The Murder Police Podcast
The Murder Police Podcast
The Murder of Trent DiGiuro Part 1
On July 14, 1994, University Kentucky football player Trent DiGiuro, was enjoying his birthday party at his home on Woodland Avenue in Lexington Kentucky, near the university.
As he and a few friends were winding down on the front porch, a loud bang shattered the warm peace of the summer evening.
Friends asked Trent what the sound was, and when he did not respond, they found him injured and unresponsive. After help was called and arrived, Trent was transported to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead within 30 minutes of arriving at the hospital.
Part 1 of a 2-part series, offers then Sergeant Dan Gibbons, who was the sergeant of the Homicide Unit with the Lexington Police Department in 1994, describing the investigation from the supervisor’s perspective. Hear Dan reveal details that were never covered in the many national television shows and documentaries, as he walks listeners through a complex investigation, that took years to resolve.
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Speaker 2:There were actually two persons present at the time the shooting occurred. Those individuals, once they determined that there was a significant injury to Trent, called 911, which resulted in police dispatch. The officers arrived on the scene. They determined that he was very seriously injured. Emergency response units arrived on the scene, transported him within just a couple of minutes to the closest hospital and within 30 minutes he was pronounced dead at the hospital closest hospital and within 30 minutes he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Speaker 1: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 Trent DiGiro, part 1 of 2, with your hosts Wendy and David Lyons, and our guests Dan Gibbons and Ray the DA Larson. Dan, just what is this case about?
Speaker 2:Well, it has to do with the death of a young man three days shy of his birthday. It involved a long-held revenge motive. It's one of those cases that comes along during a career very infrequently in this area.
Speaker 3:Why? Why is it infrequently?
Speaker 2:So many of the cases that the police investigators encounter have to do with what I would call a sudden heat and passion type of thing. It's a spur of the moment decision, a bad result that basically comes down to the police. You know pretty well, know who's responsible for the crime, and it's just a matter of pulling together the evidence to prove it. This was one of those cases that's more of a whodunit, where you really don't have anything other than a limited amount of physical evidence, a limited number of eyewitnesses, and because of that it makes the challenge much greater in bringing someone before the court.
Speaker 1:Well, Dan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:I'm retired Lexington Police Department. I served with them for 25 years department. I served with them for 25 years. 13 of those years I was a part of the Homicide Investigations Unit, seven of the 13 as the supervisor of that unit. And then you know, I mean the other times I've served in sections that deal with, you know, drug investigations, burglary investigations and things of that nature. But a huge portion of my career was as an investigator.
Speaker 1:Well, how did you get involved in this case? How did? Were you just sitting at home and your phone rang? Or what step initially was taken when you learned of this Trent DiGiro homicide?
Speaker 2:There were actually two persons present at the time the shooting occurred. Those individuals, once they determined that there was a significant injury to Trent, called 911, which resulted in police dispatch. The officers arrived on the scene. They determined that he was very seriously injured. Emergency response units arrived on the scene, transported him within just a couple of minutes to the closest hospital and within 30 minutes he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Speaker 4:What was he doing, Dan, when the shooting happened? What kind of environment was he in?
Speaker 2:This. Like I said, he was, I think, three days shy of his 21st birthday. Friends had gathered at the house where Trent lived, just a couple of blocks off the campus of the university, to give him a birthday celebration, and it was more of an open house where people were coming and going. Not like everybody stayed for the entire evening, so it was essentially a small gathering of people. It was kind of on the tail end of the party. It was winding down. Trent was sitting in a chair on the front porch on one end of the porch. These two other individuals witnesses, for lack of a better term were actually on the other end of the porch, engaged in a conversation with each other, and a shot, a single shot, rang out to 40 in the morning or so. And then when they finally determined that, you know, trent had been injured from that shot, when they determined that it was a shot and not a car backfire or fireworks or something of that nature, that's when they called the police and on the, the university, that's, university of Kentucky right.
Speaker 4:Yes, and he was a student there. He was a student. Was he involved with athletics, with the football team? Can you tell a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:I can a little bit. He had enrolled at the university as a freshman in 1991. He had taken the steps to walk on to the football team and got accepted. He was a practice player essentially for a couple of years, finally got some playing time in 1993. And that playing time continued to develop over the course of time to the point that he was getting ready to start his senior season and he was going to be a starting right guard for the team. Good deal what?
Speaker 4:happened after that? After they arrived, how did homicide get involved? After patrol arrived at the scene?
Speaker 2:Back at that time when a homicide occurred, we had and I don't remember exactly off the top of my head exactly how many members there were in the unit, but there were probably in the neighborhood of 10 members of the homicide unit. They were all called to the scene to participate in this, to become involved in doing the various things that need to be done. That was just kind of a standard protocol that when uniformed officers arrived on the scene they determined that they had a crime of this nature, then they would do a call out and the entire unit responded.
Speaker 4:What does patrol do? Waiting for homicides? Is there anything that's expected of them when the detectives arrive?
Speaker 2:Oh sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean they have to play a big role.
Speaker 2:Primarily, their job is to initially identify and protect the crime scene.
Speaker 2:And protect the crime scene and that's going to entail doing a quick cursory search of the area to determine if there's any evidence that's visibly present or readily identifiable. It's going to be taking the time to actually mark that off, to barricade it off with what's just typically called crime scene tape, to kind of define the parameters, you know, of what they want to be focused on. It's going to involve trying to identify any and all witnesses that might have some something to add to learning what had transpired up to that point, and it's going to mean even doing some very cursory preliminary interviews with those people. It could possibly even, you know, a commander on the scene may take the step to say we're going to initiate a neighborhood investigation and they would assign patrol officers then to go door to door or, you know, writing down license numbers of cars or trying to talk to people at their homes or identifying anybody that might have been in the area at the time. So that's primarily going to be. Their job is to protect the scene and try to identify witnesses.
Speaker 4:Gotcha. And how did we determine who gets assigned the homicide investigation back then? Was there a process for that? For who drew the case?
Speaker 2:A lot of times, in all honesty, I mean it was kind of random, but a lot of times it was based upon an officer's caseload.
Speaker 2:If we had an investigator who had already drawn a homicide investigation two days before, for example, then obviously we wouldn't want to add to that person's caseload by signing a new one to that person. And it might very well be that it's just kind of, you know, keeping track of who's got what assigned to them and you know how actively involved they are and how large the scale the cases are that they have. There was one other component that came into play. Occasionally I don't think it really did on this one that much but a lot of times the first officer on the scene may have information and may show a willingness to be actively engaged information and may show a willingness to be actively engaged and in order to bring their knowledge of what they learned up to that point to the case and in order to maybe give them some experience, occasionally we would transfer that person in temporarily to the homicide unit to work alongside someone else.
Speaker 3:So, dan, tell me about. You're there and you've got a dead person that's been shot and you're there as the supervisor of the homicide unit. What do you do next?
Speaker 2:Well, hopefully, patrol has adequately identified the crime scene area and gotten it protected sufficiently, and I think then we're going to take a step back as the investigations team and we're going to let our crime scene technicians come in and they're going to do the things that you see a lot of times on TV through movies like CSI and things of that nature they're going to process the scene for evidence. They're going to look for fingerprints. They're going to look for blood samples they're going to look for in a shooting case. They're going to look for fingerprints. They're going to look for blood samples they're going to look for in a shooting case. They're going to look for spent projectiles. They're going to look for casings they're going to I mean, they're going to look for anything you know, whatever it might be, that would provide them with some sort of a lead or a place to start trying to determine who's responsible.
Speaker 3:Who in this kind of a situation?
Speaker 2:one of the things that's always bothered me as a prosecutor is how are the loved ones notified of a death of a loved one? And again that comes case by case. Having distance like in this case there was some physical distance from where Trent's parents lived that makes it a little bit harder to make notification. Ideally it's going to be someone who can display and can show a lot of compassion, is going to be asked to take on the task of finding family and making that notification. In a case like this where you don't really have any family local, the family is actually a couple of hours away. Then we could even do that over the telephone.
Speaker 3:That's not ideal, certainly, but it does happen. So here you are. What kind of evidence did you have, what kind of leads did you have, at three o'clock in the morning on July, the 17th 1994?
Speaker 2:The responding officers that were on the scene. Initially they identified what they thought was the crime scene. They put their barrier tape up to protect it, they posted officers there to watch to make sure that no one entered the scene and contaminated it in any way. And they had done some cursory interviews with the people that were present and essentially what they were able to tell the investigators when they arrived was that these three people Trent and the other two witnesses were sitting on the porch. This loud shot rang out. The two witnesses looked up. They saw no vehicles in the area. They saw no pedestrians in the area. They wasn't really sure exactly what the sound was and made a comment to Trent what was that? And got no response. And then when they checked and they saw that he had been injured, he was unresponsive and that's when they called the police. You know, once the investigators get there, the crime scene technicians arrive, they begin processing the crime scene itself, with no more information that we had available to us at that time. You know it was really important that we do what we could. Now we're talking about three o'clock in the morning and there's not a lot of lighting in that area Finding physical evidence was.
Speaker 2:We were at a little bit of a disadvantage given the elements. We started looking for what are the possible scenarios to help us maybe direct our investigative effort. The way this was situated and where the injury was on the victim thought there was a possibility that someone had maybe walked up a gravel driveway between the two houses to the side of the porch where Trent was seated and possibly shot him with a handgun. So we, you know, searched that area, obviously for any spent shell casings or footprints or anything of that nature. We also thought it was a possibility that someone was across the street and fired a shot but again, not knowing where the shot came from exactly, it was hard to identify what areas to search. At that time of night, doing a broad search of that entire area just really wasn't feasible. You know, we tried to theorize a little bit as to what could have happened and then we tried to wait until we got more information the medical examiner's office until we got more information from our crime scene tech officers.
Speaker 3:The medical examiner's office. Was Trent's body taken to the custody of his body, taken by the coroner? Correct, and what is the coroner?
Speaker 2:order. Well, the coroner has a responsibility for determining cause and manner of death, and they'll use information from the police investigation. They'll use information from an autopsy conducted by the medical examiner to make that determination. Once the coroner collects the body from the hospital, they take it to a facility and then the medical examiner performs the autopsy and then prepares a subsequent report.
Speaker 3:And tell me what the medical examiner did. He obtain any evidence from the body of Trent DeGiro?
Speaker 2:He did he did Determined that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head. The shot actually entered the orifice of the left ear. Through the course of the autopsy, they were able to recover fragments of a bullet that had caused death, and this is not a structured bullet that they recovered.
Speaker 3:I don't know what that means.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean you know what a bullet looks like. I mean most people do. The bullet is totally fragmented. Once it entered it fragments into many, many, many small pieces of lead and copper. There was items obtained through the course of the autopsy and they did provide evidence for us, but not to the extent that you would have if that bullet was fully intact.
Speaker 3:So you get the pieces of the bullet as an investigator, then what do you do with it, with all of those pieces?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, obviously they're going to get logged into as evidence, they're going to be given a specific number for tracking and making sure that we don't have a problem putting them back as the item that was actually recovered.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Those items, once they get logged in, then they're going to be submitted to, for us, the Kentucky State Police Crime Lab, where they'll undergo a variety of different tests to see what information they can yield for us, and hopefully that information would be something that would number one in the early stages, give us a lead to follow up, but then it could also, be in the latter stages, be used as evidence against someone who's been charged.
Speaker 3:And did they give you some information about those bullet fragments that let you conclude?
Speaker 2:anything Somewhat limited, but they did. Yes, they determined that the round had been fired from a specific caliber weapon. Yes, they determined that the round had been fired from a specific caliber weapon. They were able to speculate and theorize a little bit, based on an educated guess that it was a particular type of weapon, and they gave us the configuration of the gun itself that fired that particular shot. So we had some idea as an investigations team as to what type of weapon we were looking for and, quite honestly, the type of weapon went a long way toward giving us a little understanding of what had transpired. We felt pretty certain after hearing the information from the medical examiner that the theory that someone walked up between the houses and shot him from just a few feet away with this particular weapon just wasn't a very valid summary. We felt like we needed to look in another direction, other than that scenario. It was helpful.
Speaker 3:What kind of gun did the Kentucky State Police Crime Lab suggest that it likely was they?
Speaker 2:concluded pretty definitively that it was a .243 caliber rifle and then they were able to say specifically that the round, the weapon, had a barrel that had four grooves with a right-hand twist, with a right-hand twist, and it's those grooves and the rate of twist that they're cut into the barrel that helps identify the bullet. It's kind of like a fingerprint on a bullet. That's correct. Yes.
Speaker 3:So a .243 rifle. Did you learn anything about the common nature of those guns? Were they common or were they rare, or what did you know?
Speaker 2:243 caliber rifles are a fairly common rifle. There's a lot of those in production. There was some speculation, educated speculation, that they could pin it down to a particular type, particular brand of weapon. But it wasn't an absolute based upon the evidence that they had, but it did give us. You know, one of the first things we would look at is number one is it a 243 caliber? And number two does it fit the type of weapon that the ballistics examination had told us it very well could be?
Speaker 1:We will be right back after this important message we want to share.
Speaker 4:In the wake of the senseless and evil act that took young Trent DeGiro's life, his family created the Trent DeGiro Foundation to keep his name alive and to help students succeed. As stated so well on the foundation's website, the Trent DeGiro Foundation was established to raise funds for and make contributions to various educational scholarship funds and scholarships in the name of Trent DeGero. The foundation is dedicated to keeping Trent's memory alive. All proceeds are used to support scholarships at three high schools in Oldham County, kentucky, and at the University of Kentucky. The foundation website can be found at tDegeroFoundationorg and we will put a link to this on our show notes, which are located at MurderPolicePodcastcom. Do us a favor and spend some time at the Foundation website and, more importantly, consider making a donation to this very worthy cause to help keep Trent in our collective memories. Now back to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Did you find any rifles that fit the description of the bullet?
Speaker 2:This was at the time, in my opinion, a very high-profile investigation and because of that it prompted a lot of calls from the public with information. Once we distributed the type of weapon that we were looking for, we received numerous calls that pointed us in direction of people who had those caliber weapons. That pointed us in direction of people who had those caliber weapons, and we pursued every one of those and none of those came back as being the weapon that fired that round.
Speaker 3:Dan, you got this information about the rifle and you got this information about the markings on the fragments taken from Trent's head. So where do you?
Speaker 2:go from here. Well again, the evidence that we had really was fairly limited. We thought our best approach was to conduct interviews with as many of the people that knew him as we could possibly find.
Speaker 2:We wanted to do a comprehensive canvas of the neighborhood just to see if we could find anyone that could provide information. Along those lines, we assigned our team various assignments to begin the process of those two things primarily. So we took and actually made an effort on the night of the offense to go door to door, but again, it's three o'clock in the morning and a lot of times people just don't come to the door at three o'clock in the morning. We put forth that effort, kept record of everyone we talked to and what they had to say. We then went back the next day and expanded our crime scene search, looking for anything that we couldn't find during the darkness around the time that the offense occurred, and assign that list out to various investigators with the instruction that they go door to door and that they go back as often as they need to in order to make contact with someone at every residence on that list and to determine did they see, did they hear anything that night? Who was in the house that night, talk to each person that you identify as being friends and even some family members of Trent's, and assigned those to investigators for them to locate those people and to conduct a comprehensive investigation with them, and the goal of that particular effort was to find if there was anything related to Trent and Trent's past that might generate a motive for why someone would want to shoot this young man. So those were the primary efforts at that time and again, it was a very high profile case and because it was so public, we got a lot of phone calls, to the point that we actually had to develop a, I guess, a roster of tip sheets and who was assigned to that tip to follow up. Because we followed up on every tip we got. We put forth for an extended period of time those efforts trying to generate any kind of lead that would give us a motive, any kind of lead that would point us in the direction of who the offender might be or anything that might even lead us to any evidence that might be relevant to it, and that went on for a long time. It resulted in numerous calls that pointed us in the direction of people that owned guns that possibly could match the description, and we followed up on each one of those. We took the steps to go and locate the individual that owned the weapon that was named in the tip. We would conduct interviews with them. We actually went through the process of collecting their weapons and submitting those weapons to the State Police Crime lab to have them compared to the evidence that was recovered during autopsy, and none of those weapons that were collected during that effort resulted in a tangible identification.
Speaker 2:Going door to door in a neighborhood, it absolutely generated very little evidence. A few people heard a loud bang in the middle of the night, saw nothing Beyond that. It really didn't generate anything other than well, I knew who lived there. I know the victim, I've talked to him a couple times in passing, things of that nature. The expanded physical search of the area during the next day during the daylight hours yielded no additional evidence other than and the turf under a tree catty corner from the residence across the intersection from where that residence is located. One of our investigators found a couple of divots in the turf, in the dirt, in the grass that was there, and those divots were positioned in such a way that it could make one think that it was left by. It was an indention left by a bipod that is commonly used on rifles of 243 caliber. We didn't know that that's what it was, but it was significant enough that we recorded it, had our crime scene technicians photograph it, preserve it, not really leading us to anyone or to any other evidence. It was just a fact that we developed through the course of this evidence. It was just a fact that we developed through the course of this.
Speaker 2:You know, in talking to the friends that we interviewed, our pursuit was what could have happened in Trent's life that might make someone angry enough that they would want to take this type of revenge out on him. And we learned that Trent was. He was a pretty good-sized fella. He was 6'2", 270 pounds. Quite honestly, everyone we spoke to said there was no doubt he was the strongest player on the University of Kentucky football team bench, pressing in the neighborhood of 400 plus pounds. He's a pretty strong guy. And everyone that we talked to said they called him a big teddy bear and they looked at him as their protector.
Speaker 2:Anytime something happened that created a verbal or physical altercation, they reported that Trent was there to stand up, to protect them, to stand guard over them. So there were times when there were verbal altercations. There were times when there were some physical altercations none major by any stretch of the imagination but we thought, you know, could this be a revenge motive, where he's made someone mad and they just came back and and took this action as a retaliatory measure. You know, we heard things from various people that was we determined to be more speculation or theorizing than actually coming from any kind of fact. Things like he was so big and so strong, was he involved with using steroids? Who was his dealer? You know, did he steal something from someone? Did he rip some dealer off? You know there were all kinds of speculation along those lines and those leads were investigated thoroughly and none of that ever proved to be the truth.
Speaker 3:How long did I mean? Did this, these things that you're talking about following up on these leads, did that? Just how long did this stretch this? Your investigation into the murder of Trent DeGiro?
Speaker 2:This went for several years. We're talking about a crime that occurred in 1994 and didn't really gain any significant traction as far as identifying the offender until 2000. On leads and of course you know those leads, they would come in frequently in the beginning, so much so that it took a lot of extra man hours just to stay on top of following up on the tips. We would see those tips start to become fewer and fewer as time passed and at that time there were programs that were being done to reenact these types of crimes, and that was done on this case, trying to generate a lead that might become tangible. And of course, when you do a show like America's Most Wanted that's a national show you get a lot of tips.
Speaker 3:I'll bet.
Speaker 2:And it did. It generated a lot of information. But, again, all of those leads that came in we followed up on. Some of them were leads that were cross-country and we were able to use other police agencies to help us follow up on those, and we were able to use other police agencies to help us follow up on those.
Speaker 3:But none of those tips really ever came to any tangible belief that we knew who we were looking for. You know, dan. As the prosecutor in this case, I stayed in close contact with the parents of Trent DeGiro, Mike and Ann DeGiro. And Mike always said somebody knows something out there and sooner or later they're going to tell us he.
Speaker 2:just he had great faith that somebody would come forward and tell and he had conveyed that to me from time to time and I got calls from Mike and I got calls from Ann on a regular basis, just checking in because they were in my opinion they seemed somewhat desperate. It may not be the right word, but they certainly wanted to know what had happened. But they certainly wanted to know what had happened.
Speaker 1:Well, sure, and I think, as a parent, any parent would want to know who and why has done this to my child and furthermore, why, six years into it, do we still not know? Right, and I'm guessing that they were wondering, like most people would. What are you doing during this time when the leads are just dead ends and they're going nowhere? Where do you, as an investigator, go from that point when nothing is turning up? What do you do then? And all the while, I'm assuming, more cases are piling on. So you know you're trying to prioritize what's coming in versus what still hasn't been solved. How do you handle that?
Speaker 2:As this time passes, when our investigators are pursuing all these tips that come in, you're right, other cases continue to come and that's important because the unit that handles the homicides at that time for the police department handles the homicides. At that time for the police department, not only did they investigate suspicious deaths and homicides, they also investigated all levels of assault. They investigated sexual assaults, they investigated harassing communications. So all of those complaints continued to come in during the course of years that we were investigating this case.
Speaker 2:And my posture with our unit was always when you look at a case on this side that's a homicide investigation and you look at a case over here that's a harassing communications matter, in your eyes, as the investigator you're going to put more emphasis on the homicide. But in all honesty, the victim of this harassing communications has nothing more important to them in their life at that time than that harassing communications.
Speaker 1:Right, and I'm imagining that they may look at it like they may be the next victim and maybe it's not as intense as they're thinking it is, but in their mind I would think. I would want you to focus on my case, and exclusively my case, because that's important to me, without knowing that you have all these other cases, and I think many people don't realize that in the back scenes you've got a lot of other stuff going on that's really more important than mine.
Speaker 2:Right, that's really more important than mine, right, and I always made it clear to our investigators that it wasn't acceptable to use the excuse I've got 50 other cases to work as an example of why I can't work on yours.
Speaker 2:That just that doesn't. That wasn't acceptable. You had to give some time to these other cases, but clearly this homicide was important and it stayed important through the course of the entire investigation. We got tips on things that were generated pretty quickly after the offense occurred. Things like during the party. There were a couple of men that walked up to the party and asked to join in and they weren't known by the people that were at the party. So they were told no, sorry, it's a private birthday gathering, so sorry, no, so what is the possibility that that offended them and they came back and did this investigating this.
Speaker 2:There was a vehicle that drove down Woodland Avenue and that there was a person in the back seat of the vehicle that kind of leaned out, stuck his arm out the window and pointed and the witnesses had pointed like he had a gun in his hand at the crime scene. Well, is that someone returning to the scene? You know what is that exactly? And all of those were, you know, followed up on and again, none of them produced a tangible suspect or tangible motive. So we looked at things like motives or leads as a random drive-by shooting. You know, is it possible that somebody just they were out roaming around at three o'clock in the morning and saw a guy sitting on the front porch and just shot him randomly, with no way of knowing if there's any connection at all? We looked at the fact that, you know, could someone in the neighborhood have gotten upset because there was a party and sounds did echo at three o'clock in the morning, you know, was it loud enough that it angered someone? And that's the way they took care of it. You know, was there an argument at the party that maybe two people got into an argument over? We looked at all of those things and none of them provided any tangible information.
Speaker 2:Then there was a call that came in from an individual who declined to identify himself. That individual talked about there being tunnels underneath the UK campus and that there were people who lived in the tunnels and that they would come out at night and they would actually assault people. From a person, from a police officer who receives that kind of information, you really don't give it a lot of credibility. Not because they're saying there's tunnels under the campus, because there are utility tunnels that run under the campus, but because the tip was so vague there are people that live in the tunnels, there are people that come out and commit assaults. Didn't give a whole lot of credibility to that tip but we did enough on it to verify. You know that, yeah, there were tunnels and we actually went and walked through and there was some evidence that people had been in the tunnels, but not evidence that people were living in the tunnels, not mysterious tunnel people who's coming out hunting Lexington of the night Right.
Speaker 2:A short time after that first call came in, this same person called in a second time and just wanted to know what we found out about the tunnels and then asked through the course of that conversation it was strictly this person now had a couple of suspects that he wanted to name and he provided us their names. We researched it. There was nothing that tied those individuals to Trent in any way, and then it started coming around that this fellow was obviously obsessed because he kept calling back and we finally managed to secure his identity. So we were able to do some research on him and what we found was that he lived in an adjoining county, tafayette County. He lived on a piece of property that was owned by his parents. That he was an avid shooter owned multiple guns, was a very good shot. By all reports. He spent a lot of time on the firing range.
Speaker 1:So you may be thinking, at this point your interest is piqued, thinking is this our guy?
Speaker 2:Well, we're now Since he's such a good shooter.
Speaker 2:That's right, because we're looking at a shot that most people would say was an expert marksman, and so now we've got a tip that leads us to an individual who is providing something that ties to that in one way. We locate this guy and we do all the things that investigators would do. We conduct interview, we compile the information that we would do. We conduct interview, we compile the information that we had to that point. We actually do a search of his residence and we found things that just added to the belief that you know the information that he was giving us probably was not accurate, valid information, but it was still there.
Speaker 2:We couldn't find anything that could eliminate, but we didn't find anything that tied him to it either, but there were things that were on the plate, like he had a family member that lived within eyesight of where this crime occurred. From the family member's back porch was a straight visual line to where Trent was sitting when he got shot. We found things that made us believe that this fellow was under the illusion that he and Trent looked so much like that they could be mistaken for twins. Through the course of it all, he thought maybe he was supposed to be the target, not Trent, but they looked so much alike that somebody got it wrong. We spent a lot of time following up on this information and trying to either tie him to the murder or eliminate him as a suspect, and that went on for an extended period of time, and we were never able to get to a point that we were comfortable with one way or the other.
Speaker 1:So I guess, did you ever at any point say to him did you do this? Of course? And he just said no, and he denied it right.
Speaker 2:He denied it and there was no evidence to put him at the crime scene. There was just a lot of circumstantial facts that this many years into an investigation, without having had anything tangible it's something Was something to pursue. And we did pursue it, pursued it pretty aggressively and again, like all the others, it finally got to the point where it kind of went cold.
Speaker 1:Another dead end Another dead end.
Speaker 2:So that kind of gets us up to the point of where we finally got a tangible lead. It was a phone call that one of our investigators received from an attorney who was representing a person who had information that related directly to the shooting and that person was willing to provide it.
Speaker 1:Hey, you know there's more to this story, so go find the next episode and listen. Hey, you know there's more to this story, so go, find the next episode and listen.
Speaker 4: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. 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 Podcast 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 and a written review. On Apple Podcasts 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.
Speaker 1:Lock it down, Judy.
