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Charlotte Teenager’s Death Still Unsolved Over Two Decades Later · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: So I want to start this deep dive with a
0:03
question today, how does a sixteen year old kid with
0:06
you know, a completely spotless record end up with a
0:10
single gunshot wound in an isolated stretch of woods?
0:14
Speaker 2: Right, and not just any kid. We are talking about
0:16
a kid who voluntarily wakes up at four in the
0:18
morning to practice basketball exactly, a.
0:20
Speaker 1: Kid who does that every single day before working two
0:23
different fast food jobs. It just I mean, it doesn't
0:26
make any logical sense.
0:27
Speaker 2: No, it really doesn't.
0:28
Speaker 1: And then you know, how does that same kid end
0:31
up with his backpack dump miles away from his body? Well, incredibly,
0:35
a complete stranger literally removes the shoes from his body
0:39
at the crime scene and then later just hands them
0:41
over to the police.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that detail alone is just baffling. I mean, today
0:45
we are looking at a case that shatters almost every
0:47
standard rule of criminology.
0:49
Speaker 1: We really are. We are looking at a stack of sources. Today.
0:52
We have detailed police reports, extensive family interviews, and some
0:55
recent really in depth coverage from WBTV True Crime Carolinas.
1:00
Speaker 2: Here is to dissect the anatomy of an unsolved homicide.
1:03
Speaker 1: Right. The victim's name is Gregory Goodson. His mother's name
1:06
is Kyle. But their story doesn't actually begin in the
1:10
woods of North Carolina. It begins with a really desperate
1:13
escape from Connecticut.
1:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. To understand the complexity of this investigation, you really
1:18
have to understand the psychological state of the family before
1:21
the crime even happened.
1:22
Speaker 1: Absolutely, So I want to set the scene a bit.
1:24
It is the fall of two thousand and five. Kyle
1:27
Goodson and her son Gregory have just relocated down to Charlotte,
1:31
North Carolina.
1:32
Speaker 2: And Charlotte at this specific moment in time is just exploding.
1:35
I mean, the banking industry is turning it into this
1:39
massive southern metropolis.
1:40
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was booming. New housing developments were tearing
1:43
up the red clay all across Mecklenburg County exactly.
1:47
Speaker 2: It is a boomtown, which means it is full of
1:49
transient populations. It is a city where thousands of people
1:53
are moving every single month looking for a clean slate.
1:56
Speaker 1: But Kyle and Gregory aren't just chasing economic upside. They
2:00
are literally running for their lives.
2:02
Speaker 2: Yes, and the sources laid this out with chilling clarity.
2:05
Kyle had survived a history of domestic violence that was
2:08
so brutally severe that an assault by her ex partner
2:12
had actually left her hospitalized in a coma.
2:15
Speaker 1: I want to pause on that for a second. A coma.
2:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is terrifying.
2:19
Speaker 1: We hear the term domestic violence all the time, and
2:21
I feel like it sometimes gets sanitized in police blotters
2:24
or news reports. But this was attempted murder in everything
2:28
but name.
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Speaker 2: That is exactly what it was. And the terror was
2:31
compounding for her because the abuser in that specific case
2:34
was receiving an early release from prison.
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Speaker 1: Oh wow, so she knew he was getting out right.
2:38
Speaker 2: And when we look at the psychology of a survivor
2:40
in that scenario, the threat assessment is just off the charts.
2:44
Kyle made the immediate calculation that this man wasn't just
2:47
going to.
2:47
Speaker 1: Come after her, He was going to come after her son, Gregory, exactly.
2:50
Speaker 2: So moving to Charlotte, where her retired parents lived, was
2:53
essentially a tactical retreat.
2:55
Speaker 1: It was about putting physical geographic distance between her child
2:59
and an own lethal threat.
3:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they land in Charlotte. Gregory is a junior
3:05
at North Mecklenburg High School.
3:07
Speaker 1: And this is where I want to just completely dismantle
3:10
the idea of the typical teenage victim, because Gregory Goodson
3:14
was an absolute anomaly.
3:16
Speaker 2: He really was.
3:17
Speaker 1: I'm looking at his daily schedule from the sources and
3:20
it honestly just makes me exhausted reading it.
3:23
Speaker 2: He is sixteen years old, right, sixteen.
3:26
Speaker 1: He is carrying a full course load at school. He
3:28
works a job at Red Robin, and on top of that,
3:31
he works a second job at his Zaxby's.
3:33
Speaker 2: And that Zaxby's was over near W. T. Harris Boulevard
3:36
and Sugar Creek Road, right.
3:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And he's doing all of this while harboring
3:41
massive aspirations. He wants to play college basketball.
3:43
Speaker 2: But he is also incredibly academically driven. I mean he
3:46
has his site set on studying computer science at Georgetown University.
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Speaker 1: Georgetown is no joke. But the detail that really stands
3:53
out to investigators either, the thing that defines his character
3:57
is his morning routine.
3:58
Speaker 2: Oh, the morning routine is incredib.
4:00
Speaker 1: Four am wake up.
4:01
Speaker 2: Yes, in their apartment complex, Gregory would get up at
4:04
four in the morning in the pitch black, go outside
4:07
to practice basketball, come back in shower, and then go
4:10
catch the school bus.
4:12
Speaker 1: I have to play devil's advocate here though, just for
4:14
a second, sure, go ahead. A lot of kids have
4:16
big dreams, right, Let the kids play basketball. Is a
4:19
strict morning routine really that significant to a homicide investigation
4:24
or is this just the natural tendency to put a
4:27
halo on a victim after a tragedy happens.
4:30
Speaker 2: Well, it is a fair question to ask, but in
4:33
this specific case, the routine is actually forensically significant.
4:37
Speaker 1: Wait, how so.
4:38
Speaker 2: In criminology, the very first phase of an investigation is victimology.
4:42
You have to map out the victim's life to identify
4:45
potential intersections with violence.
4:47
Speaker 1: Okay, so you are looking for things like drug use
4:49
or gang ties.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, we look for risk factors drug use, gang affiliation,
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high risk peer groups, truancy. Gregory's schedule actively eliminated all all.
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Speaker 1: Of those intersections because he was just too busy.
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Speaker 2: Right. A sixteen year old who is up at four
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in the morning for athletics, in school all day, and
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working fast food jobs all evening physically does not have
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the bandwidth or the timeline to engage in high risk behaviors.
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Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, that makes total sense. And he was also
5:18
taking his paychecks and contributing of them to the household
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to help his mother.
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Speaker 2: Right, he was. He lacked the typical risk factors often
5:25
associated with violent crime.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. His extreme discipline actually creates a
5:32
massive blind spot for the police dome. He really does,
5:34
because if he is not buying drugs, he doesn't have
5:37
a dealer who could turn violent. If he is not
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running the streets at night, he's not exposed to random
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gang crossfire. He's like this tightly coiled spring of potential,
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just doing everything.
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Speaker 2: Right, which is exactly why the standard homicide playbook completely failed.
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Speaker 1: Here, I can see that.
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Speaker 2: When a victim has zero known risk factors, investigators are
5:56
forced to look at the immediate hours preceding the disappearance
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with macchroscopic intensity, because the.
6:01
Speaker 1: Threat had to have penetrated a very tight, very structured routine.
6:05
Speaker 2: Exactly the timeline's everything.
6:07
Speaker 1: So let's get into that timeline, the last twenty four
6:10
hours of Gregory's life. We are at September twenty seven,
6:14
two thousand and five. Right, the day starts off perfectly normally.
6:18
He gets up, does his routine, goes to school. The
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crucial pivot happens in the afternoon, yeah. After school, he
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gets off the school bus near his grandparents' apartment complex,
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and his mother, Kyle, happens to be at the bus.
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Speaker 2: Stop, and she offers him a ride. She knows he
6:35
has a shift at Zaxby's later, she knows how hard
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he works, and she offers to pick him up later
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to save him.
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Speaker 1: The walk, which makes sense Saxby's is within walking distance
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of their home. But you know a ride is a.
6:45
Speaker 2: Ride, right, But Gregory turns.
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Speaker 1: Her down, and he doesn't just say, oh, no things,
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I'll walk. He tells his mother that he doesn't need
6:52
a ride because someone else is going to pick him up.
6:54
Speaker 2: That phrase is the epicenter of this entire mystery. Someone
6:57
else is going to pick me up.
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Speaker 1: I am honestly stuck on the phrasing of that. If
7:01
a teenager says that they aren't talking about hitchhiking or
7:04
calling a.
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Speaker 2: Cab, no, absolutely not.
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Speaker 1: That implies an arrangement. It implies a pre existing relationship
7:10
and a certain level of trust. Are we looking at
7:12
a situation here where the threat wasn't a stranger at all,
7:17
but a friend?
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Speaker 2: The statistical data heavily supports that conclusion. Actually, really, yes,
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the whole concept of stranger danger is largely a societal myth.
7:26
When it comes to homicides, the vast majority of victims
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know their killers.
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Speaker 1: It is so dark to think about, it is.
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Speaker 2: And with teenagers you also have to factor in the
7:35
extreme fluidity of their social circles.
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Speaker 1: What do you mean by fluidity.
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Speaker 2: Well, to a sixteen year old, a friend can be
7:41
a kid they just met three weeks ago in pe class,
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or maybe a nineteen year old shift manager at Zaxby's
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who happens to have a car. They extend trust very
7:50
very quickly.
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Speaker 1: Oh right, I remember being that age, you assume everyone
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is your buddy exactly.
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Speaker 2: The fact that Gregory felt completely secure declining a safe
7:57
ride from his mother means he had absolutely confidence in
8:00
the person he believed was picking him up.
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Speaker 1: So he completes his shift at Zaxby's that evening. His
8:05
timeline is totally solid up to that point, but after
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that shift ends, he vanishes.
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Speaker 2: He never comes home.
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Speaker 1: And because of that intense discipline we talked about earlier,
8:15
Kyle knows instantly that something is catastrophically wrong.
8:20
Speaker 2: Yes, she doesn't wait around. It is the next morning.
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September twenty eighth, at four point thirty in the morning,
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Kyle goes into his room to wake him for his routine,
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and the bed is untouched, completely untouched. Now, for a
8:32
parent of a chronically truant teenager, an untouched bed might
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just mean they crashed at a friend's house, right.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, you might be annoyed but not panicked.
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Speaker 2: But for Kyle, looking at Gregory's untouched bed was a
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blaring siren. He would never miss his morning basketball practice,
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He would never fail to call her. She reports him
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missing immediately, which.
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Speaker 1: Sets off this three day nightmare. The kind of ambiguous
8:54
loss where you were printing out missing person flyers, calling
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every single friend and just staring at the phone waiting
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for it to ring.
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Speaker 2: It is a horrible kind of limbo.
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Speaker 1: And then on September thirty, Kyle gets a call from
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her father. He tells her she needs to come over
9:09
to his place right.
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Speaker 2: Now because he had been watching the local news. A
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broadcast had just reported that a body had been discovered
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in the woods in northwest Mecklenburg County, oh Man, and
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he didn't want his daughter to be alone in her
9:20
apartment when she put those pieces together.
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Speaker 1: The body was Gregory. He was found on a wooded
9:26
path off the fifty seven to forty block of Simpson Road. Yes,
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the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to
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the chest. But the condition of the crime scene, this
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is where the investigation just goes completely off the rails.
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Speaker 2: Forensic science relies on the absolute integrity of an environment.
9:45
When a major crime happens, the scene is an incredibly
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fragile ecosystem of data.
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Speaker 1: Like DNA and footprints exactly.
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Speaker 2: You have hair, clothing, fibers, soil compaction, potential shell casings.
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The first rule of law enforcement is to freeze that scene.
10:00
Speaker 1: But Gregory's crime scene was severely, perhaps irreparably compromised before
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the police ever got there.
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Speaker 2: It was a disaster Forensically.
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Speaker 1: Let's talk about the ATV writers, because the people who
10:11
discovered the body were writing ATVs through this wooded path.
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Speaker 2: Right, And think about the physics of an all terrain
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vehicle for a second. You are talking about hundreds of
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pounds of machinery equipped with aggressive deep tread mud tires
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operating on loose force.
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Speaker 1: Soil, so they are just tearing up the ground completely.
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Speaker 2: When an ATV rolls through a crime scene, it doesn't
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just leave a track it churns the earth. It creates
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a localized destruction zone.
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Speaker 1: Wow, so any evidence on the ground is just gone.
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Speaker 2: It buries micro evidence under inches of displaced dirt. But
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more importantly, it alters the soil compaction.
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Speaker 1: Why does soil compaction matter.
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Speaker 2: Because that completely ruins any chance of taking plaster casts
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of the killer's footprints, the killer's weight distribution, their stride length.
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All of that crucial data is instantly obliterated by these I.
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Speaker 1: Want to use an analogy here because saying it is
11:02
like a jigsaw puzzle doesn't really cover the severity of this.
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It is more like a contaminated hard drive.
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Speaker 2: That is a good way to put it.
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Speaker 1: Because someone hasn't just deleted the files, right, They have
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written massive amounts of new, corrupted data over the original footprint.
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The police literally cannot separate the killer's code from the
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ATV writer's code.
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Speaker 2: That is a highly accurate way to frame it. But
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the thing is, the ATV writers represent accidental contamination.
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Speaker 1: Right. They didn't mean to do it.
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Speaker 2: No, they were just recreational writer who made a horrifying discovery.
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They didn't intend to destroy evidence.
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Speaker 1: But what happens next defies all logical explanation.
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Speaker 2: It really does. There was another individual who came across
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the scene, and this person physically removed Gregory shoes from
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his body and took them.
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Speaker 1: Stop. I have to just say I have read this
11:51
detail in the sources three times now and it still
11:54
does not process in my brain.
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Speaker 2: It is wild.
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Speaker 1: Someone finds a dead sixteen year old in the woods
12:00
and their first impulse is to steal his shoes.
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Speaker 2: It is deeply disturbing, But beyond that, it introduces a
12:06
massive variable into the forensic ecosystem because they touched him exactly.
12:11
Not only did this person touch the victim, potentially transferring
12:14
their own DNA fibers or hair onto the body, thereby
12:17
further corrupting that hard drive we talked about, right, but
12:20
they actively removed physical evidence from the scene.
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Speaker 1: But here is the twist that gets me. This individual
12:26
later claimed they had just found the body and they
12:29
voluntarily turned the shoes over to the police.
12:32
Speaker 2: Yes, they brought them in.
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Speaker 1: Wait, I have to push back on this. They steal
12:35
shoes off a corpse, take them home, and then decide
12:39
to just turn them into the police. And the sources
12:41
say this person was investigated and ultimately cleared. How do
12:46
you clear someone who actively loots a crime scene.
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Speaker 2: It comes down to the burden of proof really and
12:52
establishing a firm timeline.
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Speaker 1: So they grilled this guy.
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Speaker 2: Oh, investigators would have aggressively interrogated this person. They pulled
12:59
their alibi, cross reference their whereabouts on the evening of
13:02
September twenty seven, and likely check them for any connection
13:05
to Gregory.
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Speaker 1: Okay, So if the alibi holds up right.
13:08
Speaker 2: If this person had an ironclad alibi for the time
13:11
of the murder and no conceivable motive, police have to
13:13
classify them as an opportunistic, frankly bizarre post mortem tamperer
13:18
rather than the actual killer.
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Speaker 1: That is just so incredibly frustrating because their actions inflicted
13:24
severe damage.
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Speaker 2: On the case, immense damage. We don't know if the
13:28
killer left biological evidence on those shoes during a struggle,
13:31
because the shoe thief's handling of them would have massively
13:34
degraded any trace evidence.
13:36
Speaker 1: And the chaos doesn't even stop there. Gregory's backpack, which
13:40
he presumably had with him after his shift at Zaxby's,
13:43
was nowhere near the body.
13:44
Speaker 2: No, it was completely missing from the Simpson Road scene.
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Speaker 1: He's discovered much later miles away on Bud Henderson Road
13:51
in Huntersville.
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Speaker 2: And that separation of the backpack from the body forces
13:55
investigators to confront the most complex dynamic of a murder investigation,
13:59
which is what determining the primary crime scene. Was Gregory
14:03
Goodson actually murdered in those woods on Simpson Road or
14:06
is Simpson Road simply a dump site?
14:08
Speaker 1: Because if it is a dump site, the actual location
14:11
where the trigger was pulled is still out there, exactly
14:14
place containing the shell, casing, the blood pool, the killer's DNA. Yeah,
14:18
all of that is completely undiscovered.
14:20
Speaker 2: Yes, and the scattered evidence, you know, a body here,
14:24
shoes taken and returned, a backpack miles away in Huntersville.
14:28
It all points heavily towards staging and transportation.
14:31
Speaker 1: So the killer was driving around.
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Speaker 2: The killer may have shot Gregory in a vehicle or
14:36
a residence, driven to the remote Simpson Road location to
14:40
dispose of the body in the dark, and then driven
14:43
toward Huntersville, tossing the backpack out of the car window
14:47
while fleeing the area.
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Speaker 1: The logistics of that, just the movement and the vehicle required,
14:52
it all demands a motive. Why go through all this
14:55
trouble for a kid who just worked at a fast
14:57
food joint.
14:58
Speaker 2: It is the biggest question in the case.
15:00
Speaker 1: The sources outline a few working theories, and I want
15:03
to weave through them because they show how desperately investigators
15:07
were trying to find a narrative that fit these broken
15:09
puzzle pieces. Let's start with the robbery angle. Okay, the
15:12
missing backpack and the initially missing shoes just screen theft.
15:16
Speaker 2: To me, they do superficially. I mean, if a teenager
15:19
is walking home from a shift where he might have
15:21
just cashed a paycheck or gotten tips, he is a
15:23
target of opportunity.
15:25
Speaker 1: Right to a mugger.
15:26
Speaker 2: Season The killer takes the backpack looking for cash or
15:28
a phone, and then discards it later when they realize
15:31
it is just school books inside.
15:33
Speaker 1: But a single gunshot wound to the chest. I really
15:37
struggle with that part. Why is that Street robbery's gone
15:40
wrong usually involve a lot of chaos, a struggle over
15:43
a bag, defensive wounds on the victim's hands, maybe multiple
15:47
shots fired in a panic. A single shot in a
15:49
remote wooded area just feels too precise, too deliberate for
15:53
a random mugging, And the.
15:54
Speaker 2: Forensic pathology actually supports your skepticism.
15:57
Speaker 1: There it does.
15:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, a single lethal shot often indicates one of two extremes,
16:02
either a highly controlled execution style killing or a sudden,
16:05
localized dispute that escalated instantly without a prolonged physical struggle,
16:10
Which brings.
16:11
Speaker 1: Us right back to the most chilling theory, the known
16:13
acquaintance someone' speaking me up theory.
16:16
Speaker 2: Yes, if he got into a car with someone he knew,
16:19
the entire dynamics.
16:20
Speaker 1: Shifts because a vehicle is an enclosed, intimate space.
16:23
Speaker 2: Exactly, if a dispute breaks out inside a car over money,
16:27
a girl, a perceived slight, whatever it is, and someone
16:30
pulls a gun, a single shot to the chest is
16:33
highly probable simply due to the confined space.
16:36
Speaker 1: You can't really miss at that range, right.
16:39
Speaker 2: And if the murder happened inside a vehicle, it perfectly
16:42
explains the geographical spread of the evidence.
16:45
Speaker 1: The killer shoots Gregory Panics, drives to Simpson Road to
16:49
dump the body, and then drives toward Huntersville to toss
16:52
the backpack.
16:53
Speaker 2: The logistics of this crime heavily suggest vehicular involvement.
16:57
Speaker 1: But what about the rumors at his high school? Because
17:00
because the sources mentioned that shortly after the murder, whispers
17:03
started circulating about a gang initiation week.
17:06
Speaker 2: Yes, that rumor gained a lot of traction.
17:09
Speaker 1: The theory was that a local gang required a recruit
17:12
to commit a random act of violence, and Gregory was
17:15
just the unlucky target.
17:17
Speaker 2: It is a very common community reaction to inexplicable violence. Honestly,
17:21
when a good kid is killed, people want a monster
17:24
to blame, and a facials game fits that archetype perfectly right.
17:27
Speaker 1: It gives them a reason.
17:28
Speaker 2: But from a criminological perspective, the gang initiation theory is
17:32
extremely weak, and Kyle Goodson herself strongly doubted it.
17:35
Speaker 1: Wait, I want to challenge that just a bit. We
17:37
usually think of gang hits as drive bys with a
17:39
lot of collateral damage. Right, particalarly, yes, But if it
17:42
is an initiation, wouldn't a gang specifically order a recruit
17:47
to do something quiet out of the way in a
17:50
remote woods, specifically to avoid bringing heat down on the organization.
17:55
Speaker 2: That is a logical assumption to make, but it actually
17:57
misinterprets the sociological function of a gang initiation. Okay, explain
18:02
that to me, initiations aren't about stealth. They are about
18:05
demonstrating a willingness to be visibly violent on behalf of.
18:08
Speaker 1: The group, so they want people to know.
18:10
Speaker 2: Exactly they are performative. They are designed to send a
18:13
message of dominance to rival gangs or to terrorize a
18:17
specific neighborhood. Furthermore, gang violence frequently involves what we call overkill,
18:22
multiple shooters, multiple weapons, Yes, excessive gunshot wounds. Taking a
18:26
teenager to a dark, remote path and shooting him once
18:29
doesn't fulfill the performative requirement of an initiation. It looks
18:32
far more like a personal dispute.
18:34
Speaker 1: Or, as Kyle Goodson has suggested over the years, a
18:37
complete tragic accident.
18:39
Speaker 2: Yes, the accident theory.
18:41
Speaker 1: And this theory requires us to look really closely at
18:44
the psychology of the surviving family. Kyle has often leaned
18:48
into the idea that because it was a single shot
18:50
in a wooded area, maybe someone was out there hunting
18:53
or doing reckless target practice and a stray bullet just
18:57
struck Gregory.
18:58
Speaker 2: We have to evaluate this on two really, the physical
19:01
and the psychological.
19:02
Speaker 1: Oh, let's start with the physical.
19:03
Speaker 2: Physically, is it possible, Yes, a stray a rifle bullet
19:07
can travel vast distances. But psychologically we have to understand
19:11
why a mother would fiercely advocate for this theory despite
19:14
the missing backpack and the clear evidence of staging.
19:17
Speaker 1: Because accepting the alternative is just too dark.
19:20
Speaker 2: Yes, in psychology, there is a concept called shattered assumptions theory.
19:24
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
19:25
Speaker 2: We all walk around with a subconscious belief that the
19:28
world is generally good, that our actions have logical consequences,
19:32
and that our children are safe if they behave well right.
19:35
Speaker 1: If you do the right things, bad things won't happen.
19:37
Speaker 2: Exactly when a child like Gregory, who did everything right,
19:41
is murdered, those assumptions are violently destroyed.
19:44
Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
19:45
Speaker 2: For aggrieving mother. Accepting that another human being looked at
19:49
her beautiful, hard working son, raised a weapon and intentionally
19:53
felt enough malice to end his life is a psychological
19:56
torment that the brain simply rejects.
19:59
Speaker 1: So the accident theory easier to swallow.
20:01
Speaker 2: The accident theory provides a narrative where Grigory wasn't hated,
20:04
he wasn't targeted, He was just tragically cosmically unlucky. It
20:08
is a defense mechanism.
20:10
Speaker 1: For the soul that is absolutely devastating, and it makes
20:12
me think about the other dark cloud hanging over.
20:15
Speaker 2: This case, the Connecticut connection.
20:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, the entire reason Kyle moved to Charlotte was to
20:20
escape an abuse her in Connecticut who was getting out
20:23
of prison. Was there any chances of the ultimate act
20:26
of revenge? Did he track them down?
20:28
Speaker 2: It is the very first question any seasoned detective would ask.
20:32
The timeline is incredibly.
20:33
Speaker 1: Suspicious, but what did the police find?
20:35
Speaker 2: The sources are definitive on this. Law enforcement investigated the
20:39
ex partner thoroughly and found zero evidence connecting him to.
20:42
Speaker 1: The crime the thing at all.
20:44
Speaker 2: No digital footprint placing him in North Carolina, no travel records,
20:47
no physical evidence. He was completely cleared.
20:50
Speaker 1: Wow.
20:51
Speaker 2: But the fact that this theory existed at all perfectly
20:53
illustrates the suffocating terror Kyle lived with. She moved her
20:57
entire life to protect her son from a known monster,
21:00
only for him to be taken by an unknown one.
21:03
Speaker 1: So we have all these theories, a heavily compromised crime scene,
21:07
and a mother left completely in the dark. And when
21:10
you look at the granular, hyper specific details of Gregory's case,
21:14
you realize it is just one pixel in a massive,
21:18
deeply troubling picture. That is very true because Gregory is
21:21
not an isolated incident in Charlotte.
21:23
Speaker 2: No, he is not. And this forces us to zoom
21:25
out and look at the macroreality of unsolved homicides.
21:28
Speaker 1: The numbers are staggering.
21:30
Speaker 2: Currently, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department, the CMPD, has an
21:33
open cold case file that contains roughly six hundred unsolved homicides,
21:38
six hundred. Some of these date all the way back
21:40
to the nineteen sixties.
21:42
Speaker 1: If you are listening to this right now, I really
21:44
want you to just absorb that number for a second.
21:46
Six hundred open files. That doesn't just represent six hundred victims.
21:50
Speaker 2: No, it represents thousands of people.
21:53
Speaker 1: That represents six hundred mothers like Kyle. That represents thousands
21:57
of siblings, fathers, and friends who are trapped in this
22:00
state of suspended animation. The economic and sociological ripple effects
22:05
of that are just staggering.
22:06
Speaker 2: It creates a feedback loop of systemic failure.
22:09
Speaker 1: You have entire neighborhoods harboring perpetrators. You have generations of
22:13
families growing up with a fundamental distrust of the justice
22:17
system because they watched a killer walk free. This isn't
22:20
just a police department resource issue, you know, it is
22:23
a massive bleeding community trauma.
22:26
Speaker 2: And the hurdles that plague the CMPD Cold case Unit
22:29
are the exact same hurdles that stalled Gregory's investigation. First,
22:33
you have witness.
22:34
Speaker 1: Reluctance, people being afraid to.
22:36
Speaker 2: Talk exactly in many urban environments, there is a very
22:39
real fear of retaliation. If you saw something in two
22:42
thousand and five, coming forward meant risking your own life,
22:44
or at least that was the perception.
22:46
Speaker 1: And there is also a deep seated historical distrust of
22:49
law enforcement in many communities, which creates this investigative wall
22:52
of silence.
22:53
Speaker 2: And then beyond the human element, you have the physical
22:56
reality of forensic degradation.
22:58
Speaker 1: Meaning the evidence literally falls up part over time.
23:01
Speaker 2: Yes, biological evidence is incredibly fragile. If DNA is exposed
23:05
to UV light, moisture, or bacterial growth in a wooded
23:09
environment like Simpson Road, the cellular structure begins to break down.
23:13
Speaker 1: Even if the police collect it quickly.
23:15
Speaker 2: Even when evidence is collected and stored in a pristine
23:19
evidence locker, the passage of twenty one years is an
23:22
enemy and human memory is even worse.
23:25
Speaker 1: Oh, I can't remember what I had for breakfast.
23:27
Speaker 2: Yesterday exactly a passing comment someone heard at a party
23:30
in two thousand and five, a detail about a suspicious car.
23:33
By twenty twenty six, the brain has overwritten that memory
23:37
or altered it entirely.
23:38
Speaker 1: And the sources point out that this is a national crisis.
23:41
Homicide clearance rates, which is the percentage of murders that
23:44
police actually solve, have been actively declining across the United
23:48
States over the last few decades.
23:49
Speaker 2: That is a very concerning trend.
23:51
Speaker 1: And the data shows a glaring disparity in who is
23:54
bearing the brunt of this crisis. Young Black males are
23:57
vastly disproportionately represented as victims in unsolved urban gun homicides.
24:02
Speaker 2: That demographic reality is a critical piece of the puzzle.
24:06
The continuous loss of young black men to gun violence
24:09
is an epidemic that hollows out the economic and social
24:12
future of communities.
24:13
Speaker 1: It removes future leaders, future fathers, and future innovators.
24:17
Speaker 2: Gregory was precisely that a young black man with Georgetown
24:21
dreams cut down before he could ever realize his potential.
24:24
When cases like his go unsolved, it sends a devastating,
24:28
albeit unintentional message to the community about the value of
24:31
those lives.
24:32
Speaker 1: But the landscape of twenty twenty six is fundamentally different
24:35
from two thousand and five. I mean, science has advanced
24:38
in ways that sound like science fiction compared to twenty
24:41
years ago. There has to be hope in the forensic advancements.
24:43
Speaker 2: Right, there is immense hope, and it relies heavily on
24:46
genetic genealogy.
24:47
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for me.
24:49
Speaker 2: Back in two thousand and five, DNA testing was relatively primitive.
24:52
If you found DNA at a crime scene, you ran
24:55
it through codis, the national database.
24:57
Speaker 1: Right, the system they show on all the cop shows exactly.
25:00
Speaker 2: But if the killer had never been arrested before, their
25:02
DNA wasn't in the system and you got a dead end.
25:05
But today the game has changed entirely through familial DNA searching.
25:10
Speaker 1: Explain the mechanics of this, because I know this is
25:12
what caught the Golden State killer, but how does it
25:14
actually work on a cellular and data level.
25:17
Speaker 2: Familial DNA searching doesn't require the killer to be in
25:20
a police database.
25:21
Speaker 1: At all, so how do they find them.
25:23
Speaker 2: Let's say investigators have a microscopic trace of touch DNA
25:26
from whoever stole Gregory's backpack. They extract the genetic profile,
25:30
but instead of just looking for an exact match in
25:33
a criminal database, they upload a specialized data file into
25:37
commercial public ancestry databases.
25:40
Speaker 1: You mean, like the ones everyday people use to find
25:42
their heritage.
25:43
Speaker 2: Exactly those. The algorithm looks for shared centi morgans, which
25:47
are units of genetic measurement.
25:48
Speaker 1: So they aren't looking for the killer, they're looking for
25:50
the killer's relatives.
25:52
Speaker 2: Correct, the system might find a third cousin who shares
25:55
a specific percentage of DNA from there forensic genealogists build massive,
26:00
sprawling family trees backward in time to common ancestors.
26:04
Speaker 1: Wow, that sounds incredibly tedious.
26:06
Speaker 2: It is. They build them forward, looking at census records,
26:10
marriage certificates, and social media. They essentially triangulate the suspect.
26:15
They narrow down the tree until they find a male
26:17
relative of the right age who lived in the Charlotte
26:20
area in two thousand and five.
26:22
Speaker 1: It is a painstakingly detailed process, but it has solved
26:25
hundreds of cases that were thought to be completely intractable.
26:29
Speaker 2: It has so theoretically If CMPD has even one viable
26:33
swab from that backpack or from Gregory's clothing, this case
26:37
could be solved tomorrow.
26:39
Speaker 1: That is incredible to think about. But there is a catch,
26:41
isn't there?
26:41
Speaker 2: Yes, there is a critical limitation technology cannot operate in
26:45
a vacuum. It requires a human catalyst.
26:48
Speaker 1: What do you mean by a human catalyst?
26:50
Speaker 2: Police departments are overwhelmed. Detectives are constantly managing active, fresh
26:54
homicides that demand immediate resources. To pull a twenty one
26:58
year old cold case file off the shelf, to request
27:01
the thousands of dollars in funding required for advanced genealogical testing,
27:05
A detective usually needs a new.
27:07
Speaker 1: Lead, so they need someone to actually call in and
27:09
say something.
27:09
Speaker 2: They need someone to come forward with a tip that
27:12
justifies reopening the forensic inquiry. Science provides the machinery, but
27:17
human bravery provides the momentum.
27:19
Speaker 1: Which brings us back from the sceral environment of DNA
27:22
labs and macro statistics right back down to the deeply
27:26
personal human reality of this tragedy. Yes, back to Kyle,
27:30
because while the police wait for a tip, Kyle Goodson
27:33
is living every single second of this nightmare. How does
27:36
a mother survive twenty one years of an unsolved murder.
27:39
Speaker 2: We have to look at the psychological concept of ambiguous
27:42
loss and secondary trauma. Okay, tell me about that when
27:45
Gregory was killed, the immediate outpouring of grief was monumental.
27:49
The sources note that over three hundred people attended his funeral.
27:52
Speaker 1: Three hundred people for a sixteen year old. That is huge.
27:55
Speaker 2: It included high school classmates, coworkers from Red Robin, and
27:58
Zaxby's neighbors. It was a visceral, physical representation of his
28:02
impact on the community. But a funeral is an event, right,
28:06
Grief is a permanent condition.
28:08
Speaker 1: The crowd goes home, the castrole stopped coming, and Kyle
28:12
is left in a silent apartment. She gave this incredibly
28:15
devastating quote in her interviews. She said, my only child,
28:19
my universe was just gone.
28:21
Speaker 2: It is heartbreaking.
28:22
Speaker 1: And she described her grief by saying that it wakes
28:24
her up in the morning and it puts her to
28:26
bed at night. It is an inescapable physical weight.
28:30
Speaker 2: Secondary trauma in the families of cold case victims is
28:33
a unique form of psychological torture. It is an endless
28:37
looping algorithm. In the brain of what ifs.
28:40
Speaker 1: What if I hadn't moved as to Charlotte, what if.
28:42
Speaker 2: I had insisted on driving him home from Zaxby's, And
28:47
more terrifyingly, who is the killer?
28:49
Speaker 1: Right? Because the killer could be anywhere?
28:51
Speaker 2: Is it the man standing behind me in line at
28:53
the grocery store? Is it someone who attended the funeral?
28:56
The brain cannot achieve closure because the narrative has no ending.
29:00
Speaker 1: It's a slow motion haunting. And for many people, that
29:02
level of sustained trauma leads to complete withdrawal from society.
29:07
Speaker 2: But Kyle didn't withdraw. She weaponized her grief.
29:10
Speaker 1: She transforms her secondary trauma into profound advocacy.
29:14
Speaker 2: Yes, when a violent crime strips a person of their agency,
29:18
one of the only ways to survive is to actively
29:20
reclaim it.
29:22
Speaker 1: So what did she do?
29:23
Speaker 2: Kyle started volunteering directly with the police. She began speaking
29:26
out publicly against gun violence. She started organizing support groups
29:30
for other families trapped in this exact same limbo, working
29:34
alongside organizations like Not One More.
29:38
Speaker 1: She said that when she is in a room with
29:39
his other survivors, they speak the same.
29:42
Speaker 2: Language because they do they understand the visceral physical pain
29:46
of walking past an empty bedroom for two decades.
29:49
Speaker 1: By building that community, Kyle isn't just supporting others. She
29:52
is building a network of resilience for herself.
29:55
Speaker 2: But woven into that advocacy is the inescapable reality of
29:59
time I'm passing. If Gregory were alive today, he wouldn't
30:03
be a sixteen year old kid in a basketball jersey.
30:05
Speaker 1: He would be in his late thirties exactly. He could
30:07
have been a computer scientist. He could have a family
30:09
of his own. Kyle talks about the massive potential that
30:13
society was robbed of. She truly believes he would have
30:16
been a change maker, whether in the tech world or
30:18
in sports.
30:19
Speaker 2: The bullet didn't just end one life on Simpson Road.
30:23
It erased an entire future timeline of contributions to the world.
30:27
Speaker 1: And this brings us to Kyle's specific philosophy on justice,
30:30
which I find to be one of the most compelling
30:32
elements of this entire case.
30:34
Speaker 2: Her stance on the death penalty.
30:36
Speaker 1: Yes, when she discusses what she wants for the person
30:39
who killed her son, she explicitly states that she wants
30:42
him to face life in prison, and she actively opposes
30:46
the death penalty for this crime.
30:47
Speaker 2: It is a very powerful stance.
30:49
Speaker 1: I had to read that section of the sources twice.
30:52
The capacity for grace, or perhaps the demand for a
30:55
different kind of punishment, is just profound.
30:58
Speaker 2: She doesn't want vengeance in the sense of an execution.
31:01
Speaker 1: No, she wants the perpetrator to wake up every single
31:04
day in a concrete cell and be forcefully subjected to
31:07
their own thoughts. She wants them to live with the
31:09
gravity of what they did, to reflect on the innocent
31:12
sixteen year old boy they extinguished.
31:14
Speaker 2: It is a heavy, almost crushing form of justice. It's
31:17
not about quick retribution. It's about demanding that the killer
31:20
carry the earthly weight of their actions into old age.
31:23
Speaker 1: Kyle credits her deep faith for giving her the strength
31:26
to survive this ordeal, and she believes she will eventually
31:30
be reunited with Gregory. But in the interim, she wants
31:33
the killer held accountable in the most sustained, daily way possible.
31:38
Speaker 2: So to everyone listening to this deep dive right now,
31:40
this is where you come in.
31:42
Speaker 1: Because, as we have established, DNA can only do so
31:45
much without a human catalyst. Cases get solved when loyalties change,
31:50
when relationships sour, or when the weight of a secret
31:53
becomes too heavy for someone to carry.
31:55
Speaker 2: There is currently a reward of up to five thousand
31:57
dollars available via crime Stoppers for in leading to an arrest.
32:01
Speaker 1: If you lived in Charlotte in the fall of two
32:03
thousand and five, if you knew the social dynamics at
32:06
North Mecklenburg High School, if you worked at that Red
32:09
Robin or that Zaxby's near W. T. Harris Boulevard, you
32:13
need to search your memory.
32:14
Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be a confession you heard. It
32:15
could be a minor detail, a vehicle you saw parked
32:18
on Bud Henderson Road, a person who suddenly stopped showing
32:21
up to work right after September twenty seventh, a rumor
32:24
that seemed too absurd to be true.
32:26
Speaker 1: The case number is two thousand and five zero nine
32:29
three zero one three three four zero zero. You can
32:33
call the CMPD Colt Case Unit directly at seven zero
32:36
four three three six six six one four and asked
32:39
for Detective Philip Thompson.
32:41
Speaker 2: Or if you are afraid of retaliation and want to
32:43
remain entirely anonymous, you can call crime Stoppers at seven
32:46
zero four three three four sixteen hundred.
32:49
Speaker 1: Please write those numbers down, because Greg Riginson was a
32:52
kid who woke up in the dark at four in
32:53
the morning because he believed in a future that someone
32:56
violently stole from him. His mother said it best if
32:59
anyone wanted a sign, they would wanting to be just
33:01
like Gregory.
33:02
Speaker 2: I want you to think about the sheer volume of
33:03
time that has passed twenty one years.
33:06
Speaker 1: It is a lifetime.
33:06
Speaker 2: The person who pulled that trigger has lived an entire
33:09
adult lifetime since the fall of two thousand and five.
33:11
They might have a career, They might have a family
33:13
of their own, children of their own. They might appear
33:15
completely normal to their.
33:16
Speaker 1: Neighbors, but they are hiding something.
33:18
Speaker 2: They have built every single day of that life on
33:20
a foundation of a horrific, bloody secret, and psychological secrets
33:24
of that magnitude have a half life. They degrade that
33:27
containment walls breakdown over time.
33:29
Speaker 1: It slips out in a drunken argument or a moment
33:32
of crushing guilt, or a frantic confession to a spouse.
33:35
Speaker 2: Someone out there knows exactly what happened in those woods.
33:38
The question you have to ponder is how long can
33:40
a person outrun a twenty year old ghost before the
33:43
past finally demands its due.
33:45
Speaker 1: Charlotte was supposed to be a fresh start. It was
33:48
supposed to be the city where Kyle and Gregory found safety. Instead,
33:52
Kyle was handed a tragedy that froze her in time.
33:55
For twenty one years, she has been trapped in the
33:57
echo of a single gunshot, waiting for an ante. Sir,
34:00
it is time for someone to come forward. It is
34:02
time for that echo to finally fade.