The Deck - Kyle Byrtus (8 of Hearts, Florida)

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Our card this week is Kyle Byrtus, the 8 of Hearts from Florida. In 2013, 25-year-old Kyle Byrtus was found murdered on the side of the road. For the past nearly ten years, his mother has spent her days fighting for justice — and recently, she learned that justice may not be as far out of reach as once thought. If you know anything about the murder of Kyle Byrtus in 2013, please reach out to Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at 1-800-780-TIPS (8477). You can remain anonymous. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org Follow The Deck on social media and join Ashley’s community by texting [phone] to stay up to date on what's new! 

Our card this week is Kyle Burtus, the 8 of Hearts from Florida. Today's episode is a special one to me for two reasons. One, because Kyle's mom Lynn actually reached out to us about covering her son's case. And two, because I'm going to tell you his story differently than I typically do. Today, we're going to walk through Kyle's case the way Lynn had to, remaining in the dark for years about so many things, and then finding out information about her son and his murder, the way no victims loved one should.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. That's it. Around 5.30 in the evening on August 15, 2013, Lynn Krieger and her husband, Gary, were at a restaurant in Laurel, Mississippi, enjoying a nice dinner after visiting with some family, when Gary got a text from an unknown number. He just looks at it and says, I don't know who that is, and he just said, please call me. We didn't know who it was. The phone rang, he ignored it. It was a text message again.

If this is Kyle Burtis' parents, please call us. Lynn told Gary she'd take care of it, so she stepped outside and called the number. The man who answered identified himself as a detective with the Lee County Sheriff's Office in Florida where Lynn and Gary lived. He asked where we were and I said we were in Mississippi visiting family. I said what's wrong? Well we're exactly are you and And I said, we're in Laurel, Mississippi, at such and such a restaurant. What is the problem?

Can you tell me, I mean, at this point in time, I started crying. I said, is my son okay? What's going on? Well, where are you staying? So I told him the hotel. We were staying at him because we will have two local officers to meet you there.

And I said, by this time, I was frantic. I didn't know what was going on. Their phone call ended with Lynn still in the dark. Her head was spinning. She knew her son was struggling recently with substance use disorder, so she was immediately worried that he had overdosed. That worry nod at her, as she and Gary quickly returned to their hotel and waited for law enforcement. Lynn's stomach sank further with every passing minute. After an hour of waiting for someone to knock on their hotel room door, she was tired of waiting, so she called the detective back.

I said, nobody's showing up. I said, what is going on? I said, please, I can't. We have to know what's going on. So he said, let me call you back. After another 30 minutes of waiting, the detective called Lynn. He apologized and told her what he was about to do

was a bit unconventional, but he didn't want her to have to wait any longer. Over the phone, he delivered the devastating news that her 25-year-old son Kyle, her only child, was dead. And my first thought was, was it, I said, it was a drug overdose. And they said, no. The second thought was such a self-transliction. And they said no. We believe it to be a homestide. The detective asked to interview her and Gary once they got back into town so they could

hopefully start figuring out what happened to Kyle and why. Of course, Lynn was gutted and overflowing with questions and emotions, but she wanted more than anything to help find her son's killer. So right then in there, she and Gary hopped in their car and drove the 11 hours through the night back to their home in Lee County, Florida. Once there, investigators came over to interview Lynn. Police told her that Kyle had been found by a Lee County electric cooperative worker just before 12.30pm on the 15th. He had been fairly shot and was lying in a secluded field in rural Lee County.

Detectives asked Lynn if she knew of anyone who had it out for Kyle recently or wanted him dead. But Lynn hadn't spoken to Kyle in two months, and even then it was just a quick call from jail. He'd been arrested for petty theft and he was asking Lynn to bail him out. Since Lynn hadn't spoken to Kyle in so long, she couldn't offer specific information about if he had enemies or had gotten into any fights recently. But she was able to shed some light on the lifestyle that he'd been living for the past few years.

Lynn explained that in January 2012, she got a call from a friend of Kyle's who said that Kyle was struggling with substance use disorder and had been abusing oxycodone. This was the first we ever heard of it. We never, ever knew he was on any type of drugs. After that Lynn convinced Kyle to move back home and live with his grandparents for a while, and it seemed like things were looking up. But it wasn't long before one of Kyle's close friends suddenly passed away, and he turned back to drugs to cope with the pain.

Kyle's struggles with oxycodone morphed into heroin use, and soon he was committing petty theft to finance his addictions. Lynn said he even went as far as stealing two of their guns and some of her jewelry. She told investigators that the last she knew Kyle was living in the Pine Manor area of Lee County, possibly on the streets in a tent. According to Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers manager Trish Rout, Pine Manor is known as a particularly crime-challenged part of town. So Pine Manor is a part of Lee County where you've got a lot of low-income families that just can't afford to live anywhere else.

Unfortunately, it's also an area of Lee County that drug dealers tend to gravitate to. Some people have called it crime matter because of the people that tend to live there. And you know, it's kind of sad because there's a lot of really good families who live in that neighborhood. And they just don't have the financial where we're called to get out. And high manners is literally a very small area. We're talking maybe six, seven blocks.

I mean, it's not like this big swath of Lee County. It's a very small neighborhood. But there's a lot of bad stuff that happens in that neighborhood. Now having a good understanding of who Kyle was and the people he associated with, authorities kicked off their investigation. And this is where the timeline gets kind of muddy. The Lee County Sheriff's Office backed out

of doing an interview with us. So unfortunately, we weren't able to walk through every step of the investigation with them. As far as Lynn knew, her son's case was creeping along at a snail's pace. If that, please weren't sharing anything with her unless she called them first. So naturally, she was growing frustrated. In the months following Kyle's death, his face disappeared from the newspapers, and his story faded from the minds of the public.

Lynn worried that his case had been thrown to the wayside because of the high-risk lifestyle that he was leading up to the point of his death. But that's not the Kyle that Lynn had loved for 25 years. Before his life became consumed by drugs, Kyle spent his days pouring love and laughter into the world. Lynn told us one of her favorite memories of Kyle is from elementary school. He was nominated for president of his class in 2nd grade, and so he got up and stood on his chair at his desk

and being that elections were right after Halloween, he had his Halloween candy, and he was taking his Halloween candy and throwing it out at all the class and saying, I've got more where this comes from. Just vote for me and I'll share my candy with you or something like that. It was really kind of funny. That charm and charisma would follow him into his teenage years. He was the kind of guy who got along with anybody.

His classmates in high school would say that he was inclusive of everyone. Lynn told us that Kyle's friends from high school would send her messages and letters detailing how big of an impact he had on their lives. One friend wrote to her in part, quote, I continue to run through countless memories where something would happen or someone would make a joke and we would be on the ground laughing until we were crying. He was almost always smiling, happy and fun to be around. End quote.

Long before Kyle's death, Lynn felt like she had lost the son she knew and loved to drugs. A world that he quickly got swept up in after going off to college about three hours away. But in the months leading up to his death, Lynn had a feeling she was so close to getting the sun she treasured back. He had expressed interest in recovery in the past, and he was on the right track until his friend passed away. Lynn hoped that it was just a matter of time before he was ready to turn things around again.

But whoever killed Kyle stole that opportunity from him. And Lynn knew that the only way she'd ever identify that coward was to make sure the community never forgot about Kyle's case. So Lynn started meeting with Southwest Florida crime stoppers, specifically Trish Rout, looking for ways to renew the publicity and keep Kyle's story in the spotlight. Over the next few years, Kyle's family and crime stoppers did everything they could think of to get answers. They increased the Crime Stoppers' reward twice. They put up a billboard in Pine Manor hoping the right person would see it. They did media blitzes, and they mailed out postcards about Kyle's case to every mailbox in Pine Manor.

But they got nothing. The family's pleas to the community seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. Lynn remained determined, but was growing increasingly frustrated with the pace of the investigation. And that frustration only grew in 2021 when she got a call. A year ago, I got a call from Lee County Sheriff's Department, the evidence room. And they asked me if I had reported a gun stolen, and I said, yes, said, well, we have it here in the evidence room. Do you want it back? We're getting ready to destroy it.

And I'm like, has it gone through forensic, you know, just in case I said my son stole that from us back in 2013 and he was murdered. She was like, oh, he was? She goes, who's she're detective? So I gave her detective information. And I said, how long, I said, what do you mean you're destroying it? How long have you had it? Oh, it's been sitting here since 2015.

To say Lynn was speechless is the understatement of the century. I mean, one of her guns that her murdered son had stolen just before his death, that she thought all this time was still MIA had been in evidence at the Sheriff's office since 2015. And not only had no one told her, which in and of itself is troublesome, it seemed like no one thought of the possibility that the stolen gun couldn't maybe be connected to her son's 2013 homicide.

Like, did anyone check to see if that was the gun that killed her son? Lended some asking around, and although she never really got answers as to how this thing was overlooked, she did get her biggest question answered. Long story short, they did send the gun off for forensics. It wasn't the gun that killed Kyle, which part of me is glad I didn't want it to be our gun that killed him. It was good to have that answer, but the whole Fiasco really rubbed Lynn the wrong way. If that slipped through the cracks, what else had?

The answer to that question came one year later. When she learned that the gun was only the tip of the iceberg of things that she hadn't been told about. In October 2022, the Lee County Sheriff's Office released an episode of their podcast, Seeking Closure, Lee County's cold cases. The episode went in-depth about Kyle's case, releasing more information than ever before, and most of the information released was brand new to Lynn. Here's the story that their podcast told about Kyle's final days and homicide. In the weeks leading up to Kyle's death, he was living in a home in Pine Manor

that was a well-known drug house. He lived there with a few other people, but the sheriff's office specifically named two of his roommates, Jesus Torres, who went by the nickname Chuchu, and Chuchu's girlfriend Tatiana Martinez. Chuchu was kind of the boss of the drug house, but he answered to two other guys who lived elsewhere.

Luis Santiago, aka Bebe, and Bebe's younger brother Carlos, who went by Bebe Bo. Bebe was the under boss and Chuchu's supplier. Now Chuchu himself struggled with substance use disorder, so at some point he started using his own supply, which turned into quite the problem. Since he was using the drugs, he was supposed to be dealing out,

he kept coming up short on the money that he was supposed to be paying Bebe and Bebo. As time went on, Chuchu was racking up quite the debt, and he simply didn't have the money to pay. So Chuchu came up with a plan to just steal the cash that he needed. He wasn't gonna rob just anybody, though. He wanted to rob Bebe's house,

which he knew was ripe with wads of cash. And who did Chuchu recruit to help him with the robbery? Kyle. Near the beginning of August 2013, Chuchu and Kyle made their move. In the middle of the night, they broke into Bay Bay's home and stole $3,000 cash, along with roughly 400 bags of heroin. Chuchu was smart though. Before using the money he stole from Bay Bay to pay back his debt, he checked the bills

for any kind of markings that would give it away. He didn't find any such markings, so he took some of the cash and paid back his debt right away. But just an hour or so after that transaction, Chuchu got a call that left him, Kyle, and Tatiana shaking in their boots. It was Bebe's brother, Bebe. And basically, he said, the jig is up. Babe had marked the bills in a specific way so he knew that they paid him back with stolen money. Chucho Tatiana and Kyle were freaked out. They packed up everything and moved into a hotel hoping Babe wouldn't be able to find

them. But it turned out that that $3,000 they stole would become the least of their worries. Because they had robbed Bebe, they also got blamed for another recent robbery of a different big boss. In the podcast episode, the Lee County Sheriff's Office didn't specify who the other big boss was. In a sound bite from an interview with Tatiana, it sounds like she says, Danny or Daddy, but it's hard to tell. Because the Sheriff's Office declined to participate in an interview for this episode,

we simply don't have the answer as to who the other boss was. But whatever the case, whoever he was, the big boss's house was robbed of more than $20,000. Tatiana told the Sheriff's Office that she, Chuchu, and Kyle had nothing to do with that robbery, but they were still blamed for it. For days, the three of them remained on the run, hopping from hotel to hotel. But eventually, they ran out of money and eventually had to return to their drug house in Pine Manor. As the days passed, Tatiana was getting the impression that Bebe wasn't mad at them

anymore for stealing the $3,000. It seemed like he was more concerned about protecting them from the wrath of the big boss. Tatiana told the Sheriff's Office that she even got a friendly call from baby on August 14, inviting her over, but she declined. She said that she was at the house with Kyle and that the two of them needed to figure out what they were going to be doing the following day. Little Dittatiana knows she made a grave mistake on that phone call by divulging that Kyle was back to living at the drug house, and she was dead wrong about baby not being mad

anymore. Chuchu got a call from either Bebe or Bebo, and they told him that they were going to hunt him down and kill him. After that, Chuchu had had enough. He fled southwest Florida immediately. Tatiana took that as her cue to leave, too. But as she was on her way to the airport, she was stopped by law enforcement and taken into custody. Now, it's not clear what she was arrested for. Like, did she have an outstanding warrant for her arrest? If so, for what? Again, these are questions

I don't have answers to since the Lee County Sheriff's Office refused to participate. But even though La Cautiana was arrested, the podcast indicates that Chuchu is still on the run to this very day. Now, it was the very next day, August 15th, that that electric worker found Kyle. That man was driving around in Lee County when he saw a bunch of buzzards all gathered around in a field. He thought it was just a dead animal, but as he got closer, he saw a tennis shoe,

so he called 911. Kyle's hands were bound behind his back, and he had gunshot wounds to the head, torso, and right forearm. The Sheriff's Office concluded their podcast episode with theories about what happened, like that Kyle was killed by the big boss for the robbery, or possibly during one of his smaller thefts, maybe he'd stolen from the wrong person and they came after him. Listen, there's a long list of questions I have for the Sheriff's office after listening

to their podcast. Like, have they ever tracked down baby and baby and talk to them? What about that big boss? All questions I'm sure Lin had as she was listening to the podcast, hearing all of this information for the very first time. I did not know there were multiple gunshots. I did not know his hands were tied behind his back. None of the names that were, you know, mentioned in the podcast. I'd never heard them before. There was one I had heard, but and that was only because she put a post

on Kyle's Facebook page that says, I can't believe you're gone. I just saw you last night. But yes, all of that information is mind blowing. They never called me ahead of time to tell me any of that information. As a mom who spent nearly every waking moment of the last nine years thinking about her son in his case, Lynn was furious that she had to learn all of this information through a podcast at the same time as the rest of the world.

About a month after the episode was released, the Lee County Sheriff's Office did end up having a meeting with Lynn, where they apologized for publicly releasing information that she didn't know. And get this, they told her that they simply didn't know that she didn't know. Now in all fairness, Lynn did say that there's been quite a bit of turnover as far as lead detectives on Kyle's case. So it is very possible that something could have been miscommunicated or lost in all of the shuffle.

But that does little to cool her frustration. It's just like, don't you have no, so you know, what people told me and what they didn't tell me? The way the Sheriff's Office handled their podcast episode remains a point of irritation for Lynn. But ultimately, it was more publicity and more media attention for her son's case, something that she is always grateful for and always seeking out in hopes of getting justice for Kyle. Lynn lives every day of her life thinking what can I do today? Who can I talk to?

You know, she'll email me and she'll go, hey, have you heard about this organization? What do you think? Should we send her? She's always looking for another venue, another outlet, another person to talk to, another group to talk to I do admiral in so much and I admire her strength and I admire her tenacity She's never gonna back down that is to the cases advantage You know, and I pray for Linda to finally get to a place where she sees justice served in the person responsible in prison for life. And she can start focusing on the healing process because until that day

happens, she's not going to be able to heal. She's going on with her life as best as she can, but she can't go on to that next chapter until this one's finished. Right now, we're not there. We're not in a place where we're moving forward. We're standing still. And that is extremely frustrating. I know for me, I can't even imagine, you know,

Lynn's pain, and I talk to Lynn quite often, and you know, I just, as a mom, I cannot imagine the pain that she goes through. Lynn told us the reason that she pushes so hard for justice and never lets up is because she doesn't have any other option. There's no one else that's going to do it. But me, is the grief overwhelming? I don't really believe I have fully grave jet because I'm so focused on keeping this out there. I've had my moments

I'm so focused on keeping this out there. I've had my moments. And the last couple of weeks have been really rough, but now I just try to find ways to keep this out here, to keep it out in the forefront. Lynn and Trish hope that when people remember Kyle and think of his case, they don't just think about his struggles. They hope he's also remembered for all of the good that he brought into the world and the lives of those around him.

Kyle was a good kid. Kyle made some bad decisions, but he was a good kid. He had the family and friends that loved him insanely. Somebody needs to do right by Kyle. With every year that passes, we hope people change. You know, people that were hanging around Kyle and doing some of the things that they shouldn't have been doing nine years ago, you know, that's a lot of growing up to do in nine years.

And we know that the answers are out there, but the people that were involved in Kyle's circle aren't ones to be good citizens, and to speak up about things that they see or hear or know are going wrong. So that's been a point of contention in this case because when you're dealing with people that aren't necessarily on the up and up, it's very difficult to get the truth. And every year that passes, every August, the passes, we always hope we don't want to be here next August talking about

it's the anniversary again. But every year we find ourselves in the same position and it's beyond frustrating and upsetting. Lynn and the rest of Kyle's friends and family have waited nearly a decade for justice. It is time they get some answers. If you know anything about the murder of Kyle Bertis in 2013, please reach out to the Lee County Sheriff's Office at 2-3-9-4-77-1000. Or you can call the Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at 1-800-780-TIPS. That's 1-800-780-8477 and you can remain anonymous. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis to learn more about

the Deck and our advocacy work, visit the DeckPodcast.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Oh!