Latest / Wrongful Conviction Podcasts / 541: #541 Guest Host Maggie Freleng with Quincy Cross
Transcript
- 00:00:02 Speaker 1: On the morning of August first, two thousand, a woman's partially burned and decomposing body was found behind a middle school in Mayfield, Kentucky. Eighteen year old Jessica Current had last been seen playing cards with friends on the previous Saturday night, leaving a nearly three day gap where no one claimed to have seen her. The crime was investigated by local and state police, but after a couple of years the trail went cold. Then, prompted by a citizen's investigation conducted by a local housewife, one of Jessica's friends came forward with a bizarre tale. In it she and a group of friends had partied with Jessica that night, then kidnapped, beaten, and raped her, and finally killed her. The ringleader, she told police, was Quincy Cross. Quincy had been at a party in Mayfield that night, but he claimed never to have met Jessica or any of the others involved. Still at trial, when others testified to the events of that night, they two pointed to Quincy as the murderer. But this is wrongful conviction, So welcome back to wrongful conviction. I'm Maggie Freeling, host of wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling and I'm so excited to be sitting in for Jason Flamm today and to share this story with you today. I have Quincy Cross with me and I also have Miranda Hellman, his attorney from the Kentucky Innocence Project. Miranda, thank you for being here, Thanks for having us. Welcome to the show. 00:01:47 Speaker 2: Quincy, Hey, how you doing? 00:01:49 Speaker 1: I am well. How do you feel about telling everyone your story today? I know you haven't done that much. 00:01:55 Speaker 2: It's a lot of things that I've been olding in for a long time. 00:01:58 Speaker 1: Well, let's get to it. I want to hear your story in detail, and usually I just like to start with your life growing up? What was that like? 00:02:07 Speaker 2: I grew up with sisters and brothers on both sides my family, my mom's side, you know, my dad's side, on my stepmom's side. You know what I'm saying, very old, protected by my sisters, all of them, provider, protector, somebody that they can come talk to, have the conversations that they can't have with other people. And they know that. And uh, and we have real good times. You know, as kids, we did other things together. We used to catch turtles and snakes and all that we used to go frog gig, we used to have you know, just do what young kids do. I grew up in Union City and I grew up in Wooler Mills, Tennessee. So you know, I'm a country guy, all right. 00:02:44 Speaker 1: You got to explain that to me, though, Quincy, I grew up in New York City. What is growing up in the country, Like. 00:02:49 Speaker 2: Okay, country is a whole It's a whole lot of love in the country. You know. It's like we did We did small things like play tag and play baseball, and you know, we just did it as a small community. Then you got to tighten their family because it's a lot of older people that raised you. They cooked for you. You know, you wash their cars like more, their yaards and things. Because we was tightening. There was a whole lot of love in the community. 00:03:11 Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, Quincy, When you were younger, what did you what did you want to do with your life? What were your hopes and dreams? 00:03:19 Speaker 2: Sports was my thing. I wanted to be a good football player. That's what I wanted to do. I want to go to college and play football and help the older people in my community. Look up, you know, what I'm saying, and say he did something with his life, you know what I'm saying. 00:03:32 Speaker 1: So what was going on in your life in two thousand? 00:03:34 Speaker 2: It was up and down. Two thousand was up and down because matter of fact, we had just had my grandmama's funeral on Mother's Day of ninety nine, and I went through a spiral after that, you know, because that was that was my heart. 00:03:47 Speaker 1: What do you mean by spiral? What did you what was that like? 00:03:51 Speaker 2: I got off in the drugs, basically got off in the drugs and using the man telling them I was doing both. 00:03:57 Speaker 1: What kind of drugs? Okay, So wondering if before the summer of two thousand did you have any run ins with the law at all when you were selling drugs, dealing drugs whatever it was. 00:04:12 Speaker 2: Well, it was like small smile, petty client, like marijuana, k you know, cocaine case some day wouldn't get you no time, you know, some thirty day, ninety days, you know, some smile like that. 00:04:22 Speaker 1: So Quincy, that summer you were living in Union City, Tennessee, just south of the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. But the crime that you were ultimately convicted of occurred in Mayfield, Kentucky, which is about thirty five minutes away by car. So, Mirinda, can you tell us a bit about what Mayfield was like in two thousands so listeners can kind of get the feel for it. 00:04:42 Speaker 2: Sure. 00:04:43 Speaker 3: So, Mayfield, Kentucky was and still is a very small town in rural western Kentucky, a very predominantly white community. The black population and minority population live on one side of town, where you know, the white population lives in another. So the police and really the city government in Mayfield has had a few scandals throughout its time. The one that I think is most connected to this case would be the assistant police chief, Ronnie Lear. 00:05:15 Speaker 1: At the time of Quincy's drug arrest, Ronnie Lear had already been under investigation for some time because of allegations that he and some of the other police officers had been selling confiscated drugs. Lear was later indicted for misconduct charges after crack cocaine was found in his desk drawer. 00:05:33 Speaker 3: He was fired essentially from the Mayfield Police department sometime after this case occurred, and it appeared to be a theory of the defense at the time of Quincy's trial. Even in two thousand and eight that Ronnie Lear was just a crooked cop and that this may have been connected to it in some way. 00:05:50 Speaker 1: Okay, So Quincy, can you tell me about the night of July twenty ninth, two thousand. Who were you with and how why did you wind up in Mayfield? 00:06:00 Speaker 2: Were in Youngest City. We had a party set up. We was planning the house up for this party, and uh, Travis Jackson, Carlos, Saxton and Gregg store had pulled up. So I've been knowing Travis before he could walk. So he come down there looking for some drugs. So I told him, you know, I could help him out. 00:06:19 Speaker 1: Quincy, Travis, Carlos, and Greg drove around for a while looking to score and picked up some drugs near his hometown of Woodland Mills around nine point thirty. They stopped at a liquor store, then headed back to Union City. On the way, Travis suggested they head up to Kentucky. He knew some folks that could sell to in Mayfield, just over the state line. 00:06:39 Speaker 2: I'm like, man, I don't know nobody in Kentucky. Man, I want to go to Kentucky. He was like, come on, man, if you go, we'll bring you back later on. 00:06:46 Speaker 1: It took some convincing, but eventually Quincy agreed and they headed up to Kentucky and the process to. 00:06:52 Speaker 2: That we can hit these back so many these different back roads to where I don't even know where we at. We pop up in. 00:06:57 Speaker 1: Mayfield around midnight. They ended up at a party on Chris Drive, somewhere on the outskirts of town. 00:07:05 Speaker 2: They got their girlfriends or whatever hanging out out there, so we're selling drugs out there as all. I don't know nobody out there. 00:07:12 Speaker 1: I'll you here later on, a number of other people who were involved in Quincy's case were alleged to have been at this party on Chris Drive, including Carlos Saxton, but the only one of them who was actually there was Carlos. The night wore on and Quincy's friend showed no sign of wanting to leave the party. 00:07:32 Speaker 2: But I keep asking them to take me home. I'm like, man, I'm ready to go home. So I've used the phone, the hel home. I call him uponder them back in Eystad it letting them know the I'm trying to get home, and I know they waiting on me in you know. 00:07:44 Speaker 1: By now, the sun was starting to come up. Quincy was getting hungry, so he borrowed Greg's car to drive into Mayfield to get something to eat, but he got lost on the way downtown and ended up driving in circles around the back roads. Finally, around seven in the morning, he ran out of gas. Quincy found a gas can in the trunk of the car and was about to pour some into the tank when someone drove by and stopped to help out. It happened to be the Mayfield deputy jailer on his way to work. 00:08:12 Speaker 2: This guy, he's standing right beside me, so he's seen me drop a couple of drops of gas on my parents' lead. But he's in the hairy to get to work because he's late. So Stay Trooper with Mike Perkins pulled up. So now he smelled the gas, but he gave me a ride back to Chris Drive about a mile up the street, and from now he dropped me off. And then he said he went back to the car and he's seeing marijuana, which was which was some some black and mile and mile. It wasn't even marijuana, it was black and male. 00:08:38 Speaker 1: So you encountered Officer Perkins the morning of the thirtieth and so when he found what he said was weed. I know you said it was black and milds like, which is like a cigar kind of thing. What happened from there? 00:08:52 Speaker 2: So he come back to the to the house asking me if he can search a car, Tell him the car ain't mine. Then I got two empty baggage in my pocket that I meant to go away but day in my pocket. And then Betty Kentucky two formed a prayer for negi is automatic possession, So and two empty baggies is what got me arrested. 00:09:09 Speaker 1: In all, ten of the people at the Chris Drive party were arrested that morning for drug possession, including Quincy. He spent the next two years in the Kentucky Department of Corrections as a result. So Miranda, this drug arrest happened on the morning of July thirtieth. Meanwhile, a young woman named Jessica Current had been seen at a different gathering with friends the night before, and then she went missing. Her body was found a few days later, on Tuesday, August first. So do we know what happened in the time between. 00:09:43 Speaker 3: The timeline is difficult to nail down, and we don't have a time of death. Even a day of death for Jessica, partly because of the mishandling of the crime scene and the autopsy medical examination. So Saturday night, which would have been July twenty ninth, was the night that Jessica was last seen. So through looking at the witness interviews, I have the most accurate account of her leaving a small get together with her cousin Vnesiha around eleven o'clock that night on Saturday. 00:10:18 Speaker 1: And according to the witness statements, this was just a few women playing cards at one of their friend's houses, nothing to do with the party on Chris Drive. 00:10:27 Speaker 3: So we know for certain that evening she was alive, She was in Mayfield, and she left a small get together at a friend's house. No one aside from Venetia and Victoria Caldwell saw her anytime after eleven o'clock. 00:10:42 Speaker 1: But Venetia and Victoria Caldwell were to become major players in Quincy's case. We'll hear more about that later. By Sunday afternoon, Jessica's parents, who were watching her baby son, Zion, were concerned. It wasn't like Jessica to not be up and ready for chure. They started calling around, but they didn't find anyone who had seen her since the night before. By Tuesday, August first, nearly three days after Jessica had last been seen, her parents filed a missing person's report with the Mayfield Police. 00:11:15 Speaker 3: So as the missing person's report comes in, it's almost at the exact same time that the call that this body's been found behind the middle school comes in. So the Mayfield Police dispatch out the Assistant Chief, Ronnie Lear, and then the lead detective in this case, Tim Fortner. 00:11:31 Speaker 1: Tim Fortner was a beat cop who had just been promoted to lead detective. This was his first day on the job. He'd never investigated a murder before, and the investigation was disorganized from the start. So, Miranda, can you describe the crime scene? What did the investigators find? 00:11:50 Speaker 3: So, Jessica's body was found pretty severely decomposed and burned. She did not have clothing on. It was pretty clear she had a dress on and just most of it was burned off of the top, but there were pieces of it underneath of her body. Her shoes were found at the scene, but they weren't on her feet. She had some jewelry on that was not burned off, and that was actually how her mother identified from photos of the jewelry that she was wearing. 00:12:21 Speaker 1: Was there anything else found at the scene that they thought was significant. 00:12:26 Speaker 3: The majority of the items that they attempted to test or to look for evidence on were just so badly burned. The fire had basically burned out, so there was very little left at the crime scene that wasn't you know, charred. And then additionally, they decided at autopsy they wouldn't keep her clothing and they said it was too badly burned. There was a small piece of a braided belp found pretty close to the body. I mean a guess is about two to four inches long. It's not on her, but it is in the grass next to her, and it does have a buckle still attached to it. So those were collected and still remain in evidence. 00:13:05 Speaker 1: So there were two things that were later alleged to connect Quincy to the crime. First the fragment of braided belt and buckle, even though that style of belt was common at the time. And second, the fact that the body had been found partially burned, coupled with the smell of gasoline that had spilled on Quincy's pants. 00:13:25 Speaker 3: There was definitely an accelerant used and the police follow the assumption that it was gasoline and they connected that just by the word gasoline to Quincy, who was found that next morning pouring gas out of a gas can into the car that had no gasoline in it. The deputy jailer saw that happen. He actually watched Quincy dump the gas on himself and down the side of the car, and that's why he pulled over and asked him for help. 00:13:53 Speaker 1: While the police were attempting to collect evidence, the crime scene was getting more and more chaotic. 00:14:00 Speaker 3: Are really starting to show up at the middle school where they put tape up. It still wasn't a super secure scene. In looking at the video that they made that day, people are really coming and going. 00:14:09 Speaker 1: And one of those people was a local housewife named Susan Galbreath. 00:14:15 Speaker 3: She describes herself as an overweight stay at home why though, who solved a crime? So Susan Gaalbrith was at the scene the day Jessica's body was discovered. From her own writings, she says that she was at a diner in downtown Mayfield having breakfaster lunch and that she felt a higher power calling her to the middle school because she felt that there was a tragedy there, so she becomes essentially obsessed with this case. 00:14:46 Speaker 1: Tim Fortner headed up the Mayfield Police investigation, working with the Kentucky State Police. Initially, the authorities had two main suspects, both of whom were arrested in two thousand and one. One was Carlos Sack, one of the guys who had been to the Chris Drive party along with Quincy and who had been dating the victim, Jessica Currn around that time. The other was Jeremy Adams, the father of Jessica's son. Jeremy's mother was a close friend of Susan Goalbreth's, so. 00:15:17 Speaker 3: Once Jeremy's arrested, Susan Galbrath turns into kind of a private sleuth, wanting to put the case together and figure it out. So she's I mean, she's deeply involved and very intertwined in the story, to the point she's almost acting as a fourth investigating agency, you know, alongside the city police, the State Police, and the Bureau of Investigation. 00:15:39 Speaker 1: And Susan was getting inside information from one of the State Police investigators on the case. 00:15:46 Speaker 3: That was Jamie Mills. They were exchanging information pretty freely. So Jamie was actually giving this private citizen that wanted to solve this crime information. 00:15:56 Speaker 1: Thanks to Jamie and her other connections, Susan had access to not only the police files, but also to Jeremy Adams's entire attorney file. And in one of the police files there was a mention of the drug arrest on Chris Drive. 00:16:10 Speaker 3: There is a notation in Quincy's file about him being booked in and him smelling like gas, and I think she starts to weave the stories together. I believe that that's why she started turning to Quincy. He was pretty easy Mark as well. He was an outsider, which I think is incredibly important to this case. He was not from Mayfield, he had very few ties to Mayfield. It was easy to point the finger at him because he was kind of a nameless, faceless person that was not her best friend's son. 00:16:39 Speaker 1: So, Quincy, when did you first hear the name Jessica Currn? 00:16:43 Speaker 2: First time I ever heard her name, I was locked up. I was already locked up. We was in the back of the jail and we ve bought a newspaper backer. So he found the body, a body behind the school. I was like, man, that's bad man. How they did her? 00:16:54 Speaker 1: Man? 00:16:55 Speaker 2: Somebody? Ye, they need to convict somebody. 00:16:58 Speaker 1: While Quincy was still incarcerat in Mayfield on the drug charge, he became acquainted with Tamra Caldwell, the sister of a fellow prisoner. After his release in October of two thousand and two, he began seeing Tamra and eventually moved in with her in Mayfield. Tamra was the cousin of Victoria Caldwell. Then, in February of two thousand and three, the two suspects, Jeremy Adams and Carlos Saxton, both had their indictments dismissed because of discovery violations by the Mayfield Police Department and the local prosecutor. Although they had not been excluded from suspicion, it was the police and prosecutor not responding to discovery requests from their attorneys that led to their release. The case went cold for a few years before it was eventually picked up by the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation or KVII. Meanwhile, Susan Galbreath was still hard at work on her citizen's investigation. She had teamed up with a TV documentary production company and was still being fed information by Jamie Mills. She had also started a MySpace page of the case, publicly calling out some people she thought were involved, including Quincy Cross, which is how she drew the attention of Victoria Caldwell. Victoria told Susan Golbreath that she knew who had killed Jessica because she had been there when it happened. Victoria and Venetia had never met Quincy until he began seeing Tamra in two thousand and two. Yet the pair wove a bizarre story that implicated Quincy, Tamra, and an acquaintance named Jeffrey Burton, and that ultimately became the basis of the States case against Quincy. 00:18:37 Speaker 3: So the ultimate theory that gets presented at trial by Victoria and Venetia is that they were walking around in Mayfield, Victoria, Venetia and Jessica and that a car picked them up. The car changes, the driver changes constantly. It's very hard to pinpoint who this was supposed to be in the car. It's supposed to be jeff Tamara, Quincy, Victoria, Venetia and Jessica, and that Quincy was like making advances on Jessica and she was not wanting those advances, they end up at the party at Chris Drive. 00:19:13 Speaker 1: According to witnesses from the party, none of these people were ever at the Chris Drive party except for Quincy and Carlos, who had driven up together from Tennessee. Yet at some point Victoria and Venetia folded Carlos into their own narrative. Since those two were the people last seen with Jessica, and since Carlos was seeing her at the time and was a suspect in her murder, all three of them had every motive to deflect suspicion from themselves, which is likely how their stories ended up merging together. Carlos Saxon later testified at the trial that at the party, Quincy was seen swinging a brown braided leather belt around like a rodeo writer, but this fact could have been fed to him by the investigators to account for the charred fragment belt found near Jessica's body and to fabricate another connection between Quincy and Jessica. Victoria and Venicia's stories get more outlandish from there. 00:20:11 Speaker 3: Somehow they get from Chris Drive to Jeffrey Burton's house back into town, and when they got there Quincy knocked Jessica out in the car, they carried her body in. She was still alive, but they carried her body in, put her in Jeffrey's bedroom, and they essentially had an orgy where everyone was kind of coming and going in and out of this bedroom while Jessica was coming in and out of consciousness on the bed. Then they say that some time after that, after she woke back up, that Quincy hit her in the head. Again, they almost exclusively say it's with a baseball bat, like a miniature souvenir baseball bat, until they can't find the baseball bat and they find something else. 00:20:57 Speaker 1: According to Victoria, she had buried the bat in her sister of Rosy Christ's backyard, but when they searched the backyard, the investigators could not find it. Instead, they uncovered an old, rusty ratchet, and at that point Victoria's story suddenly changed. 00:21:14 Speaker 3: And she says, Oh, it wasn't a bat, it was a tool that makes a clicky noise. And they collect the item and there's literally no evidence on it, nothing that connects to the crime at all whatsoever. 00:21:28 Speaker 1: Nevertheless, that item later showed up as evidence at trial. 00:21:33 Speaker 3: Victoria gets on the stand and says it's the murder weapon. I buried it in the backyard along with some clothing. And they never find the clothing. They never find the baseball bat. They only find this ratchet, and it becomes a key piece of evidence against Quincy. 00:21:46 Speaker 1: So, without a physical connection to the crime, and despite the cause of death being undetermined at autopsy, this ratchet was alleged to be the murder weapon based solely on Victoria's word. The theory became that Quincy had allegedly hit Jessica repeatedly in the head with not a bat but this ratchet, and Victoria and Venetia's absurd tail continues after Quincy supposedly delivered the final blow. 00:22:14 Speaker 3: They say that that final blow is what killed her, and that they continued to have this orgy after she had passed away, where Quincy forced everyone to perform sex acts on Jessica after she had passed away. From there, they say that morning broke they took her body and put it in the garage, wrapped in a blanket and just left it there for a few days, and it wasn't until a smell started occurring that they decided they were going to move the body to the middle school. 00:22:42 Speaker 1: Where it was found the following Tuesday morning, August first, and autopsy was performed on Jessica's body, but as with most of the investigation, it was badly botched and inconclusive. Because the body was so badly decomposed and burned, the medical examiner was unable to determine when or how she died. In addition, items of her clothing had been discarded, and no one thought to save a sample of her DNA to potentially compare it with profiles found on other crime scene evidence. So in two thousand and five, Jessica's body was exhumed and re examined. Kentucky State Police hoped that DNA samples would corroborate her alleged connection with Quincy, who is by now their main suspect. 00:23:27 Speaker 3: One of the main pieces of evidence that they were looking for was something that would have her DNA sample in it. They had all of these items from the crime scene that they wanted to use to connect Jessica and Quincy together. They tried very hard, and they were never able to do that. 00:23:44 Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Susan Golbreath continued with her campaign to throw suspicion off her best friend's son, Jeremy Adams, and onto someone else. And by two thousand and seven, thanks to her citizen detective theories, the weak threads of circumstantial evidence being used to connect with the crime scene, combined with Victoria and Venetia's absurd narrative, the state believed that they had enough to make an arrest. By then, Quincy was living with a woman named Melissa, who had two young boys. One night, he and Melissa were lying in bed watching television. 00:24:20 Speaker 2: In my face pop up own the news, said the news won I'm considered armed in dangers, so the first thing I think about is in keyds. So she gave me a look like, Babe, what you gonna do? I said, I'm gonna get him up out of here because I don't want to know bringing no girls up here, what he's keezing. 00:24:34 Speaker 1: Quincy's friends and family immediately started calling, urging him to get out of town. One friend offered to drive him to California, another to Mississippi, but Quincy didn't want to go on the run. He went to his dad's house to find the police had already been there looking for him. 00:24:51 Speaker 2: So I tell my dad, I'm like looke man, I'm great telling myself he and haig Ma Kentucky, because I ain't gonna do no run because I ain't need nothing. But they got me considered armed in dangers. I know they won't try to kill me. I think that they wanted me dead so they can try to er up and close his case, so they can just say, well, we got the person that did and he's dead. And you know that's what I think. So these these guys from the so cappin Tucky brew up investigation on Lee Wise and O'Neill come to take me up from the from the Apeman County jail and they take me to a hotel room at the Duka and then Terry gave me the whole time from about from about leave them that twelve that night till about sixty seven that morning. When I keep telling them to take me to the jail, man, I don't want to talk to y'all. Take me to the jail. 00:25:53 Speaker 1: Did you ask for a lawyer, Quincy, I did ask for a lawyer twice, and they never gave you a lawyer. 00:25:58 Speaker 2: Never. They never even act like they heard me say that They had just told me that I was arrested anyway, they were telling me I was arrested for the murder of Jessica Karring. 00:26:10 Speaker 1: From the time that Jessica's body was found in two thousand until Quincy was arrested in two thousand and seven, the case went through several different investigations and a mind boggling number of suspects. We don't have time to go into all of that, but let's take a moment for a little recap. So the case was investigated first by the Mayfield Police Department, resulting in the arrest of Jeremy Adams and Carlos Saxton. After their charges were dropped due to discovery violations. Neither suspect was ever recharged or went to trial. When Susan Golbreth got involved, working with Jamie Mills and the Kentucky State Police, she was the one who pushed Quincy forward to the exclusion of Jeremy and Carlos, as well as several alternate suspects. Then the KBI picked up the case, using Victoria and Venetia to solidify their theory of the crime. This led them to Quincy, Tamra, and Jeffrey, who were all charged with kidnapping, rape, murder and abuse of a corpse. 00:27:12 Speaker 3: The prosecution's theory wasn't super clear. When you look at this case. There are four different investigations that end in four different outcomes with four different defendants, and so I see why it was very difficult for them to figure out, how are they actually going to try him for this murder and let alone get a conviction. 00:27:30 Speaker 1: Nevertheless, the trial began in March two thousand. 00:27:33 Speaker 3: And eight, So for a capital murder case to go to trial in less than one year is to me unheard of. I don't see how anyone could be prepared to go to a capital trial in one year, especially in light of the massive amounts of discovery that the prosecution was dumping on them continually. 00:27:50 Speaker 1: The state, led by Special Prosecutor Barbara Wailey, built its case largely around the outlandish and inconsistent stories told by Victoria and Venetia. Both women had pleaded guilty to corpse abuse and evidence tampering, but as the prosecution star witnesses, their sentencing was delayed until after they had testified in Quincy's trial. After telling their stories in front of the jury, Victoria Caldwell was sentenced to five years, but ultimately served just under three months. Venisia's Doublefield got a total of seven years, but ended up serving only six months. Along with their trial testimonies, which was the only direct evidence against Quincy, the state presented a diary that Victoria had supposedly written during the time of the murder, in which she implicated Quincy. 00:28:38 Speaker 3: So this diary is supposed to be a document that helps lend some truthfulness to the story that Victoria and Venicia come up with. One of the entries essentially says they found Jessica's body, Oh my god, what am I going to do? And she says the phrase Q is nowhere to be found. 00:28:57 Speaker 1: Which is really odd. Remember, according to Quincy, Victoria did not know him in two thousand. They didn't meet until over a year later when Quincy was dating her cousin Tamra. The prosecution also presented testimony from the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy. Despite the burnt and decomposed condition of the body, he said that he believed the cause of death could possibly have been either strangulation or blunt force trauma, but his theory appeared to be based more on the evidence presented by the prosecution the piece of belts and the story about the ratchet than on actual medical evidence. In defense, Quincy's attorney Vince Eustace brought up the former Chief Medical Examiner, doctor George Nichols as an expert witness, but his testimony was also inconclusive. 00:29:47 Speaker 3: He essentially was just a witness to say they truly can't say when this crime occurred. They can speculate as to strangulation, they can speculate as to blunt force trauma, but because of the decomposition the bach medical exam, together with just the condition of the body, they absolutely, with certainty cannot tell you that this occurred here in this way or that this was what actually caused her death. 00:30:10 Speaker 1: There was no medical evidence that Jessica had even been raped. 00:30:15 Speaker 3: There was no semen found anywhere, there was any any other evidence of sexual assault. Maybe because it didn't happen, maybe because of the fire, but we just certainly do not know it. 00:30:26 Speaker 1: Carlo Saxon testified about seeing Quincy swinging the belt around at the Chris Drive party, and Victoria's sister Rosie Christ took the stand for the prosecution to answer questions about the ratchet found in her backyard. 00:30:39 Speaker 3: She's very quiet. She answers yes and no, she doesn't say too much. She's a prosecution witness, but not super cooperative. 00:30:47 Speaker 1: And in fact, Rosie later returned to the stand to testify for the defense, recanting her previous testimony. 00:30:55 Speaker 3: Saying, they threatened me. They said they'd take my kids away, I would go to prison for murder, and then they paid me money to do it. And it really just falls on deaf years and it gives us a little bit of insight into exactly how the prosecutors and police were treating the witnesses in this case, with their threats and with their payments. And that was essentially the case. Quincy did not testify. They they did very little to cut it Victoria and Venetia's story, and it just at the end of the day, I don't think it swayed the jury. It wasn't enough to show that what they were saying was a lie and that it was a provable Ee. 00:31:32 Speaker 1: Here's a question, Quincy. Didn't you have an alibi for the time she was killed? 00:31:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, I did. My lawyer never used it. I was on Cruze Draft. I never left christ Draft that night, and everybody in the house they continue I never left that house till the song. 00:31:45 Speaker 1: Came up, and then from Sunday morning on you were in the Mayfield Jail for weed possession correct accord. 00:31:52 Speaker 2: So the records, that's what it say is I was already locked up the first time I heard Justica's name, I was locked up. 00:31:59 Speaker 1: I think some people might hear this, you didn't know Jessica, you don't even know your co defendants, and some people might just feel like, how did this happen? 00:32:09 Speaker 2: I still wanted that, but I know how I know now that I've been in concrated, you see a whole lot of things that don't happen nowhere else but Kentucky and West Kentucky. 00:32:20 Speaker 1: Here. 00:32:21 Speaker 2: As long as I've been going through from penitentiary to the penitentiary, I've been letting other people look at my paperwork, and they asked me the same thing, like, bro, how had you even loked up? Like how you locked up? And I'm like, man, I can't even explain it because I don't even know. I don't know how I'm locked up. 00:32:36 Speaker 1: So when you're at trial Quincy, it's wrapping up, they're given closing statements, and then you you hear you're convicted. 00:32:44 Speaker 2: I cried, man, I cried with my dad and I kept telling my daddy, these people gonna have to audacity to ask me to lie on camera. And Jeffrey, they came to me with a deal. They came, they came to me with a deal, a fifteen year deal. I just told my do that I ain't that type because because I know they innocent. The reason I know they're innocent because I know I'm innocent. So I didn't I didn't even ask him what they wanted me to say, none of that, because I ain't that type of person. 00:33:11 Speaker 1: So you were like, I will take a life sentence. I'm not gonna lie about these people. 00:33:16 Speaker 2: Right, You're exactly right, I will, And that's what I did. 00:33:22 Speaker 1: Tamra and Jeffrey both took Alfred please and were given ten and fifteen years, respectively, but Quincy refused to plead out, and on May twenty first, two thousand and eight, he was convicted of capital kidnapping, capital murder, rape, sodomy, and abuse of a corpse. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. 00:33:46 Speaker 2: They rushed me, stayed out of the court room. They had a brace that a locked my leg because because they thought I was gonna run. As soon as the first person said guilty, I didn't even. 00:33:56 Speaker 4: Hear what all the charges were they used. They rushed me about the court room. 00:34:00 Speaker 2: M hm. I was very very angry, very very angry. It's just what can I do but make my own time hard? Understand what I'm saying, because there was a lot of different things going through my brain. But I don't want to react to make everything harder than it was. Man, it's it's it's it's it's hell for real, and every in every aspect, any any any person that you can think of, that's in hell. I'm surrounded by them every day. But just imagine that. Imagine being innocent and going through that though, imagine being an innocent person going through the same going through hell. So now you got to adjust to it. I have to adjust to it. So now I have to raise the little hell of my fail in order to so for other people not to bother me. I have to regular hell of my fail because you got to adapt to it. If you don't adapt to it, you know, you become a man of mouth. At that period, ain't nothing between in my world. 00:35:23 Speaker 1: Over the next ten years, Quincy filed a number of appeals with the trial court and with the Kentucky Supreme Court. All were denied, and then in twenty eleven, he received a letter from an unlikely source, Jessica's father, Joe Curran. 00:35:38 Speaker 2: That he sent a message to me and told me to write him a letter about how I was feeling about everything that I was going through if he wanted to get with me, and he wanted to get a better understanding about you know, what I'm going through and what I feel, because he knows that I'm innacing and he seemed the facts of the case, and he knew that I didn't have nothing to do with it. Because you want to the actual person that murdered his daughter in prison, I will want him too. I want to know who did it. I'm paid for it, but it is it's gonna haunt me for my grave if I don't find that. 00:36:11 Speaker 1: And Joe has continued to believe in Quincy's innocence and to advocate for his release. 00:36:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a win for me though by myself. That's just from the outside, from the inside looking out, that's a win right there. Period. So so that means he knows everything that I know understand what I'm saying. 00:36:31 Speaker 1: And Joe Curran wasn't the only one who believed in Quincy. The Kentucky Innocence Project had started to work on his case in twenty thirteen, but unfortunately they had to shelve it a few years later due to funding concerns. Then, in twenty twenty, Miranda Hellman joined the Kentucky Innocence Project, right around the time that the country found itself in the grip of a worldwide pandemic. 00:36:55 Speaker 3: As COVID was hitting. I didn't have much else to do, so I just started going through old dusty box and I found this massive case. It had fourteen eighteen boxes sitting on a shelf. It was very messy, it was not in any order. I couldn't tell what I even had to look at. So I started digging, and I think probably from the first thirty minutes and looking in the box and reading these memos from past staff, I knew there was something to it. 00:37:19 Speaker 1: So the KIP team began seeking out documents on the case. 00:37:23 Speaker 3: It took us well over a year to get state police documents and start to try to locate evidence. The high profile nature of this case and the massive amount of very well known and high ranking people that were involved in it, from the investigation, through the prosecution, even into the post conviction litigation made it very difficult for us to get anything. So we fought for about a year and a half to get records, and it's taken about two and a half years just to try to lay my eyes on the majority of what we have. The prosecution did what I would call in civil litigation and a document dump, where they bury you in boxes and boxes of paperwork so you can never get through it. So we have about forty thousand pages of discovery from the trial attorney file that we still to this day. I go through every day just trying to pull out what I think that we're going to need for post conviction litigation. 00:38:19 Speaker 1: One detail that caught their attention right away was the sketchy history behind Victoria's diary. 00:38:25 Speaker 3: So Victoria told the KBI officers that she kept diaries. 00:38:29 Speaker 1: Her whole life. 00:38:30 Speaker 3: She wrote in them every day, and she kept every single diary she ever wrote. So supposedly KBI found parts of these diaries in the trash can behind her apartment that she was living in in California. It's a spiral bound notebook written in a combination of pencil and blue ink. They're dated in two thousand, and they only give eleven pages of this time period exactly when the crime happens, late July to early August of two thousand, so she dates these as two thousand, but there is one entry that looks as if it was two thousand and one or two thousand and seven that she goes back and fixes and puts a zero over it. 00:39:09 Speaker 1: It turns out that prior to trial, the prosecution sent the diaries to the Secret Service in Washington, DC for analysis. 00:39:17 Speaker 3: So the Secret Service comes back and says, we don't have this ink in our library. So that means either it's a really rare ink that we just have never collected, or it's so new we haven't collected it yet. 00:39:29 Speaker 1: So it's not likely to be an ink that could have been used in a two thousand diary entry. Yet, despite its dubious authenticity, the diary was presented at trial as evidence that Quincy was with Victoria and the others that night. 00:39:45 Speaker 3: So in post conviction, a motion that will be filed is a request of a reanalysis of that ink, either by the Secret Service or by a private lab. 00:39:55 Speaker 1: So we mentioned the diary. Is there anything else, you know, points that you guys are making out of these forty thousand pages that you've read. 00:40:04 Speaker 3: Well, somehow forty thousand pages didn't even tell the whole story. So since I've come onto the case over the last year, we've been able to obtain new documents that weren't part of the original discovery or part of the initial investigation. A lot of that is centered around Susan Galbrath. She was communicating quite a bit with TV producers, friends, family, and now we have those written documents so we can really show this missing piece. This investigation wasn't what it looked like, and here's why it ended up where it ended up. She was the person who put Quincy Cross in prison. She's the person who handed the police their theory, their investigation, and their star witnesses who had been prepped and paid to give the testimony she wanted them to give. 00:40:47 Speaker 1: So Rosie Christ wasn't the only witness who was being paid for testimony. 00:40:53 Speaker 3: Both Victoria and Venisia received money from the KBI out of a state fund that is set aside for witness protection, and Victoria was moved from California to North Carolina. Her living expenses were paid for about a year, and then she was brought back to Kentucky and basically traveled all on the dime of the state. She had told many people, including her sister and Venetia that all testified that she had said this, that they could make money by giving these statements. So the combination of this payment to witnesses how Susan was moving behind the scenes. We also have a couple pieces of forensic evidence that could be tested today that were never tested at the time of trial. So that includes some items found at the crime scene, some cigarette butts, a drink bottle that may or may not have had accelerant in it. But until we find out if there's a DNA profile on any of these items that were found with her body, we really can't say for certain. So much like asking for the release of the diary, we're going to ask for really of items of evidence to do some DNA testing. 00:42:03 Speaker 1: Miranda and the KIP team are hopeful that all of the new evidence and information they're now presenting will spur the courts to take a look at what the jury never got to see. 00:42:14 Speaker 3: And that really is going to be the beginning of a new chapter of litigation for Quincy. 00:42:20 Speaker 1: So meanwhile, for listeners who want to know what can they do to. 00:42:25 Speaker 3: Help, there are a few petitions online that all support Quincy's innocence and call officials to review the case, including the governor and the Attorney General. I would strongly suggest anyone who wants more information about the case look at those petitions. The information that's been given. 00:42:44 Speaker 1: Awesome, so we will link to those in the bio so listeners can find them and also follow the case for any updates. So now is the part of the show we call closing arguments. I want to thank both of you guys for joining us. Quincy, thank you so much for sharing your story and Miranda for being here helping out to tell it. And we'd just like to ask your final thoughts, any takeaways, anything that you want to share with listeners. Miranda, do you want to start off and then we'll let Quincy finish. 00:43:12 Speaker 3: Quincy's case and the murder of Jessica Kurrn are some of the worst examples of official misconduct that I have seen in any innocence cases that I've worked on. I think that what is so unique about his case is the long investigation, the many people involved in the investigation, and the mishandling by an ept and untrained police officers that led to his arrest and ultimate conviction. 00:43:41 Speaker 1: And Quincy, what about you? What do you want to say to listeners? 00:43:45 Speaker 2: Want? I want them to know another I'm innocent person, you know, And I want them to look at the bag that again. I want them to look at everything everything about this case. And that's what I want the world to be know. I've been through I don't been through some heal trying to get the truth out, and now that I got the opportunity to get it out, it makes everything a whole lot better. Yeah, it makes everything a whole lot better for me. That's what I want the world to know. That I'm a bad and plus I'm a better person. Believe it or not, for a prison made me a better person. I have a whole lot of love in my heart. That's that's the biggest thing I want to know. 00:44:28 Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all Lava for Good podcast one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Flumm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wurtis for inviting me to sit in today, and thanks to our production team Connor hall Andy, Chelsea, Lela Robinson and Kathleen Fink. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on all platforms at maggie Freelink. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one