood to get an analysis and that would just tell you that would never happen, You'll have phones that flip and you could talk on them. I mean crazy stuff like that. It I'll carry a bag in a phone, or phone in a bag.
Steve McCown:I even found out that there's rapid DNA now, and that's even past me. So, yeah, I'm going to start talking, like you guys. Yeah, oh, yeah, exactly.
David Lyons:But there again, what a blessing, and the idea that that's powerful stuff, absolutely.
Steve McCown:And so Dr Ralson, being the whiz that he is, I mean he was like oh, we have this down here, we have this arm, we have this torso, there could be something going on here. So he compares it to and, through some of the samples that were taken, was able to confirm that those two body parts went together. Good for him, can you imagine.
David Lyons:And could be, not even just a deal, if somebody didn't even do that. Yeah, I mean, and that's not unbelievable. It wouldn't mean that they were lazy or anything, but if somebody just didn't make that comparison.
Steve McCown:Just putting two together, yeah.
Chris Schoonover:So I remember my first show here. It's so important that I don't know how many people you've had on here, how many detectives, but it's so important to make the point that if you have a detective on this show, I hope you kick them out your door when they say I, I solved this. Oh yeah, so already we have Jesmond County sheriffs helping us. We have Louisville state medical examiners. We have Frankfurt state medical examiners, we have Henry County Sheriff and Corner helping us. This is a phenomenal case. Everybody's working at.
David Lyons:And Jesmond County Corner that we actually did an interview with.
Steve McCown:Yeah, my interviews helped us out, I mean eventually we'll have the folks down the forensic and the prologists down at UT at the body farm helping us out. So we're the ones that have to testify.
Chris Schoonover:But everybody else is so wonderful and you can't do it without them.
Wendy Lyons:Some of us test. I don't buy that every time I'm here. Yeah, yeah.
Chris Schoonover:Yeah, yeah. Some of us are up here for a long time, some of us aren't yeah.
Chris Schoonover:Exactly. This is a story for another time. Yeah, we will. Yeah, so on my birthday, I contacted the Louisville Medical Examiner's Office and they proceeded to tell me that they have come up and, steve, we had talked to him off and on about hey, try this, We've. I did Google, he did Google, he's experienced, steve experienced this. It suggested hey, he's collected bodies from the water being a corner, this is what he recommends. And, lo and behold, they did get a fingerprint off of the arm. Oh, wow.
Steve McCown:Yeah, they were actually able to get a bunch of prints. If I remember, in looking at some of the stuff that we got back from Keith Dahlinger at the KSP Lab, they were able to get some really good prints.
David Lyons:You know, do you have any? How they, how they managed it.
Steve McCown:I think what they actually did is they, they, and not to be gruesome to your, to your audience, but they actually removed the hand from the arm. That way they could roll it better to make better prints.
Wendy Lyons:And what they did what they let the.
Steve McCown:They let the arm kind of dry.
David Lyons:Right.
Steve McCown:Because it had been in water for so long. They let the arm, they let the arm dry, and then they rehydrated the tips of the finger to make them more malleable I think is the word that you use there. So so they're. They have some stiffness too, so you can get some ridge detail when they roll the print. So they were. They were successful in getting prints and, and sure enough, they came back and told us hey, that arm is Goldie Massey's arm.
Wendy Lyons:And we knew by that arm being Goldie Massey's arm, that torso was Goldie Massey's. But but how? If a person had, how were you able to obtain that those were her prints, had she ever had a record of some sort? Because if you don't have a record, you're not going to know whose prints those are.
Steve McCown:Correct. So we talked about Nibbon earlier and it's finger, it's shell casing fingerprints. There's AFIS out there and that's the automated fingerprint indexing system which, if you've ever had your prints taken or if you've ever been in trouble, you're in it. So that's that's. That's how we had Goldie's fingerprints is because she was already in AFIS.
Chris Schoonover:She had written bad checks in Bourbon County and they fingerprint everybody in Bourbon County when you which is minor offense, right, right, but maybe as a blessing now is that.
Wendy Lyons:Well, there was. They wouldn't have known if she hadn't been 100% yeah.
Steve McCown:Right, 100%, I mean if she had never been arrested or never been her fingerprints. We would have known who's whose hand that went to so yeah, so that was my birthday gift.
David Lyons:That was a great birthday, happy birthday, thank you.
Chris Schoonover:I think, I think it was only 65 at that birthday. Well, I showed you my civil war buttons I was brought them into work Exactly.
Steve McCown:He shot with a musket.
Chris Schoonover:So from this point, once we get the fingerprints and identify that they are Goldie Massies officially, I'm proud to announce Steve McCollum is the lead on the homicide of Goldie Massies.
David Lyons:So how'd that happen? I mean, you dodged that bullet so many times.
Steve McCown:It was just, it was his turn. Yeah, it was. I was up and we had. We had went all the way through the rotation from when I initially we went out and interviewed Paris in the very beginning at his place and we had went through so many homicides that occurred. I was back to the top and here we are. Here we are, Goldie's. Goldie's arm match your upper torso, so during this time?
Wendy Lyons:was there any word from Zach or Paris?
Chris Schoonover:Zach was in the jail.
Wendy Lyons:Still in Burbicanie Jail Still Months later.
Steve McCown:And we really hadn't. I mean we hadn't make contact with pairs, we were doing our thing on the side. You know, we were adding all these things up, as ever coming in.
Wendy Lyons:So since you encounter in the doorway, you hadn't gone back to see him again.
Chris Schoonover:Nope, no.
Steve McCown:I hadn't talked to him.
Chris Schoonover:Remember, we still have several other suspects we have to eliminate. We have Zach, right, we have the people that she owes money to. Well, in the meantime, when we're waiting for the torso and the fingerprints come through, actually, the people that she stole money from have been calling me and telling me she may be on the run. She owes me this much amount. She may be on the run. An older lady that when I got the cell phone records from Goldie Massey that's very same day on the 21st, she had probably called her seven times because Goldie was supposed to show up at her home to go ahead and do her her quarterly taxes and she never showed up. So the older lady's sweetest pie from Bourbon County said well, I'm gonna have to file because she stole enough money from me. I just can't take the loss. So she calls financial crimes at the Lexington Police Department and files charges. In the meantime, stephen and I are still working on the homicide of Goldie Massey. It's officially a homicide.
Steve McCown:And I think an important part of that and what Chris touched on there initially are those cell phone records. So right, we get the cell phone records back, and what we get back with that are her locations and numbers called. So right, what do we want to do? We want to look at those phone numbers as to who are the last people to call her, because those are the last people to talk to her. So we start going through her call log and start identifying those numbers as to people that had talked to her recently. So we knew that we want to talk to those people and that's kind of what we were doing in the meantime is going out, identifying the numbers, identifying the people, and going out and saying, hey, why'd you call Massey on this date? Hey, why'd you call Massey on this date?
Wendy Lyons:Real detective work.
Steve McCown:Yeah, what, yeah, what. Why were you trying to get a hold of Goldie for? You know? Just just to shore that end up. You know, because you think about somebody that talked to him the last time. You're like, that last person that talked to somebody is pretty good. You know that's somebody you want to talk to.
David Lyons:Well, you're closing loops, right?
Steve McCown:Yeah, and we were going absolutely, and we were going back a few days to talk to the, you know, talk to the appropriate people in the last days before we knew that she had gone missing.
Chris Schoonover:Right, and along with those phone calls, we still have the last people who are calling her Zach, looking for her because he needs a babysitter, and Paris, yeah, because he was coming to Synthiana to pick her up.
Steve McCown:According to him. He was coming to Synthiana.
Chris Schoonover:So I didn't get to go ahead and celebrate like I wanted to. You know, strippers, balloons champagne.
David Lyons:Right, exactly, I uh.
Chris Schoonover:Steve and I make a plan that we're gonna have to get a search warrant done. So I go home and then Steve and I meet early the next morning and we write up a search warrant and for the listeners that and many of the listeners that I've learned on your podcast they listen, they were faithful, but if they're new, a search warrant just doesn't happen within an hour and you can go get a judge to sign it. It takes several hours to put the probable cause, while you need that search warrant and the basis of everything you've done in the investigation thus far and then go ahead.
Steve McCown:And I think part of the search warrant is what are we looking for? What are you? What are we looking for? What do we have? We have an arm that's severed. We have a torso that's severed. We have a statement from a guy whose house that we're going to go search, who wouldn't let us in, that had some injuries. So what are we looking for? We're looking for blood. We're looking for tools.
Steve McCown:We're looking for, you know, the things that would add up in the murder that we're investigating. We're not. We're not looking for computers, you know. We're not looking for cell phones. We're looking for things that love letters Correct.
Chris Schoonover:We're not looking for, and that's the great thing, it was a minimal amount of things we can narrow it down to. We're not looking for documentation that says I hate you, right, because we didn't have a long-term relationship.
Steve McCown:Tars binding. You know, I mean because you think about it. If you cut someone up, there's going to be a lot of blood.
David Lyons:Well, that and any other body fluid, I mean there's tons in there, right, absolutely.
Wendy Lyons:Yeah.
David Lyons:And the other thing, too, about again, kind of like we talked about, when you're standing in front of a door and he's got an arms length and you can see inside the door again, if you get into a house that has those limited things and you stumble across those other things and you can get those through serendipity or cut a second search warrant based on the defining of them, so it's it's a stair step way in there.
Steve McCown:but that's a really good explanation, though, of how you limit yourself on the scope of what you can go in Absolutely, and I was always taught by these guys and by Chris and Bill and Robin and Matt and those guys. Those four corners are what. That's your career, you know. You present those four corners of that paper to a judge. I mean, you have to be certain on that. So we were, we talked about it Chris and I did before we even started writing it on how we were going to prepare this and what we're really going to be looking for, what we're going to be focused on, and I'm not going to say it really hurt us. Actually, I think in the end, when we did it, I think that we thought we hurt ourselves, but initially we kind of limited what we were looking for.
Steve McCown:We did receipts to show that they went to the bar, but I think, as we go along and as you'll hear, it actually helped us to get back in there.
Chris Schoonover:His first interview was phenomenal. To help us get back in there, right.
Steve McCown:Yeah, and we'll get into that. And what we found initially in the initial search warrant and what we're just looking for limited, you know, we again we weren't. We weren't looking for computers and digital information and things like that and nature, we were looking for tools, tarps, blood, biological and it would be normal for her clothes to be there.
Chris Schoonover:Right that we're dating. Right, they're adults, they're going to be dating, so a toothbrush is not going to help us. No, right, nothing like that.
Steve McCown:Yeah, so we, chris and I said, and we talked about it, how do we need to go about this? And we thought that was the best way to do is be limited in the scope on what we had, and that's kind of what we did.
Chris Schoonover:Right. So once we typed up the search warrant that very next morning, uh, steven I and it was just. This was a case, I will say. It was well thought out, well planned and every portion of this investigation was discussed as a chess game. Yeah, we, we're getting a search warrant. How are we going to get Paris out of the house to talk to us, because he barely wanted to talk to us standing at the door?
Steve McCown:Right, how do we get him to headquartered? Well, we can actually sit down and talk to him, because if he says I don't want to go, he don't have to go.
David Lyons:He can sit on the curb and watch him search his apartment.
Wendy Lyons:Right.
Steve McCown:So I mean, we were, we were really game planning. How the hell it's good. How are we going to get him to come down?
David Lyons:And I'm sure that included the Pike County affiliation. Well, yeah, yeah, we started looking, but what was?
Steve McCown:important. What we found was is he had? History on him. Yeah, so we did a history on him and found that he had pawned a bunch of things and actually he had filed him a police report for his stuff that had gotten stolen from him recently, and we knew one of the detectives back in property you can say that was shit and there was a reason he was saying it was stolen from him.
Steve McCown:I think and there was a report on file about one of the detectives back in property crimes. They're like, well, use that, We'll be like, hey, let's come down and talk about this stolen shit that's been you're wanting recovered there we go. That's exactly, and that was kind of the ruse that we used, which came up in a suppression issue later on down the road, but you probably survived it.
Chris Schoonover:We did.
David Lyons:We did yeah, of course, because it's legal.
Steve McCown:But we had to come up with a way to say hey, Paris, you need to come and talk to us. And if he said no, we'd be like, well, you probably want to because you, you have some interest in this, right. Right, we may have some leads on some of the stuff that you were the stuff that was going to report a stolen couple of weeks ago, so that's.
Chris Schoonover:So he agreed to come down. Once we knocked on this door, he answered his door.
Wendy Lyons:It was an evening time Did he look at you all like no and again no, he did not.
Steve McCown:And again, we were we. We planned this out. We didn't want everybody there. You know, we didn't bring a team of people that was going to do it. It was a Steven I mean Chris, when the door said hey, paris, you want to come down? We've got this, and he agreed. So once he left we were like go.
Wendy Lyons:Hey, you know there's more to the story, so go download the next episode, like the true crime fan that you are.
David Lyons:The Murder Police podcast is hosted by Wendy and David Lyons and was created to honor the lives of crime victims, so their names are never forgotten. It is produced, recorded and edited by David Lyons. The Murder Police podcast can be found on your favorite Apple or Android podcast platform, as well as at murderpolicepodcastcom, where you will find show notes, transcripts, information about our presenters and a link to the official Murder Police podcast merch store where you can purchase a huge variety of Murder Police podcasts swag. We are also on Facebook, instagram and YouTube, which is closed caption for those that are hearing impaired. Just search for the Murder Police podcast and you will find us. If you have enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe for more and give us five stars in a written review on Apple podcast or wherever you download your podcasts. Make sure you set your player to automatically download new episodes so you get the new ones as soon as they drop, and please tell your friends Lock it down.
David Lyons:Judy.