The Deck - Kirsten Leonard (9 of Spades, Nevada)

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

A while back, our team at audiochuck received an email from Kirsten Leonard’s family asking us if we would cover her case. Specifically, the email was sent by her nephew, Karsten, who’s named in memory of his aunt… an aunt he never got the chance to meet.That’s because in June 1986, at just 22 years old, Kirsten was murdered in what can only be described as a senseless and brutal crime.If you have any information about the murder of Kirsten Leonard in 1986, please call the Reno Police Department’s Homicide Unit at 775-334-2188, or anonymously report information by calling Secret Witness at 775-322-4900. You can also visit the Secret Witness link on the Reno PD’s website to submit tips anonymously, or send an email to [e-mail]. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/kirsten-leonard Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo apply for a Cold Case Playing Card grant through Season of Justice, please visit: www.seasonofjustice.org The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF  Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our first card this week is Renee Rosita Harris, the King of Spades from Florida. That episode is already in your feed. But this card and this episode is Kirsten Leonard, the Nine of Spades from Nevada. A while back, our team at AudioChuck received an email from Kirsten's family asking us if we would cover her case. Specifically, the email was sent by her nephew, Karsten, who's named in memory of his aunt, an aunt that he never got the chance to meet. That's because in June, 1986, at just 22 years old,

Kirsten was murdered in what can only be described as a senseless and brutal crime. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. The afternoon of Thursday, June 26, 1986, seemed pretty ordinary for a Reno, Nevada apartment manager named Bill. Ordinary and a little tedious, even. He was in the middle of doing probably the least favorite part of any apartment manager's job — collecting rent. But when he knocked on Kirsten Leonard's door at the Gibson Apartments, he didn't

get a response. According to an article in the Reno Gazette Journal from 1995, Bill had done the same thing the day before, and Kirsten didn't answer then either. And listen, dodging rent collection must not have been in character for her because by day two, Bill was becoming concerned. And he wasn't the only one, because about the same time,

Kirsten's new boyfriend showed up at the apartment. Only roughly three weeks into their relationship, he'd spent the last few days of those weeks trying to reach Kirsten with no luck. So sensing something was wrong, the two decided that they needed to get a look inside the apartment. And even though Bill's the apartment manager, he didn't actually have a key, only the owner of the building did. So their only option was to gain access from an outside window.

Kirsten's apartment was a first floor corner unit, which made things easier for Bill and the boyfriend who just pulled themselves up onto the windowsill where they found an unlocked slash open window with a screen. Once Bill moved the window screen, they could look inside and what they saw shocked them. Here's Sergeant Laura Conklin of the Reno PD explaining what happened next. Her boyfriend contacts the Reno Police Department and says that he has found a deceased person in her room. When the police get there, the boyfriend said that he observed her deceased through an open window. The door was bolt locked from the inside,

but the windows were open and the screens were somewhat a jar. And she was found lying on her left side in the bed, obviously deceased from multiple stab wounds and partially unclothed. Most of the blood was on Kirsten or contained in the bed. She was found in a shirt and underwear with one sock on, partially covered by a blanket. Sergeant Conklin has guessed that, due to the condition of her body, she had probably only been murdered 24 to 48 hours earlier,

because her body was not in an advanced state of decay, even though it was not in an advanced state of decay, even though it was June in Reno and the Gibson apartments didn't have air conditioning back then. As investigators checked this scene out, there were no apparent signs of a struggle and nothing missing to indicate that this might have been a robbery gone wrong. It also seemed like maybe someone had brought a weapon with them, because they looked at that one-bedroom apartment up and down and they didn't find a single sign of what could have caused her wounds. Though Sergeant Conklin isn't sure how much that would have helped investigators at the

time anyways. A murder weapon would be something that would be great if we had it, but again, a murder weapon is only going to have our victim's blood on it. Not oftentimes are we going to be able to pull something off, especially from 1986, that would give us touch DNA evidence or anything like that. Know what is helpful in 1986? Prints. And they found a good amount of them around. But one in particular was evidence gold, a bloody fingerprint in one of the door frames. If a fingerprint is left on the victim's blood, then we can assume a lot from that that that would be a suspect. Someone touched her and it's her blood with the suspect's fingerprint in it.

But the question was, was this fingerprint left by someone known to Kirsten or a random stranger? And how did the suspect potentially get in and out of what ended up being a locked apartment? Well, they could have entered if she opened the door, let the person in, locked the door behind them. Something occurred inside the apartment. This person then decided, I'm going to make sure that the door is locked and escaped out through the window. Another theory could be that this person knew her and had a key and then staged the apartment

to make it look like somebody went in and out of the window or the person could have come in through the window. To try to narrow in on one of those theories, detectives had to go boots on the ground. I mean, there's no security cameras for them to check out, so they went door to door to canvas the apartment complex. When they did, they eventually found one neighbor who told them she heard some kind of disturbance

two days prior, which would have been Tuesday the 24th. It wasn't like a screaming or cries for help, and I mean, to muddy the waters even more, she wasn't even sure if what she heard was from Kirsten's apartment. So investigators had no real eyewitness accounts. And now, when reviewing the case file with us, investigators don't point to any reports of sketchy people hanging around the building or near Kirsten's apartment door or unit in the days leading up to her murder. And honestly, they didn't even know if there was just one suspect that they needed to be looking for or more than one. Although Sergeant Conklin is pretty confident that she knows the answer to that. That's the thing about when we're not in those four walls, we don't know what happened.

There's no video, no audio, no witness. We don't know. Typically, that I have found in my career is one person can keep a secret, two people can't keep a secret. And so I'm assuming it's one person that committed this crime, but again, I could be proved wrong."

With nowhere else to go, investigators turned to the autopsy, which took place on June 27th, the day after Kirsten was discovered. In line with what they saw at the scene, the cause of death was determined to be from those multiple stab wounds to Kirsten's torso. And while there was some minor bruising on her legs, there were no apparent signs of defensive wounds, adding to the assumption that she had been killed with little to no struggle or fight. A sexual assault evidence kit was done, and semen was found, which gave investigators another crucial piece of forensic evidence. But like the Prince, it would only be useful if and when they had someone to compare it to.

And the first someone that they wanted to compare it against was the boyfriend. In his statements to police, Kirsten's boyfriend told investigators that he didn't have a key to her apartment. He also said a few strange things to them, like that he had gone into the apartment, but then went back out. It kind of sounds to me like maybe he was indicating he climbed in and out the window when her body was found, but I mean, it's unclear. And then he ended up taking that statement back anyways. He also admitted to having alcohol in his system when he helped find Kirsten's body, which I don't think would have been entirely shocking to investigators. I mean, this is Reno, a town full of casinos where the party goes on 24 hours a day. But because you always check those closest to a victim, investigators wanted to vet him thoroughly.

They interviewed him three times. They gave him a polygraph. They compared his prints to the bloody one that was left behind in the apartment. He wasn't a match. But the boyfriend did offer investigators something of value — names of several people that they should talk to next. So as police worked to track down everyone on this list, they also discovered more about who Kirsten Leonard was. She had just moved to Reno in the spring from California, and when she arrived, she'd gotten a job busing tables at the Comstock Hotel and Casino, which was about a two-block walk from her apartment.

She was just, you know, a young girl, 22 years old, that upon reading the reports, I found out that she partied some. She had male friends that came over, female friends that came over. Not to disparage her in any way, but she was of that age where she probably partied quite a bit. According to Kirsten's sister, Karen, in the past, Kirsten had worked as a sex worker, mainly in the Bay Area where she was from. But Karen felt the move to Reno had been a chance for her sister to get a fresh start. Here's Karen recounting back then.

She was trying to get her life together at that time, and she had done a lot more before that. But at the time she was trying to get her life back together, that's when it happened. There's nothing to indicate from Kirsten's family that she had any enemies. And considering she was only in Reno for a few months, that's barely enough time to make those enemies in a city she wasn't from. I mean, again, Reno was her chance to start over and do it only a few hours from home. But just days into the investigation, police still didn't have any solid leads. And there seemed to be some conflicting reports on

Kirsten's final whereabouts leading up to her murder. According to that Reno Gazette Journal article, Kirsten was last seen on June 22, so that would be four days before her body was found. But as investigators started interviewing more people, several claimed to have seen her after that. But when exactly and where is unclear. Karen Leonard heard that there was a party in Kirsten's apartment in the days before her body was found. And according to the Reno PD, there was a noise complaint about music and partying in Kirsten's apartment two days before she was found. But the details of who was there for exactly how long and what went on there were all unknown in the

investigation. And to make things more confusing for investigators at the time, the rumor mill was off the charts. I think one of the most frustrating things on this case is the age of this young gal at her time in her life. That's when we can all look back when we were 18 to 22 years old and it was, I heard this, and I saw this. And the amount of rumors that came in in this case about, I believe it's this person, oh, I heard that this happened.

And you see when you start over here with five people and you give them the details, by the time it gets over here to the fifth person, it's completely changed. That's how the street works. So they will follow down any lead, that this person did it and she owed this person money or she was upset because she, I don't know, did something to this person.

We tracked down every lead. In doing so, they gathered fingerprints from several different people related to this case, including both that apartment manager, Bill, and the building owner. None of them matched that bloody fingerprint. And in addition to the boyfriend, they polygraphed

two other unnamed men who police felt were truthful in their responses. And we know one of these guys was an ex-boyfriend who had drinks with Kirsten at a casino less than a week before her murder. Investigators also obtained a knife from one person that they interviewed. But they were never able to determine that knife as being the murder weapon. Now, I do know that there was no attempt at the time to use the semen to rule people in or out. It seems that the sample was so small they feared using all of it right away when better testing might become available.

So they relied solely on that bloody fingerprint for that. But with no new leads or information, the case went cold for eight years. Until, out of nowhere in 1994, something surprising happened. I was pretty shocked that they actually found a person that they thought might have been responsible. There aren't a lot of details on who this person was or even how this person had come onto the investigator's radar in 1994. All we know from Sergeant Conklin is that word of mouth put them onto this guy,

someone who by that point was already in prison. But clearly, there had to have been something of substance or detailed information investigators felt strongly about because once investigators discovered this guy, they took a real close look at him. So these cases, like, we don't stop. If we get actionable information, we're gonna move on it. But like everything else with Kirsten's case,

this suspect led them nowhere. He wasn't a match to that bloody fingerprint, and the case went cold again. And what made things more difficult over the years He wasn't a match to that bloody fingerprint, and the case went cold again. And what made things more difficult over the years was that Reno PD didn't have a dedicated cold case unit. Still don't, even to this day. But that's something that Sergeant Conklin

is hoping will change. Eventually, we are working towards having a fully funded cold case unit. We have a chief of police who is very supportive of this, but no police department has unlimited resources. So it's about how do we protect the current citizens and how much time and effort and money can we put into cold cases. And cold cases are expensive. Cold cases rely on DNA evidence and fingerprint evidence. The good news for investigators was that Kirsten's case had both. So in 2011, some 17 years after they last looked at her case, investigators decided

to take another crack. Except there was a problem. To do the testing that they wanted with the DNA in 2011, detectives were told that there was one very big risk, and they were given a warning. It was suggested, don't test the suspect's DNA at this point because you'll lose the entire sample if you do that. That left investigators with one shot, and it was a shot that they weren't comfortable taking at the time. So instead of risking significant evidence, they waited. time. So instead of risking significant evidence, they waited. With the years rolling on, Kirsten's case, like many old cases, got lost in the shuffle

of more current cases that needed solving. The case kind of got dropped off the radar. And I think that that happens. It's hard because I'm passionate about cold cases. But you have murders all the time and you've got to investigate those. So all this information that I read through and that these detectives did before me and before my time was tremendous. And so I think the only frustrating thing for me is we didn't find out about it sooner.

You know, for a long time, I thought there was just this database of cold cases in each department, a list of people waiting for their turn at justice. For a long time, I thought there was just this database of cold cases in each department. A list of people waiting for their turn at justice. But that's actually not the case. Not even close. I've talked about this before, probably a lot before, so just humor me if you know what I'm about to say, but I think it's an important point that I want to keep driving home. Even in 2024, you would be hard pressed to find a department that has

everything digitized. We've been all over the country and I haven't found a single one. That means the detectives only know about the cases they get assigned or ones that the detectives before them passed down or sometimes, honestly many times, the ones that families remind them of time and time again. And that's the message that I hope families keep hearing from me. Call. Call again. Find out who's assigned to your family member's case.

Do everything you can to see to it that it gets assigned to someone. And if that doesn't work, keep trying. Try other avenues. Reach out to local reporters or community groups that can get your family's story out there. Or hey, even podcasters. Because that's what Kirsten's nephew did. It's an exciting thing in that her nephew reached out to you I thought was phenomenal. I would not have known about it because we don't have people that are actively investigating

every cold case at the Reno Police Department. Karsten, who I mentioned at the top of this episode, emailed us back in August of last year asking us to cover Kirsten's case. That email prompted us to make contact with the department, who in preparation for our interview, re-looked at the case. And that is exactly what the case needed. Because re-looking at it now, Sergeant Conklin believes that all the pieces are finally there. Not just the evidence, but the science to confidently process that evidence too. This is one that's solvable and it's exciting to find a solvable case because a lot of times these unsolved cases are difficult, very difficult because we don't have leads. The nice thing about this case is all the forensic evidence was saved.

And after reviewing this case, I contacted our forensic lab here at Washoe County Forensic Science Division. They said that they have a lot of things that they can do with the technology at this point. You need so much less DNA. Then we do have our supposed suspects, semen, from this case. And we're going to go forward with all of the stuff that's in there to retest everything. If they're able to get a good profile from the semen, that will be uploaded to CODIS to see if they get any hits.

And that's where this case stands today, potentially on the vert of being solved if new testing can point them in the right direction of their killer. But no matter what the new testing results show, it doesn't sound like Sergeant Conklin is giving up. I think for me being 22 at one point in my life and being at that age and being excited about what your life might be, she was in Reno having a good time and she was at that prime time in her life and to have it tragically ended by someone that victimizes a person so personally that more than likely was sexually assaulted and then died a tragic death by being stabbed. All of that eats away, I think, at every investigator.

She was a sister to someone, and she was a daughter to someone, and she was an aunt to someone, and she was a friend to someone. So for me, that's what motivates me. I look at this young gal and I think, what would I want an investigator to do if it were me that was murdered?

Sergeant Conklin also believes in the power of what a single deck of playing cards can do and how the information on those cards can change the course of a case like Kirsten Leonard's. I'm so glad we chose her to be one of the people on our cards. When I started researching this, I was like, what are these playing cards and why would we send them to prisons?

And people that are in prison know things. And that is why they go to prisons and they go to jails across whatever region you're in. I'm trying to get enough playing cards to put them in every prison. In Karsten Leonard's email to us when asking for help on his aunt's case, he wrote the following, I wasn't alive then, but I know it's been something that's been hard on my family for a long time. And if there's even a chance we could learn something new and connect the dots, I'm willing to take that for my mom and our family." Maybe we can do more than just connect the dots

for Carson and his family. Maybe we can help solve this thing. Sergeant Conklin is convinced we can. She believes that the killer most likely told someone what they did, and maybe that someone is you. If it is, the Reno police want to hear what you have to say. They also want to hear from anyone who saw anything suspicious around the Gibson Apartments building on West 2nd Street in Reno, Nevada, particularly in the days leading up to June 26, 1986. Or they want to hear from anyone else who

might have known something about the murder of Kirsten Leonard. Please call the Reno Police Department's Homicide Unit at 775-334-2188. Or you can anonymously report information by calling Secret Witness at 775-322-4900. If you don't feel comfortable calling, we also have information in the show notes about how you can contact both the Reno PD and Secret Witness online. The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?