Law&Crime Sidebar - Kentucky Mom's Alleged Double Child Murder — Everything We Know About Accused Killer Tiffanie Lucas

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Kentucky mom Tiffanie Lucas is accused of killing her own young children, allegedly shooting them both in a home before running outside and collapsing in the driveway. The Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber speaks with Angenette Levy, host of Crime Fix, about the latest developments in the case and how we could have gotten here.SPONSOR:Go to https://www.piavpn.com/LawandCrime to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free!HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Michael DeiningerScript Writing & Producing - Savannah WilliamsonGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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No peanut. Yay. We're going to get into everything we know in the Tiffany Lucas story with Crime Fixes Anginette Levy. This is the case of the mom accused of shooting to death her two young boys. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by law and crime. I'm Jesse Weber. All right, let's get back to a story that we've been following for a little bit.

We want to do kind of a deeper dive on it. We haven't talked about in a couple of weeks. So this is that horrific story out of Kentucky, where a 32-year-old mother is accused of shooting to death her own children. Tiffany and Catherine Lucas has been charged with the murders of her. two young boys, six-year-old Maurice, nine-year-old Jaden. They were found by authorities in the home shot in the head. And, you know, when we first covered this case,

I actually interviewed Bullet County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy, Colonel Alex Payne. And again, this is when it first happened. We didn't know all the details. He couldn't reveal so much. And he said something to me that even though I know what happened now, it was just so chilling when I first heard it. Let's just play that real quick. I can tell you that the boys were shot in an area that,

would not be survivable for anybody. However, they were alive, to the best of our knowledge, when they were transported by EMS to the hospital, and passed away while at the hospital. Yeah, pretty horrifying there. A Bullitt County Sheriff's Detective, Richard Beale, testified during a court appearance that two neighbors, a husband and a wife,

called 911 after hearing gunshots. And Beale explained that after reviewing nearby ring doorbell footage, you can hear four gunshots. They were fired within 30 seconds. And then about five minutes after the last shot, Lucas leaves the home and yells for help, even tells a neighbor allegedly that, quote, her kids were dying. That neighbor apparently ran inside, attempted to help the boys. When police arrive, Lucas allegedly was lying in her neighbor's driveway. She was arrested.

She was interviewed. And she told the police that the shooting was seemingly an accident, that someone had given her a gun, but also she said that, quote, she's in such a bad spot and is, quote, so stupid and that, quote, she would never do anything like this unless someone manipulated her. The gun, by the way, was reportedly found on the bed. Detective Beale also testified that Lucas, quote, made statements that she was being manipulated through Facebook, through the internet or through Wi-Fi, through Facebook and through her Wi-Fi, being manipulated. into doing what she did. She was charged with two counts of murder, as I said, and a bullet county judge set a $2 million bond for Lucas saying that she is a danger to others. Well, now we want to get into a little bit more of this. And I want to bring on correspondent for the Long Crime Network and host of Crime Fix, Angenette Levy.

Angenet, always good to see you. Thanks for coming back on. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jesse. I'm sorry it has to be for such a really awful story, but I think it's important that we talk about it. Yeah, unfortunately, that's something that a lot of my guests say. I wish it was under better circumstances, but those are the cases that we're covering. You actually cover this quite a bit on your show, Crime Fix. Just to start off, what is your reaction, your thoughts on this?

Because, you know, it's one that we want to keep covering because it's so shocking. Yeah, well, I have a lot of thoughts on it, actually. You know, it would have been interesting for us to have gone to the preliminary hearing. We didn't. but here are my here are my thoughts on this you know it's so weird how people can look so together on social media that's why i think social media is often so deceiving we saw those pictures of her on Halloween or around Halloween with her kids they look all happy they're in their costumes everybody's having fun when it sounds like from everything we're learning that you know her her life

was a wreck behind the scenes and i think this is probably somebody who um i know that the family members of the two boys say we don't believe that she had mental health issues. Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn't. But I know a lot of times people who struggle with addiction and who are addicted to drugs, they're, you know, they're self-medicating. They get into drugs because they do have mental health issues and they're taking drugs or they get into drugs to feel normal or they try drugs and they get hooked. You know, it's all how your body and your brain reacts to the drugs once it gets into your system. So she may have some mental health problems coupled with these addiction issues,

and it just creates this perfect storm. It doesn't make her not responsible for her actions, and it sounds clearly like she killed her little boys. Working here, researching, covering the stories we do, you quickly realize your physical safety and your digital safety are so important. When you're using websites and various apps, you know, probably to watch side. bar, right? Your device sends out data into the open, which can be viewed by different entities like hackers, internet service providers, and more. And this is especially true if you connect to the

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or law genre. Plus, private internet access subscription allows you to protect an unlimited amount of devices at the same time. That's right. You can protect your intent. You can protect your entire household or workspace with just one subscription. In this internet era, it is so important to safeguard your digital identity. You can go to PIABPN.com slash law and crime to get 83% off of private internet access with four months free. Let's get into her history a little bit with drug abuse and her criminal record, just to add to something that you mentioned, those photos of her and the children from Halloween were one

week before this happened and she actually posted um i think on facebook and wrote happy halloween from us to you may the force be with you and then it was just a few months before i think in may um when she had posted another photo of her and her children and said my lifeline my heartbeat my everything so it really came out of nowhere um you talked about the potential her history of drug abuse what do we know about that and her criminal record well she was arrested, you know, she had a drug arrest back, and I believe it was 2018, and she has some history of drug abuse. And so whether or not she was ever really clean, I don't know, but she had had that one charge, and that's really the only charge we know about. And people

who do drugs, I mean, you know, drug addiction, especially when you're talking about opioids and stuff like that in this country, it's an epidemic. So you could be, doing drugs and using drugs, have drugs, and nobody realizes or nobody knows or you don't get caught because so many people walking around, you go to the grocery store, who knows if the person next to you in the produce section is struggling with addiction and has a drug addiction problem? You just don't know because people can often put on a mask and look like they're normal on the outside. So we do know that she had a history of drug addiction, but it was only that one charge. It was just that one criminal charge that we are aware of. Yeah. So like you said,

it was 2018. She pled guilty to these drug charges. She was sentenced 30 days in jail, but there were no arrests from 2018 until, of course, these shootings. I believe a family friend had actually reached out to local news and said that, you know, she was very confused and shocked by this. You know, everything seemed to be okay and seemed to be fine. And one of the chilling, things is there was a report, I think, from 2016 when she had opened up a business. She was a business owner, Tiffany and Lucas at one point, right? So Tiffany Lucas opened Tiff's one-stop shop back in 2016. So if you look at the timeline here, being a small business owner is a really difficult job. And so she didn't have that store open very long. And if you look at the timeline

here, she's on the news talking about being a small business owner opening this business. She had done an interview with WDRB down there in Kentucky about this. And so it's 2016. Then she's got these drug charges in 2018. You know, the business was not successful. It eventually closed. So who knows what was going on there. Is she not able to successfully run this business because she has these struggles with addiction? So she had at least been trying, it appears, to do something good. I mean, she's trying to run a business, and it didn't work out for her. Yeah, she had told WDRB, you know, I cook hot food in here. It's really what sells the best.

She says a lot of people don't make their way down here. But if there's a Walmart, you know, come out of the woodwork for Walmart. So probably would have brought a lot of people to, you know, stop and check us out. But like you said, that business closed up. By the way, we also learned something, I think relatively recently, I think we learned relatively recently about the house where the shootings happened? What do we know what's happening with that house? Well, it was a rental house, Jesse. And we know that when family members had gone to, you know, clean out the house because Tiffany Lucas is in jail and sadly the boys

are deceased, the house was a wreck. It was a mess. And as you can imagine, you know, if she is struggling with mental illness and she's actually claiming that she's being manipulated through Wi-Fi. Who knows? Maybe she was hearing voices. Who knows she was or not? We just don't know what the actual truth is here. We have to wait and find out more. She may have just been trying to get by. I don't know. But the house was a rack. There were eviction notices all over the place. So her life was in shambles. And put that next to the photo on Facebook from Halloween and then there's that other photo where it appears they're like at a Lego store or something like that that looks like a perfect day out with the kids with the boys and then then they walk into

the house and everything's a rack and there are eviction notices everywhere those two those two images they do not square but there were efforts in the past to reach child protective services because it seems at least from the brother of the boys he'd claimed that family members had called CPS. They had concerns over the years, no? Yeah, that is true, Jesse. Some of the family members do claim that and that they were concerned. But I'll tell you what, when I worked in local news, I covered a tri-state area for 10 years that included Kentucky. It was Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. And especially in Kentucky, in any state, really, but really in Kentucky, especially, it's like impossible

to take kids away from a parent, especially a mother. And when you make these complaints, first of all, these child protective services agencies, there's a lot going on here. And we don't know the ends and outs of what the complaints were and how those were handled. But a lot of times these places, these agencies, they're overwhelmed. You have these low paid social workers investigating these claims and these complaints. And, you know, it takes a lot to get children removed from a home. So we don't know the exact nature of the complaints, how they were handled. many times those complaints are kept secret.

They're confidential for many reasons. Maybe we'll learn more about that as the court process unfolds. But, you know, these agencies, these people are overwhelmed, overworked. We don't know if that was part of this at all. But it's like impossible to get, you know, kids at times out of a house. I mean, did they go to court? Did they go to court and file paperwork and say, look, we think these kids are in danger? You know, we need a TRO or something.

We don't know that. I don't know if that even happened. But if they made complaints to child protective services agencies, you know, we're going to have to wait to see what happened with those and how those were handled. You had mentioned court. Do we know what the next step in this process is when her next court appearances or anything like that? You know, I checked up, I checked on that. I was doing a little bit of looking around on that. And right now, we don't.

I have any idea when her next court date will be held. That's because her last court date was a preliminary hearing. And so now the case will be presented. The prosecution will go to a grand jury and they'll present the case. And just to be clear, with the preliminary hearing, there was enough evidence for the judge to actually say to this should move forward in the process. Right. At a preliminary hearing, that's exactly what happens. The Commonwealth attorney in Kentucky would put on a witness or two.

to just show to the judge, look, there is probable cause, a very low standard, that this defendant committed the crime and this case should go to the grand jury. And that's the next step. So now that determination was made. Yes, there's probable cause. So now the Commonwealth attorney will go to the grand jury, which is a secret proceeding, present evidence to the grand jury. they will indict her, and then the case will be bound over for trial. She'll have to, you know, it'll be set for an arraignment, of course, after the grand jury indicts her, and then that court date will be set. And when I mentioned Detective Beale, he was one of the people that spoke at that preliminary

hearing, and a lot of that evidence was based on him. You know, we talk about the family's response, the community as well, the family in the community. What have you been hearing in the aftermath of the killings of these two boys? What's their feeling after this? Oh, I mean, it's heartbreaking. It's devastating. It's heartbreaking. I mean, anytime something like this happens, Jesse, I think people are always thinking to themselves, we would have helped. We would have done something. We would have taken the boys. I mean, you know, anytime you hear about something like this, there are always people that say we would have had we had had we have known. obviously if if family members are saying we made complaints and we would have done you know we would

have helped or we were trying to cry for help and those cries fell on deaf ears I mean we still don't have enough information to know but this is this has been a shock to the community and those boys you know being a parent is really challenging but this is just anytime a child is harmed like this it's beyond the pale and it's horrible and I think people are just horrified by this those little boys were beautiful and it's it's heartbreaking it really is um and i'll just leave everybody with this so michelle rice who's maurice's stepmother she told wdrb that family as you mentioned had reached out to child protective services she believes that drug abuse played a role um and she basically in response to what the allegation was that you know like lucas was manipulated she said nobody can

manipulate you to do such a horrific thing nobody can manipulate you to do that we love them so much so many other people really love them and could have been there to help them, but she wouldn't allow that. She was too selfish, and now they're gone. Really, really sad case. We're going to continue to follow it both here on Sidebar, and Anginet's going to follow it on Crime Fix. And Genet leaving. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jesse. And that is all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. Please subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jesse Weber. Speak to you next time.

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