True Crime with Kimbyr - Teen Runs Out of Gas and Never Makes it Home | Casey Crowder

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

In the early morning hours of August 27, 2006, 17-year-old Casey Crowder, a bright, happy high school senior, was driving home along a quiet stretch of Highway 65 near the small town of Dumas. And then her car ran out of gas. Stranded and alone on a dark rural highway just before dawn, Casey did the sensible thing: she picked up her phone and called for help. It's the kind of ordinary bad-luck moment that happens to almost everyone. But Casey never made it home.When her family realized she was missing and her abandoned car was found by the roadside, a desperate search began, and the answers, when they finally came, would haunt this small Arkansas community for years. In this episode of True Crime with Kimbyr, we trace the full Casey Crowder case: the girl she was, the ordinary night that turned into every parent's worst nightmare, and the long road to justice for a family that has never stopped fighting for her.🔎 COME FIND ME: Personal IG https://www.instagram.com/kimbyrleigha/🚧 True Crime IG: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimewithkimbyr🔗 Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/KimbyrleighaYouTube/📥 Sponsorship Inquiries: [e-mail]🚨 This video is for educational purposes & documentary purposes ONLY. All info is gathered ONLINE from multiple sources, and though each case is thoroughly researched, not all info is always 100% valid. Please do your own research. 👩🏻‍🎓 ABOUT ME: I'm Kimbyrleigha; thanks in advance for reading this. I think it's important to know someone's background and education because it helps explain how they view situations and why they may hold a particular point of view. I hold a bachelor's degree in Psychology and Sociology. I graduated from law school in 2010 and have a Juris Doctor (law degree). I'm also currently in school studying Medicolegal Investigation. COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: I do my best to ensure that everything in these videos complies with the legal Fair Use Standards. I never intend to violate anyone’s copyright. If you own the rights to something that was unintentionally used in this video and would like it removed, addressed, or licensed for a fee, please reach out to me first, and I will get back to you ASAP. [e-mail]

I'm sure that most of you can relate to this. The gas light comes on in your car and you do the math in your head and you know how many miles you have left, how far it is to the next gas station, whether you can make it or whether you're about to be that person standing on the shoulder trying to flag down help. And usually you make it. Most times the math works out.

But on a Sunday morning in August of 2006, a 17-year-old girl standing on a two-lane highway in southeast Arkansas 40 miles from home, did the same math and came up short. So she does everything you would do. She pulls over, she puts on her hazard lights, and she calls her mom. She's got money in her pocket, and she's got a phone that works, and there's a gas station just up ahead. Close enough that walking to it isn't even a decision.

It's just the obvious thing to do. It's the thing that any of us would. Half a mile, eight minutes, maybe 10 at the most. She tells her mother she can handle it. and her mom hangs up and starts her day because there was nothing out of the ordinary about this. It didn't sound like an emergency. It sounded like an ordinary Sunday with a little problem in the middle of it, like a story her daughter would tell later rolling her eyes about her walk,

but she never comes home. Somewhere on that stretch of road in broad daylight, on a highway that people drive every day, Casey Crowder stops being a girl who ran out of gas, and this moment becomes every parent's worst nightmare. Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. And if you have never been here before, I'm Kimberlea. It's nice to finally meet you.

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Now you are watching this the day before my IVF retrieval surgery that's going to happen tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock. And if some of you are following along on Instagram or my community tab, thank you so much for wishing me luck. But by the time you see this, it will already be done. but if you do want updates, you can look at those places. My Instagram, my community tab, and of course become a member of my channel.

And I share a lot here and also on Patreon. And thank you so much for all the love and the well wishes. I will definitely let you know the outcome of our entire journey very soon. But I want to take you back to that phone call. Because Casey's mom, Melinda Crowder, has replayed it time and time again more than she can count. It's 5.30 in the morning. and her oldest child is on the line telling her the Durango is sitting on the side of Highway 65

outside of a little town called Dumas. And Melinda's first feeling is not fear at all. It's something closer to maybe annoyance because Casey was supposed to be at her friend Brianne's house and Dumas is 40 miles in the wrong direction. Sounds like a typical teenager, right? So now she knows where her daughter actually was going the night before. Her boyfriend Adam's house, not Briand's.

And she's going to deal with that later. after church, the way you would deal with any 17-year-old who you know just a lied about having a sleepover. But for now, she just wants to know that her daughter is okay. And Casey says she is. She tells her that there is a gas station close by, and she has money in her pocket and she's going to walk there. Melinda actually offers to send help, but Casey tells her not to worry about it. She's got it handled. I think this definitely sounds like my daughter, to be exact, because she's 14 and not driving yet,

but I'm sure many of us as teenagers did the same thing. So many times you think you can handle it, and it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Melinda also has three boys. She's at home trying to get them dressed and fed and out the door so that they can go to church and in the pew by nine. So she's got her hands full. But before she sits down for the sermon, she goes inside and she dials her daughter's number and tries her one more time and it goes straight to voicemail.

Now, that honestly made a lot of sense. Her daughter might be annoyed that nobody did drive down there to get her. This is exactly the kind of thing a teenager would do. Give you the silent treatment. Cancel your call. Plus, Melinda thought Casey would be busy, probably walking to get gas and then walking back. So Melinda turns back towards her morning at church. However, by noon, there's still nothing.

No call, no text. No Casey walking through that front door with a story about her morning. Melinda calls Casey's friend Brianne. And Brianne then confirms what Melinda already figured out. Casey was never there. That was a cover for whatever Casey had really been doing the night before. Still, Melinda tries not to spiral at this point. Because there's a Sunday happening all around her.

Her parents are coming for dinner. Her husband, Marty, is pulling a double shift. And three boys need something from her about every 10 minutes. She keeps telling herself, the silence, is Casey's attitude. It's rebellion. But that reasoning gets harder to believe with every hour that passes. Her husband Marty finally gets home close to midnight.

And Melinda tells them that their daughter has not answered her phone since before sunrise. And I know what you're probably thinking, wow, that is a long time to go by without, I don't know, going to look for your daughter. By now, Melinda's hysterically crying. They get in the car. They drive those 40 miles south in the dark. working off the very little details of what Casey had described over the phone. She was near a hospital, near a gas station, and Melinda cries the entire drive. Because somewhere on that drive, she stops being able to tell herself the story about her daughter giving her the silent treatment.

Around 1 o'clock in the morning, they find it. The blue Dodge Tarango pulled over on the shoulder of Highway 65. It's locked and it's empty. Casey had left the emergency flashers on, and they'd be. been going on so long, the battery had almost had nothing left. The lights her parents were looking for were barely blinking by the time they got there. But there was no Casey, not in the vehicle, not standing on the shoulder, not anywhere they could see. And Marty stands on the side of the highway in the middle of the night, far from home, looking at his own truck that he let his daughter

borrow, and he dials 911. This is the worst nightmare that I can think of, not knowing where your teenager is, knowing the car is there, none of her personal belongings, and she's nowhere to be found. Where was Casey Best Crowder? And before we talk about what happened on that road, I want to talk about who she was. Casey was born on February 24th of 1989 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to Marty and Melinda Crowder. And for about two years, she had them entirely to herself. Then Nicholas arrived in the spring of 1991. And then 17 months after that, in August of 1992, the twins came along, Joseph and Wesley. So by the time Casey was three and a half years old, her mother had a preschooler, a toddler, and two newborns. And the Crowder household became the kind of house

you could probably hear all the way from where you're sitting right now. The four kids under four, Casey out in front of all of them, stepping into the role as a big sister. Anyone who has grown up as the oldest or has an older sibling knows exactly what it was like for Casey. She was bossy and Melinda said it very clearly that her daughter loved giving her three younger brothers a hard time. And she would tease them the way that a big sister can when she knows how to push every one of their buttons. And it was the ordinary kind of sibling warfare, so to speak. And it means nothing at the end of the day because it's all in good fun until somebody outside the family tried it. And what I mean by that is you could not give her brothers a hard time the way that she could.

Casey would be the first to fiercely defend her brothers. If anyone came out one of them, she would give them all of the grief she wanted because she was allowed to do that, but they weren't. And that instinct, that particular combination of, I will handle this and don't you dare, was what she was made of. The people who loved her described her as independent, confident, and determined to make her own decisions and not especially interested in anyone weighing in on them. She was the kind of kid who figured things out rather than waited around for somebody to figure them out for her. And in a family

of four children and two working parents, that quality gets rewarded. It was nice that she could take care of herself and it became a part of who she was. She also called herself a tomboy. She spent a lot of time in her childhood on a softball field, first with the American Eastern Little League in Pine Bluff. And then her sophomore year, she was. She made the jump to high school softball and played for the Watson Chapel Wildcats. And if you have ever been around a small town softball program or any sports program, you know it isn't really about the sport so much as it is about the community. It's an entire social ecosystem.

It's the same families and the bleachers, the same coaches who've coached your cousin and the same concession stand every weekend after weekend, year after year, and Casey grew up in the middle of all of that. Those were her people. She had also been in the school choir since the sixth grade, six years. So this is a girl who could slide into second base and then go on the risers and sing and apparently saw no contradiction in it whatsoever. It was like her girly side or her more girly side and her more tomboy side.

That's what I got from it. Church was her other constant, first Christian church in Pine Bluff, the congregation she belonged to her entire life. And her family didn't show up just occasionally. They were there every week. So now you kind of know the rhythm. of this family, Sundays, where her mom is getting ready and getting all of the children ready as well. And that was what it was like when the phone rang. Casey wasn't home and the three boys were

getting ready for church. And there was Melinda on the other end. Casey was petite about five foot one, around 105 pounds, straight blonde hair, green eyes, and a pierced belly button. And she was pretty happy about that. And I mentioned her size, not because it should matter, but because it's going matter in this case specifically. Because even though she was tiny, she did not walk around like she was. She was very strong-willed and athletic. And by the summer of 2006, she was 17 and about to start her senior year of high school, which is that specific time where everything's ending and also starting all at once. One more season, one more year of the same hallways and the same friends and those same bleachers. And then you're out on your own and free. Whatever that was going to look like

for Casey, she hadn't gotten it aside yet. And she was just days away from the year where she would start deciding. She also had a boyfriend at the time, a serious one if you were to ask her. It was a boy named Adam and they had spent most of their free time during the summer together if her parents would let her. And most of the time they would say it depends, which is why on the last Saturday of that summer, when Casey said she was going to spend the night with her friend, Brianne and some of the other girls, Melinda was actually pretty happy about that. It was nice to see her go out with the girls for a change, not Adam again. So that night, Melinda told her daughter to have fun, be safe, and that she loved her. And Casey always told her mom that she loved her, even through any teenage angst

there was. And that Saturday, she got into the family's Dodge Durango, pulled out of the driver around 8 o'clock, and she didn't head out to her friend's house. She drove right to Adams. And I guess what sticks out to me is when that vehicle does run out of gas the next morning in the dark on the side of the highway 40 miles from where she lives, she's not panicking. She's not falling apart. In her own opinion, as she told her mom, she could handle it. She did not need rescuing. She assessed the situation. She called, reported what was going on, identified a solution right away, and declined help.

Casey was entirely capable of walking half a mile to that gas station by herself. But where was she exactly? And I figured to understand what happened here, you kind of have to know the road she was on. But first, let's talk about where Casey actually lived so we can contrast it. Casey was from more of the city, if you want to call it that. She was from Pine Bluff, which sits in Jefferson County. It's in the southeast quarter of Arkansas. About 40 some thousand people live there, and it was still the biggest thing for a long way in any direction.

High school football on Fridays, church on Sundays, and you pretty pretty. much know everyone, maybe you're separated by one or two degrees from everybody else. And then you get in a car and you drive south. And within about 10 minutes, pine bluff is gone and you are in the Delta. And I want you to picture this correctly because if you have never been to southeast Arkansas, because I hadn't, you're probably picturing hills and maybe trees. And you should be picturing the opposite. It is completely flat. It's some of the most productive farmland in North America. Think cotton, rice, and source. soybeans in fields that run to the horizon in every direction. And there's nothing out there in

between that your eyes can see, just tree lines, grains, and maybe a canal. Because there are these drainage canals out there everywhere. And they cut straight through these fields because with land this flat doesn't actually shed water on its own. And running down through the middle of it all, north to south, is U.S. Highway 65. If you live down here and you're going anywhere, you're you're getting on the 65 to do it. It has two lanes for most of it. It carries farm trucks, logging trucks, and 18 wheelers, and everyone coming and going. And I'm talking about long, long stretches, where it's simply pretty much nothing on either side, just fields.

And if you kept going down this highway from where Casey lived, you would hit Dumas. Now, it's not Dumas. It's Dumas. And if you say it wrong, everyone will know that you're not from there, which I get told. in almost every video and I am not from there. Some people think it's Dumas. It's Dumas. It's home to about 5,000 people in 2006

and this is agriculture top to bottom. Now, I usually say these kind of things in my members-only videos, but I want to tell you that if you're from this area, because I like to connect with the people that say, wow, this hit close to home, well, I want to mention something you're probably gonna recognize.

It's something that most people don't know anything about, and if they see it, they're probably thinking, what did I just see? That's what I thought the first time I saw it. I'm talking about ding-dong daddy. Yes, but wait. For decades, there was a billboard on the edge of town announcing that you had arrived at the home of ding-dong daddy. I know. I know. And every year, they throw a festival called Ding-dong Days with a parade and a fish fry and a pancake breakfast and a 5K. And at the center of the whole thing, they crown a ding-dong daddy and a ding-dong mama of the year. And by now, you're probably thinking what anyone who is not familiar with this town

would be thinking when you hear ding dong. But I looked into it because I was curious. And it's a song from back in 1928. A traveling musician named Phil Baxter wrote a song called I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas. That's right. Louis Armstrong recorded it. It ended up in a Hollywood movie. There's also a town in Texas that claims the song as well. Dumas, Arkansas does not care. I wanted to mention this because I wanted you to get a feel for the character of the small, agricultural little isolated town. They found humor in this.

And from Dumas, you can get to Pickens. I'm not showing you this because I think you're going to be planning a trip anytime soon. It's important for the story because Pickens is about 10 minutes from Dumas. And that's where Casey's boyfriend Adam lived. That's why Casey was on this road to begin with. And if you're thinking, wow, her boyfriend lived 40 miles away, well, if you're from Southeast Arkansas in 2006, this was completely normal. 40 miles wasn't that much of a drive.

There's no buses, no trains. There's no other way to get there. And if you have a vehicle and you're comfortable behind the wheel, you make the drive. And Sonic, if you have a Sonic where you live, you have a Sonic where you live, you have a Sonic where you live, I had one growing up in Jacksonville. But if you have a sonic, that is where they went to get something to eat. So 40 miles down 65 to see a boy that you are in love with in high school wasn't a big deal. It wasn't an expedition. But it was a detour and a secret that Casey had been keeping from her mother. Casey had told her mom like I told you that she was going to a friend's

house, but she didn't. But I also want to be very specific about this. Technology. This is, of course, of an older case and it matters because of the way that you look at everything. It's easy to forget what teens were like back then and what they had. Casey did have a cell phone, but this wasn't a smartphone. There was no iPhone. I think that came at least one year later. But here she was with the phone that could make phone calls and maybe the occasional and very short text message because it was probably one of those ones where you had to use the numbers to spell things out through pressing them a number of times.

There was no Find My, there was no location sharing, there was no app you could get on to track her location. No dash cams in every car, no ring cameras on doorsteps, know everybody filming everything. If you wanted to know where someone was in August of 2006, well, they'd have to call you for you to be able to find out. Or you would have to call them and they would actually have to answer. That's the entire safety net that you would have, a phone call. And when a call goes to voicemail, kind of like it does today, and you don't have a location, and you don't get a last red receipt or anything like that, you pretty much have nothing but silence. And whatever story you tell yourself in that silence. But don't get me wrong. There were cameras.

They existed, and they're going to become important in this case. CCTV footage. But in 2006, surveillance is not what it's like now in 26. We're talking low-resolute. often black and white, and these cameras were usually aimed at the cash register or maybe the front door, because that's what these businesses cared about. And these kind of cameras would even record over themselves on a loop. And they do not have traffic cameras like they do today. So here you have a young girl on a road, all alone, a car pulled over that ran out of gas with almost no witnesses. In a county where you can drive 10 minutes without passing a house.

in a year where we did not have tracking devices on our phones and all the cameras were pointed at something else other than possibly where they are now outside of buildings. If you've ever been 17 in love with someone that lives a county over, let's say, you know exactly how quickly that stops feeling like a lot of distance. You don't care how far you have to go, you just do it. And of course, Melinda noticed it was an ordinary part of raising a teenager. You're watching her become an adult and get further and further and find. out of your orbit. Lying to her mom is not a red flag. I'm sure all of us have said we're going to be

somewhere and we go somewhere else. And I say that partially because of what Melinda's reaction tells you. She found out 5.30 in the morning with her daughter on the side of the road on a highway and she wasn't feeling scared. She was a little bit disappointed, but that's it. And there would be time later to reprimand her if she needed to. And I do know that a lot of time had gone by, Remember I told you like it was midnight? Her husband came home and you're probably thinking, why did she wait so long? But she had three other kids at home. But once her husband was there, they left to find their daughter.

So when I left off, they had gotten to that Durango. So let's recap. It was pulled over on the shoulder of Highway 65 near the hospital exactly where Casey had said it would be. It was locked and it had run out of gas. Casey was not in it, so Marty called 911. Officers were there within minutes. They took statements from Marty and Melinda on the side of the road, and then they looked at the whole vehicle inside through the windows, and they noticed Casey's purse was not in there, and neither

was her phone. Whatever she had done, she had done it deliberately enough to take her things with her, lock the doors behind her, and go. They did, however, still see her softball bat and her glove still in the back. There was an Exxon station about half a mile up the road, so this is where her parents and the officers thought she would be or where she was headed, so they went there together in the middle of the night. They showed a picture of her to the guy that was working the overnight shift. And he said he did not recognize her

and he had not seen her. Later, David Chastain from the Arkansas State Police took the lead on this investigation and he went back there to talk to other employees and that is when they pulled the store's security footage and they went through it. Casey had never been there. She was not on that footage

and that was their first clue, kind of. Because it wasn't much, but the Durango and the Exxon were half a mile apart, maybe 10 minutes of walking, and she never arrived. Which left investigators with a very small number of possibilities and no way to choose between them. Did Casey start walking and maybe go in a different direction than she told her mom? Did she begin to go towards Exxon and something happened to her before she got there? Or had she never started walking at all? because somebody stopped on that shoulder before she could. If anything, it left her parents with even more fear.

You expect that maybe you're overthinking things. You expect that maybe there's going to be a reasonable explanation like, I don't know, she got there, she didn't have enough money for a gas, and she decided to call a friend. But you don't expect her to never show up and not know where she went. Investigators started calling hospitals around the region and detention facilities as well. They were checking whether anyone that was admitted. matched her description, but it came back with nothing. The other thing they did was retrace her evening,

which meant they started to call the last person who she said she was with. Adam. He told them Casey had come down on Saturday night and they went to a party. They stopped at Sonic for food. They went back to his house and she stayed over and then she got up and she left somewhere between 5 and 5.30 on Sunday morning because originally he said she wanted to try to make it back to church before her mom left so she could go with her and her brothers. Before she pulled out, though, she actually asked him for some gas money, and he gave it to her

because he knew she had run low on gas. He also told them that one of his coworkers Jimmy had come over while Casey was getting ready to go, and this was early. But Jimmy was there to see if Adam was interested in going fishing that morning, and if so, they were going to prepare their gear. Jimmy leaves at some point, goes to get one of their other co-workers named Jay, who also wants to come fishing. And around 7 a.m., Jimmy and Jay and Jimmy's truck are driving up Highway 65 and they pass the Durango on the shoulder of that road, but they do not stop. When they finally get back to Adams, they mention it, which at that point, Jimmy and Jay leave, drive back up to the gas station to check for Casey while Adam stays home.

He does not have a cell phone. So he's at his house and he's waiting in case she got a ride back or she calls. But when he tries to call her, it goes straight to voicemail and she never shows back up. Jimmy and Jay don't find her at the gas station. So they drive back to Adams and they all go fishing. What do you think of that whole story? Well, detectives want to know more. So they went and they found Jimmy and Jay and they confirmed what Adam had told them.

They said they didn't know where Casey was. but it did seem odd that all three of these young men knew on that Sunday morning that Adam's girlfriend's vehicle was sitting empty on the side of a highway and she was not answering her phone, but Adam does nothing. He doesn't call her mom. He doesn't call the police. He goes fishing. He doesn't seem like he really cared that much. Or is he just a young man with other things on his mind thinking like everyone else did that Casey could handle it herself. There was also a problem with what Adam had told them the first time they spoke to him because they went back to speak to him a second time.

And he did acknowledge that he might have left a few things out. He and Casey had smoked marijuana the night before. And they had slept alone together. So they weren't exactly sleeping if you know what I mean. I think, you know, and I don't have to spell it out for you. Anyway, neither those things connects them to what happened on that highway. But a person who leaves things out in their first version of the timeline gets looked at a little harder. And Adam did get looked into.

They weren't going to rule anyone out because they didn't know what happened to her. Officers then go to nearby businesses and they located in McDonald's that was in walking distance. Now this was past the Exxon, but they thought, okay, maybe another theory is that she went to go get something. eat first and then she might have decided to go somewhere else or got a ride. So they look through the CCTV footage. They look on video from about 5.30 that morning for a couple hours and they scrub through it. They do spot a young woman coming in around 6.30 that morning, but she did not match Casey's description. And they looked through every single person that came in there and they didn't see her. They did the same thing with hospital footage. They started at

520 that Sunday morning. Now this was very close to where her car was left. There was one camera on that building that pointed towards the sidewalk in between where the car was and where the gas station was. And they were hoping that they were going to see her walking. But it was so dark. I mean, you can make out maybe some headlights from cars that are passing by, but no people until maybe 640 when the sun actually comes up. Then things were a lot more clear. But that's over an hour. later from when she called her mom. Now the hospital was only about a thousand feet from where she was on her way to the exon station. So maybe she would have passed it. But like I said, probably too dark to even see her. This is what it looks like in 2008, according to Google Maps. So there were businesses nearby,

but they weren't open at that time of day. So nobody would have seen her walking. And there was just fields as far as you can see. But this was a busy highway. Lots of you. vehicles passing by. So now investigators are thinking there is a possibility that she got inside somebody's car. That meant she was taken somewhere other than that gas station to go get gas and go back to the drink go. So that was a terrifying thought. Her family and her friends, they drove to Dumas with stacks and stacks of photographs and missing person's posters. And they started going door to door. They were asking businesses and anyone that was on that road for help. They stapled and taped her face to every surface in that town that could hold a flyer.

The description that went out on those flyers was 17-year-old girl about 5'1 and 105 pounds, blonde hair, green eyes, and a pierced belly button. They were hoping that someone would recognize her. And dozens of officers and volunteers had joined in. They were working this rural highway between Dumas and Pickens. The stretch she would have driven that morning, on the ground, and by air. and more and more agencies arrived. And officials actually set up a temporary command center to organize the search teams. They kept track of tips that were coming in

and they were trying to coordinate even more search teams. And in those first few days, nobody could even say what they were looking for. There was no evidence near her car that Casey had been hurt. There was no evidence of anything, which meant every possibility stayed on the table, including the ones that people did not want to think about.

and including the ones that they were thinking about. Some were thinking that maybe she got struck by another vehicle out in the dark. And they searched. They searched for a hurt or injured girl along that roadway. Her parents didn't believe she would ever get in a car with a stranger because she was careful. And by Thursday, August 31st, the FBI had joined the Dumas Police Department and the Arkansas State Police. Five days in, and there was still nothing. No confirmed sightings of Casey, no witnesses who saw her walking, no witness who saw her stop,

and no witness who saw her get into another vehicle. The ground searched between Dumas and Pickens produced nothing. The flyers had produced nothing. And all the people closest to her, especially the ones that had seen her that morning, had all been interviewed. And I'm just going to tell you this. They had been strange, but it led nowhere. And that will make sense, I promise. but it was just sitting with me this entire time and it bothered me like I'm sure it's going to bother you.

Never mind. I'm not going to make you wait. I'm just going to tell you now. Remember Jimmy, the coworker and friend of Casey's boyfriend Adam that came to the house while Casey was getting ready to leave? Well, this is going to come out way later because obviously phone records took some time to get. They have to subpoena those records. They have to be sent back to the investigators. But when they pulled the call logs, it showed that Casey had actually started. started calling Jimmy at 5.53 a.m. Not Adam, Jimmy. Actually, she called him until 639, four times in 46 minutes as she sat at the location where her car was found. Shortly before that first call, she had just watched him walk into Adam's house, so she knew, of course, that Jimmy was

there, awake nearby, had a truck. So I thought, maybe she was calling him because it was the fastest she could get a can of gas or get a ride. But according to those records, Jimmy never picked up the phone. Why was she calling Jimmy? And not her boyfriend Adam. Now, I know Adam didn't have a cell phone, but he was just at the house, right? I even thought, okay, maybe Adam was asleep or, you know, kind of half awake when she was asking him for some gas money before she left. And because Jimmy was right there and she passed him as she was leaving. Maybe that's why she called him, but I just kept thinking, why not call Adam? It just bothered me. I found no clue from anything I read, and perhaps there was a reason, and I just never got it because it wasn't documented.

But the investigators said that Jimmy and Jay were both potential suspects when this investigation began, because everyone was a potential suspect. But especially because Jimmy had been the last person to see Casey when she was leaving Adams, and Jimmy and Jay had drove past the Dringo. They had seen it. They didn't stop. And they didn't take it upon themselves to go looking for Casey. They went fishing without alerting anyone. It just seems kind of odd to me.

But at this point in the case, they don't have those phone records. So Special Agent Boyd Rochiers and other FBI agents went after the only thing they did have, CCTV. This time they went to the Sonic. Adam had told them that he and Casey stopped at Sonic the night before. And that Sonic turned out to be roughly 400 yards from where the Durango was found. The camera that was set up was to watch the outdoor dining area, the parking spots and the benches in the parking lot. But when the investigators looked at the footage, they found that at the very top of the frame

past the parking lot, there was a thin strip that you could see of Highway 65. Almost all of that recording is empty parking spaces and wooden benches and nothing was happening there, but there was just that top edge where you could see the road. And on that road, you can see vehicles passing by vehicles that had to have passed by the Durango just before they made their way past Sonic. So agents started cataloging every single vehicle that crossed the frame of that video. They wrote down the time, the color, and the direction of that. of travel. And if they could make it out, the approximate make and model, every single one,

hour after hour, building a list of everything that moved on that highway that morning, because somewhere in that list might be the vehicle connected to Casey or to somebody already mentioned in this case. There was no green Chevrolet truck, which was the vehicle that Adam drove, so they crossed that off their list. However, at approximately 704 a.m., a gray pickup truck traveled north away from where the Durango sat. In color and style, it resembled the truck that Jimmy drove. But nothing put Adam, Jimmy, or Jay near Casey's vehicle when she would have been stranded out there that Sunday morning. So no amount of strange behavior or unexplained things could really change anything. However, there were investigators that did admit in records that I

found that they believe there could be an attraction between some of Adam's friends and Casey. They were quoted talking about how they could imagine one of them finding her attractive and maybe her being around when they came to visit Adam from time to time. So it was concerning that they felt like these guys didn't do more, but there was no proof that they did anything to her. So that list of vehicles just kept growing. And then after six days, something they found changed everything. six days after Casey called her mom from the side of that highway, a member of the National Guard that was working a search team east of Dumas was walking through farming country, through fields and the tree lines and drainage canals that cut straight through them, and several miles from the highway

in a wooded area near one of those canals off a stretch known as Canal 43. The searcher saw something that stuck out between the logs and the trees on the ground. It was a badly decomposed body of a young woman. Almost a week had gone by in the hot summer. It was exposed to the elements which meant it was in very bad condition. It was not easy to identify her by just looking at her. She was fully clothed, but what stood out was what was around her neck. One single black zip tie tied tightly and cinched in position.

locked there. It was clear that this was a homicide. And right away, they noticed the belly button piercing. Now that was the first indication that this was the body of Casey Crowder. That finding was called into investigators and they came out there, including Sergeant Todd Daly from the Arkansas State Police. And he said he had never in his entire career ever seen a plastic zip tie used as a murder weapon. It was brutal. Jim Snyder from the Duma Sheriff's Office talked to the media. and he confirmed what they had found. Can you tell me what has happened? Yes, this afternoon we have located a body.

The remains were carefully transported to the medical examiner's office where Dr. Charles Cocas conducted a full autopsy and confirmed that this was indeed the body of 17-year-old Casey Bess Crowder. He did this with the help of dental records. It was determined she had died from exphyxiation. This is not getting enough oxygen, which I'm sure you know, and the form of strangulation was by ligature. And that ligature was a zip tie.

It was so tight around her neck that it formed a circle of only three inches across. Three inches. That is not a restraint that slipped. That is one that has been pulled down as far as it could go on purpose. In the doctor's estimation, it would have cut off blood flow from the brain and caused unconsciousness within 10 to 20 seconds. there were no defensive wounds that could be identified, no gripping marks, no bruising anywhere. Not because they weren't there. It was because the days had gone by and decomposition erased the surface of the body where that evidence would have lived.

The doctor could not determine if she fought back or whether she was hit with anything, but it was sad that they did find scratch marks on her neck. where she had actually dug her own nails into her skin, trying to get her fingers underneath that zip tie to breathe. Sheriff Snyder described what she went through as pure hell, and now her parents had to be confronted with the truth, and I'm sure you can imagine it tore them apart. Melinda didn't even accept it.

She told investigators they had it all wrong, that they had made a big mistake. That was not her daughter. In her mind, Casey was somewhere still out there, and she was going to be found. And the thing these people were telling her simply did not make sense to her, it could not be true so she wouldn't agree to it. Her husband couldn't even speak.

He was hysterical. They both were. Melinda has talked about that moment since. And what she remembers is walking out of that room away from her own husband, not because she didn't want to help him, but because she could not figure out how to comfort him while she was trying to still make sense of the words that she just heard. so she couldn't handle it.

That was September 2nd. Casey had been supposed to start her senior year that same week. And now Word was getting around to her friends that they would see an empty seat in class where she would have been. And they couldn't believe it. None of them could. None of them could be prepared for something like this. I think just knowing that I'll never see her again.

That I'll never be able to talk to her again, you know. And young people don't imagine a friend. friend being murdered or even dying in high school. It was a lot for them to take in. For six days, everyone had been working in that half a mile of highway in the town of Dumas. The body ended up six miles away, off the road, in the woods, past fields near a canal that a person would have had to known about to find. Nobody would just walk there an accident. She did not end up there on foot, which meant that at some point, on the morning of August 27th, on the shoulder of that highway, Casey did get taken away in a vehicle.

But did she get in willingly, or was she forced? Which one? So back to the scene and some additional details. Her shoes were not too far from where her body was found. And they looked like they were kicked off of her feet. They were the kind that kind of slide on like slippers, almost like an uggslipper. And then there were her shorts. Well, they were men's boxers.

She was wearing them as a pair of shorts, which was actually not that unusual. It was sort of the style in the two things. thousands and underneath was a pair of regular women's underwear. Well, there was a rip right in the crotch of the outer pair, so of the boxers, but not on her underwear. But because this article of her clothing was disturbed, that was enough to go with this sexual assault theory as a motive. And there was nothing else. Her purse wasn't there. Neither was her phone. There were no tire impressions, no footprints, no drag marks, or anything else at that scene that they could document as evidence, which must have been very frustrating. So investigators went back to what they had.

CCTV footage on that highway of those cars passing by from Sonic. Now, this was not much, but they watched and watched that narrow strip of highway at the top of that frame, and then they went down that same list they had of every car and truck, and they started to cross them off. But now that list meant something different, because Highway 65 was a road connected. the place Casey disappeared with the place where she was found. At first, they were just looking for witnesses. Now they're looking for someone who may have taken her. Any vehicle traveling between those two points that morning would be very significant. And guess what? At approximately 6.42 a.m., a white pickup truck with dark markings along its side passed the camera traveling south towards

the Durango. But then, just minutes later, at approximately 6.45 a.m., would appear to be the exact same truck passed by again. And now they're heading north in the opposite direction, in the direction of where Casey's body would eventually be found. What also stood out was that it was moving faster on the way back, as if they were in much more of a hurry to get away than they were when they would have been coming up to where Casey would have been standing,

which seemed pretty important. And why this was all significant, it was the only vehicle that did this. Investigators could not read the license plate. The image was obviously too poor to see who was inside the vehicle. But what they had was a white truck with these dark markings down the side. And they took a screenshot of this footage to local vehicle dealers and they asked what kind of car it could be.

And the answer came back as an early 2000s Chevrolet Silverado, which is one of the most important trucks in America and especially in 2006 in Arkansas. you would see, I don't know, a dozen of them any given afternoon. But what was on the car? That marking, it really narrowed it down. Not every Silverado had those. So they started looking for more cameras on that route heading north, out of Dumas,

trying to follow that truck past the point where the Sonic had lost it. And they found a Dollar General up the road. Now, they did not have exterior surveillance. But what they did have was one camera inside. that store that was facing the entrance and through the glass you could see a small piece of that same highway at approximately 6.46 a.m. a white pickup truck with very similar markings passed through and that truck reached the intersection where 65 and 165 meet and it turned east on 165 which is the road out towards the farmland where Casey's body was found. Now that second sighting

did two things. It confirmed the truck had kept going rather than turning off somewhere in town, and it put the vehicle on the route connecting Casey's abandoned Durango with the area where she was found. This is the point where the phone records came in. Now, I already let you in on the calls to Jimmy that went unanswered between 553 and 639 that morning. But at 704, four numbers were entered on Casey's phone keypad before the call button was pressed. Four digits. One five five zero. It's not a phone number. It's not enough to connect to anything or anyone. And they didn't know whether it was the start of something longer, like a number that never got finished, or if it was a number pressed by accident or something else. No one has ever been able to say what was being dialed.

It could have very well been her struggling with someone that was trying to take away her phone as she tried to call for help. Maybe she was even trying to call 911 and that that got pressed before something stopped her. But it was eerie thinking about that possibly being her last call. But when you line that attempted call or whatever you want to call it, activity on her phone with her last unanswered call to Jimmy, which was at 639, well, that's a very small window. You have 639 to 704. Now take that and line it up with the white truck.

It's going south past the Sonic at 642, then comes back north at 645, and passes a dollar general at 646. The final entry on her phone is 704. That's 25 minutes. And this is the only connection they have at this point. They have the description of this truck, a direction of travel, no license plate, no name, and no way to find it. So they decide to make the truck come to them, which is very smart. It was exactly one week after Casey had disappeared.

On Sunday, September 3rd, the FBI set up a checkpoint on Highway 65 near where the Durango had been abandoned. And the logic was simple. People are creatures of habit, particularly on a Sunday morning in this area. Whoever was on that road at 642 a week ago might be on it at 642 this morning a week later. Maybe they're going to the same place for the same reason. And a regular driver in this area might remember seeing a girl standing beside an SUV. They might remember another vehicle slowing down near her SUV.

They might remember a white truck with a stripe on its side. So starting a little after six, agents began stopping cars and asking drivers and their passengers where they had been the Sunday before. And a white pickup truck with a dark stripe came up that road right towards them and I would say that these agents were not very surprised because this is exactly what they expected to happen at this traffic stop. But imagine seeing this truck and wondering who was going to be inside. Was there going to be clues? Was there going to be something of Casey's or evidence of her going missing in that truck?

Well, soon they would know everything they could gather from questioning the driver. Upon being stopped, there was a man who identified himself as four. 46-year-old Kenneth Ray Osborne. He provided his identification, and they confirmed his name and date of birth as December 7th of 1959. He lived at a place called Wolf Project. It was about 20 minutes down Highway 65 from Dumas, and he wasn't in that truck alone. Next to him in the passenger seat was a young woman that could have come off as very suspicious, but she immediately identified herself as Holly Osborne. She was 20 years old. And, the daughter of the driver.

The agents asked where the two of them were headed that morning. And Holly explained her father was taking her to her morning shift at a nursing home in Dumas. But now the question was, where had you been the previous Sunday? Kenneth told them that he had driven that same stretch of road most Sundays, and he had indeed drove that road at the same time one week ago. And we know that's the morning Casey was taken. He didn't dodge the question at all. He put himself on that highway at that hour.

So agents took down his contact information. They wrote down his license plate, the vehicle identification number on his truck. And they also asked him if anyone else had been riding with him the Sunday before. They asked him for two reasons. One was to see if it's possible that he was going to admit that he had picked up Casey and maybe brought her somewhere. And also to see if his daughter could be a witness. and it was true. Holly admitted she had work the Sunday before, and that same day that Casey was missing, they drove together down that road on their way there. So at this point, they told Kenneth they wanted him to come by the police department.

They just wanted to go through his movements a little more carefully, and Casey had witnessed anything that day in relation to the missing young woman. And that was the whole point. It was for drivers to be able to recall whether they saw a girl. with a disabled vehicle on that road last Sunday. Most of the people in this area had already heard of Casey's case. I mean, the flyers were everywhere. This was a small town. She had been missing for eight days. Her body had been found the day before.

FBI was in town. The National Guard had been out searching. There was a command center there. And here was a man who lived 20 minutes away and drove this highway constantly. He would have known exactly why he had been stopped. but at this point the procedure was to let him drive away and see if he would appear later willingly at the police station. He was their number one person of interest and he doesn't come back in. Not that day.

But the following day on September 4th, Kenneth had heard from his own friends that investigators wanted to talk to him and wanted to take a look at his truck. And he did show up at the Southeast Arkansas Law Enforcement Center on his own. The thing was that people from this area who saw his truck on the news knew it belonged to him. We're talking about a very distinctive vehicle. So, of course, they were telling him. They were like, listen, you know what? They're looking for someone with your exact same truck and you're the only one in this area with a truck like that. You better go talk to police.

So at 255 p.m., Arkansas State Police Special Agent Rick Newton and Special Agent David Chastain sat down with him. That interview was not recorded. There was no audio, there was no video. Only thing that existed was Agent Chastain's handwritten notes. And what those notes entail is that Kenneth explained, he drove a truck for a living, he was a long-call trucker, and he worked for a company called USA Truck. What that meant was that most of the week he wasn't even home.

He only came back in town on the weekends. He talked about how he had two children, Holly, and a younger son, Kenny Jr. Kenneth was also fairly recently widowed. His wife Rhonda had passed away 18 months earlier and had been very, very hard on their family. Holly had been closer to her mother than she was to her father. And when her mother died and her father had to work so much, she was left to take care of her younger brother all week long. After that background information about his current lifestyle was put into the record, Kenneth gave his account of August 27th. He said he had driven Holly and DeDumis leaving their home in Tiller around five.

40 a.m. They got into town around six and they stopped at a local diner called Matthews. That's where they ate breakfast together. And this was actually a very popular, I'm just going to call it like rest stop for big truck drivers like Kenneth. It's a place where you could stop, you could refuel, you could get some food and some coffee. After they ate, Kenneth said he dropped Holly off at the nursing home and then he drove home. Well, the timeline alone wasn't enough for detectives and they asked him for permission to search his residence in his truck, and he consented. And somewhere in that conversation, the agents noticed that he had scratches on his arms. So naturally, they asked about them. And Kenneth explained he had a small dog at home, a very energetic dog that bit him

and scratched him all the time, and he liked to play rough. Then he agreed to let them photograph not just his arms, but his entire body. And that's when they noticed faint abrasions all over his chest, on his elbows, and on his knees. So now it's not just his arms. It's other parts of his body. And not only could that line up with maybe being in a struggle, but kneeling down, possibly in a wooded area as it was happening.

But he was very cooperative. If that wasn't apparent from everything I told you thus far, He said that the cuts on his chest and his other areas, that was a skin condition. But now there are two different explanations. But investigators had to do their due diligence. So they asked him point blank if those scratches could have come from a girl fighting for her life. Kenneth kind of posed a question back to them. He said, well, wouldn't you know?

Because if she scratched me and these scratches were caused by her fingers, wouldn't my skin be underneath her nails? Now, they can't just go back and confirm that. 2006, we're talking crime labs that had turnarounds for DNA testing that could be not only weeks but months, maybe even a year. The Arkansas State Crime Lab was handling the entire state. Even a priority homicide would not come back that fast. So no, they wouldn't have known. But here's where one of the problems lie in this case.

heat and water because they degrade DNA. And decomposition of that severity made recovering usable samples very unlikely. Six days outdoors, late in August, fingernail scrapings are surface evidence. And the surface is the first thing to go. And rain, humidity, insects, animal activity. There's nothing left to scrape. So their chances of usable DNA was very slim. But here's the thing.

Nothing there doesn't mean he's innocent. A negative result from a degraded sample isn't evidence of absence. It's evidence that the sample was not viable. In his account had a problem, and the problem was really the Sonic footage. Kenneth said he dropped Holly off around 6.20 a.m. and he drove home. But that wasn't adding up, because he was still in the area to get caught on CCTV footage at Sonic about 20 minutes later. So they confronted him with that fact. Kind of seems like a lie at this point.

But he remembered he actually went back to Matthew's diner and had another cup of coffee. Okay. And I guess that's plausible. I sometimes have two cups a day. But here's what's even more unsettling. His house was south. And at first, he is heading south on the sonic footage at 6.42 a.m. However, he's caught literally coming back north back in the direction that he came just three minutes later at 6.45.

and he's not seen going back south towards his house at all. I'm a very visual person. I think you know that if you've been here before. And if you are not watching, then you might want you for this. Because I couldn't for the life of me understand how all this works. And that's very important for this case in particular. So instead of you trying to figure it out in your head, I'm going to show you on a map exactly where these locations are.

And it's going to start making a lot more sense to you why they had Kenneth in the police station. Everything we're talking about is right now on Highway 65. From the top of this graphic that I just made you, there's a yellow rectangle. Well, that's Matthew's Diner. It's on the corner of Highway 65 and Highway 165. Now, you see that red arrow. It's pointing from Holly's work at the nursing home, and it's a very short drive.

We're talking one minute from her work to Matthew's Diner. The Exxon Gas Station is right before you get to Sonic. That I've made a red rectangle around. They're close to one another across the street from each other, and that is where Casey was trying to get that morning. Now here's an expanded view. I'm circling the nursing home with a yellow circle at the far top. And then there's the Dollar General.

That's where one of the cameras was. And then the Exxon, which I didn't circle. But here's the Sonic with the red rectangle, the red circle further down to the south, is Delta Memorial Hospital, which was right near where Casey's broke-down vehicle was sitting on the side of the road. And I indicated that location with a star. So now I feel like you have your bearing straight.

And I'm going to explain to you the direction that Kenneth and Holly would have been traveling that morning. They came from their house to the south in Tiller. So they would have come up north on Highway 65 and first they would have passed Casey's broken down vehicle on the side of the road. Right before you get to Delta Memorial Hospital. Then they would have kept going all the way to intersection Highway 65 and 165 for breakfast at Matthews Diner. And since Holly made it to work that day and we know she did, they would have driven one minute to drop her off. So to make it back home, Kenneth would have logically had to go back south from where he came. Back down 65, passing the Dollar General, passing the drive-through, passing the hospital,

and then passing Casey's car on his way out of town back home. But that's not what happened. Not only did he turn around and start to head back where he came down 65, he turned and went east on 165. That's exactly how you would get to canal number 43 where her body was found. I hope this is all making sense. Remember what the footage looked like early that morning? You can't see cars.

so you can just disregard any footage of Kenneth's truck taking Holly to work. You wouldn't have been able to tell. You would have only seen headlights like this. But the next time they see his truck, which was during daylight, it was captured going south at 642, which would have been after that supposed second cup of coffee after dropping Holly off. And that would have lined up with him just going home. Except for the fact, he's caught on camera three minutes later

going back towards Sonic, back in the direction of Matthew's Diner and the nursing home again. But why? That was the question. And here's what else the investigators know. Casey was found in the area that's called Canal No. 43, which is a very isolated area. However, you would take Highway 165. Do you see what I'm getting at? Highway 65 and Highway 165 is where they caught Kenneth's truck. He's last seen driving going right off of the 65 into the intersection of the 165, right where Matthews Diner was, and in the direction of the highway that you would need to take

to go right out to where Casey was found. Explain it. That's what they wanted him to do. And that's when his story changed, and that's never a good sign. He said that when he left Matthew's Diner, after dropping off his daughter and having that cup of coffee, he started going home. But then he realized he was down to his very last cigarette. Again, plausible. So he said he quickly turned around, made that U-turn, drove back to Matthews to buy more, and then he went home. But that explanation

created a bigger problem than the one he was trying to solve. If Kenneth turned around, drove back to Matthews, that would account for him the second time on camera. But then if he drove home, we should see his truck cross a third time on Sonic footage, heading back south again. Agents went back. They went through repeatedly through that CCTV footage, and never a third time did his truck pass. So either he took a really long detour, a long route, and the total up of obstruction just to come back home, which would also potentially pass where her body was later found,

or he's lying about what really happened. I'm sure you're thinking what these detectives were. He was driving Holly to work, and he saw Casey on the side of the road, and it peaked his interest. And when he was heading back and caught on camera at 642, he saw her still on the side of that road. And we know she was still there, because at 639, just a few minutes before this, She made a call on her phone that pinged in that location. So within just three minutes of him being in her vicinity, she was there. In those three minutes between the time they see him again on that sonic footage,

going the other way, he totally could have grabbed her, put her in his truck, and drove away. That's the theory they're working with, because there was no explanation that made sense for him not to go home in the direction he would have been coming from. It was very suspicious. And I think rightfully so. If you had merely gone to get cigarettes at Matthews, why not turn around and drive back the way you came?

They had been interviewing him for hours, but it wasn't being recorded. So now they knew they had to keep him there and start to ask these questions all over again from the beginning so they could get it recorded. And at 11, 15 p.m., they're still rolling audio. They ask him again about the scratches on his arms. And this is something that I personally noticed that wasn't referenced anywhere, but these scratches were scabbed over. They were not fresh and bleeding, but here's my point. It has been over a week.

So you would expect that these scratches would be healed if they were defensive wounds from Casey into someone's arms. And that's exactly what they look like to these detectives. Plus, think about this way. I have a dog. I'm sure many of you have dogs. If you do have a rowdy hyper little dog that jumps on you all the time, wouldn't you also have fresh scratches along with the healed ones?

Because your dog lives with you. I'm assuming that right? And I'm assuming that dog gets on you all the time. So why hasn't that dog scratched you like that in a week? To form new scratches along with the healed ones. Does seem kind of suspicious, doesn't it? Your dog didn't learn to stop jumping on you in a week? And to these detectives, they did not look like scratches from dog claws.

They look like the ones you get from fingernails. Look at them for yourself. I feel like I'm going back to the arguments in the Karen Reed trial. If you know, you know. And apparently they had interviewed people from Matthews Diner who would have known exactly who Kenneth was. And they had no transactions for a pack of cigarettes. So did he bum some off someone? It didn't make any sense.

And then they go over how Kenneth had told them, well, I'm going to be cleared because you're not going to find my DNA under Casey's nails. And they argued that he watched way too many crime shows because not all crimes are solved with DNA. But something else happened in this interview that some people might find to be controversial. These investigators, probably at their wits end, right? They're wanting to get a confession because they think that Kenneth did it. So they lied to him. They were bluffing. But they told him they had phone data that put him

both right next to where her car had been abandoned at approximately 7 o'clock that morning. And then shortly afterward, they had more phone data from afterward around 713 at another tower that had his phone pinging near the route towards canal number 43 where her body was found. They told him there was no connection to a tower near his house. during that window of time. And the truth was, they were still waiting on cell phone data.

And whether people like it or not, they are allowed to lie. They're allowed to fabricate evidence that does not exist to get a confession. And Kenneth had no answer. But that didn't make the detective stop. They just pushed harder. They give him a theory of what they thought happened. Here was this attractive young girl on the side of the road all alone, wearing, you know, know, shorts, and the way they put it was, I feel like degrading, but I think you get my picture. And it caught his attention, and he's lonely because his wife passed away about a year ago, and he's going through a lot of problems. And that's the point when Kenneth just cuts off the investigators. He's like, I did not kill her. I have nothing to do with her murder.

But that wasn't the answer the detective Newton was looking for. He wanted that confession no matter what. And I can't get into the minds of either of these detectives, but I don't. I truly believe that they thought he was guilty. They already had proof he was in the vicinity of both locations. And they're not going to let him go. So Newton started to graphically explain what was going to happen to Kenneth, meaning that they were going to seek the death penalty. It was almost like they were threatening to kill him. You're looking at going before 12 people in a box in Arkansas City and going to trial for capital murder and be sentenced to death. They're going to cook your ass.

Do you understand where I'm coming from? They ain't they're going to burn you. They're going to pump the needle in your arm, Kenny. The prosecutor will go for your jugger thing. Some may say that this is doing something pretty unethical, which is pretty much bringing up things like you're going to get burned by the jury. They're going to put a needle in your arm. I mean, they were also playing good cop and bad cop.

There was brochures. He was the good cop. And he was calmly telling him, just work with us. Just work with us now so that we can make it possible that you're not put to death. Just tell us what happened.

And that is when Kenneth asked for a lawyer. But was he given one? No. They kept going. The questioning continued. And it continued for a very long time. And when Newton finally got up and he left the room,

He said to him, the next time I see you, I'm going to get nasty with you. But the truth was, Kenneth was entitled to representation before speaking to these detectives, and none of what they had was proof. It was speculation. And it was evidence that he could be involved. We're talking about a truck that resembled his truck, on a recording too poor to read a license plate, and video that doesn't even capture who's driving,

never shows a passenger in his car either. because you just can't tell. Then the scratches. He had explanations for. But inconsistent statements about cigarettes and why he turned around that morning, which is something that anyone could possibly get wrong. But then there was, of course, also the fake phone data.

Yeah. That didn't exist at the time. So they really didn't have much to hold him on so they had to let him go home. And three weeks went by before it seemed like authorities were doing anything in Casey's case. but behind the scenes, they had a big tip come in.

Casey's body had been found three days earlier, and everyone in that town knew it. And Kenneth Osborne's name has started moving around a lot. And on September 5th, the day after they let him go home, a woman came forward. Her name is Nancy Dunn. She knew Kenneth's family really well. She drove into Dumas every Sunday morning, the same as Kenneth. And their vehicles would pass on the same. that highway regularly enough that they would wave at each other as a little ritual.

And every single time, he waved back. But on the morning of August 27th, she waved and Kenneth did not wave back. And that stood out to her. And I think many of us, including myself, have internal dialogue. Like, did I do something to him? Is he mad at me? Did he not see me? But it stuck with her.

And as people started talking, she started thinking about it more. and more. And she remembered clearly, clearly remembered that when she passed Kenneth, he wasn't alone in that truck. She saw someone in that passenger seat. And at the time, she assumed it was his daughter Holly. The problem was, Holly was already at work. She was already clocked in. And what's weirder is that this person looks slumped over, like leaning, like they were asleep or something like that. And the reason she assumed it was Holly is because she always saw Holly and they worked together at the nursing home. So when Nancy gets to work, she realizes Holly's already there, it just kind of made her think. Like, what did I just see? So when she comes forward to police, she didn't say, I saw Casey.

She said, I saw a person that cannot be accounted for in a truck belonging to a man whose name is now in every conversation in town about this murder. But now, investigator, had a witness who put a body in that cab with Kenneth, something that the cameras could not do and could not see. They had an eyewitness that was brave enough to say something. But nothing happened for three weeks. Kenneth went back to work. Like I said, he was a long-haul driver. So that meant he would leave the state. And these investigators let him. Nobody stopped him. Nobody charged him. He had willingly given his DNA and he let them go through his house and his truck. He had let them photograph his whole body, and during that time, this poor family that just lost their daughter had to bury her.

The service was held at First Christian Church. This was the congregation that Casey and her family had belonged to her entire life. The one where she had gone through Christian Youth Fellowship, the same church her mother had been driving her brothers to on the morning she called and said she was on the side of the highway. They buried her at Fitzhue Cemetery, Section 4, in the same ground as her father's parents, Luther and Louise. And at the same time, back at Kenneth's house, his children were going through their routine and household that also knew what loss was like. Holly was 19 when her mother died. She was 20 now. And her father was gone most of the time, which meant that that 19-year-old had taken on almost all of the household needs, especially when it came to her younger brother.

and for herself in the middle of grieving her mother, she was working hard. She was working at a nursing home. Kenneth's mother Ruth was nearby and a sister Lisa, and between them they had kept things as normal as possible for this family for the last year and a half. And they had no reason to believe that Kenneth would do anything to hurt a young lady or anyone for that matter, and they had no idea what was coming. But the investigators were building their case. Whatever swabs that could be taken from Casey and her clothing and the scrapings beneath her fingernails,

they were being tested because that was the whole question whether she had gotten a piece of whoever had done this to her. And about a week after she was found, that's when Kenneth's truck was impounded. They went through the interior. They collected anything they could. And of course they had his DNA to test everything against. And there was one more thing. The crime lab actually found animal hair on Casey's clothing. not human, something that looked like it could come from a dog or cat.

And we know that Kenneth owned actually several dogs. If hair off a 17-year-old girl's body could be matched to animals living in a specific house, then that's a physical link between them. The problem at that time was that the state lab in Arkansas did not do mitochondrial testing on animal hair. So an investigator had to actually fly samples from Ken's pets, to a lab in California and they waited. So all of this was pending, the swabs, the fingernail clippings, the zip ties,

the DNA on the truck, the hair, everything. Nobody had an answer yet. What they had was just samples in a queue. So by the last week of September, investigators had gone as far as that evidence was going to take them for now. But they felt like they had the right man. And they truly believed that the DNA would be a match,

no doubt about it. And by Thursday, September 28, they had enough to arrest Kenneth Osborne. It was easy to find him because the company he worked for knew exactly where he would be stopping along his route and when he was heading back towards town, they were able to pick him up at a truck stop. He did not resist arrest. He did not say anything. He didn't give them any problems. He did not resist arrest at all. They let him call his daughter, who was already on the way to come pick him up. But Kenneth told her to stop wherever she was because he was under arrest.

Holly rushed to her grandma's house, Kenneth's mom, and they raced over to the police department. By this time, Kenneth had been awake somewhere around 36 hours. He had not slept and he would not sleep that night either. He was going straight in for an interview. With the same two men that had sat down with him before FBI agent, Boyd Rochers and Detective Rick Newton. And remember his promise.

he said the next time, I'm going to get nasty. That's what waited for him. But what was interesting is they did not take him to the Southeast Arkansas Law Enforcement Center. Instead, they drove him out to a metal outbuilding behind a house. And it wasn't just anyone's house. It belonged to Jim Snyder. That month in September of 2006, Snyder was a deputy for the sheriff's department. He was the sheriff-elect, meaning he was picked

by his community. He had won the election, but he had not been sworn in yet. So for those few months, he was both the man doing the job and the man about to run the department. But the more interesting part is that he knew Kenneth. Not just in passing, not just because they lived in the same small town, no. He had known him for years. He'd actually employed Kenneth at one point. So he was Kenneth's former boss. And the building where they took Kenneth belonged to this friend, this former employer, who was two months from being sheriff. And this is off the books. This is not the typical place you bring a suspect, a murder suspect for investigation purposes. But the reason investigators gave for choosing this place is because it was practical. They said the media was everywhere.

They were camped out at the law enforcement center. Casey Crowder's murder was the biggest story in southeast Arkansas at the time. And if they brought a suspect through those doors, every camera in that state would know within a minute. What they were trying to do is keep it quiet. The shed was quiet. Nobody would be watching and they didn't want to cause a scene. So at 4.45 that afternoon, Noon and Pashir sat down with him inside that shed with a video camera. and strategically Kenneth's daughter Holly was being questioned too in a different building by different people at the exact same time. Before Kenneth had even signed the form acknowledging his rights,

Newton already reminded him about what he told him the last time. Nice is gone. Things are going to get ugly. And that's when they brought up Holly. Holly had actually become a suspect in her own right for possible obstruction of justice because she had made contradictory statements between the time that they stopped her at the truck on that roadblock to this formal interview. She also would not permit her brother Kenny Jr. to be interviewed. And inside that shed, Kenneth was told what was going to happen to Holly,

that she was going to be put in jail. And he was told that what he could do to stop all of this was just tell them why and what he did to Casey. If he confessed, They would let her go. They told him they would even bring her up there. If he wanted to talk to her, they would bring anyone up there, anyone he wanted, except maybe his lawyer, because he did ask for a lawyer. So here's what they talked to Kenneth about, his late wife, Rhonda. And they said, you know, we know that Holly and Kenny Jr.,

they're your life, aren't they? They were appealing to his emotions. And in the same breath, Newton told him he was going to drag his daughter through the mud. They told him that once he walked out that door, they wouldn't be able to help him anymore. They couldn't help Polly. They couldn't help Kenny Jr. There was no tomorrow for them, they said. And Kenneth was terrified. The fact that they brought him to this isolated area where no one else was around, he didn't know what they were going to do to him. He knew that they had the power and he believed they were going to do something to his children, lock them up at the very least. But he repeated that he did not

kill Casey. Then they tell him about the evidence. They tell him they have a witness that saw somebody in his truck that morning, which is true. But they added that Holly had been able to confirm it to that witness, which is not in any version of what Nancy had told them. What actually happened was that when they asked Holly about it, she said that her dad went straight home after dropping her off. And then they told her that the witness had saw Kenneth's truck heading towards the river. Holly told them that could not be true. And that's why they thought that maybe she was covering for him. Because in all honesty, there's no way she could have known what happened after she got out of that truck that morning and went to work. But she insisted her father would never hurt anyone and she was

standing by him. His family was standing by his side. But about an hour into the interview, there was a bombshell. This is what they hoped would finally break Kenneth. Not only did they tell that they found Casey's DNA inside his truck, which was a lie, they explained a new piece of evidence that was 100% putting Kenneth where Casey's body had been found. Newton told Kenneth, the United States Air Force had satellites all over and they were recording 24 hours a day and they could zoom in anywhere. And they looked at the location where Casey's body was. And lo and behold, there was Kenneth's truck. And they took a screenshot of that video, that satellite footage.

And they sent it to detectives. And there were the detectives opening up this envelope and showing it to Kenneth. There it was. A satellite photo of his truck right there. Right next to Canal 43. Dated September 27th of 2006. I mean, I'm showing you the picture right now on the screen. It's his truck.

It seems pretty concrete. Unless someone had the exact. exact same truck, that exact same hour, the exact same day. And they happened to go down those roads that Kenneth was on and pick up Casey and kill her. Right? Wrong. Yeah. Because that picture is fake. Yes, it's 100% fake, fabricated, produced, doctored. These agents had actually gotten a similar truck. They drove it out there. They took a photo. Can you imagine being presented with that? I mean, I guess if you're guilty, you're like, well, shoot, they got me.

Most of us know the underlying reality here. It's 2006. There was no system passively recording continuous overhead video of anywhere, I mean, especially rural Arkansas. Not that anyone could just pull a truck off later. Imaging satellites passed over specific points. They're on scheduled orbits. They capture stills when they're asked to.

And the odds of one of them being over a farm on that road at 6.50 on a Sunday morning are pretty much non-existent. Even setting aside that the Air Force does not just hand over surveillance imagery to state police, even one's investigating a homicide. But like a local homicide, it's not going to happen. But Kenneth believed it. This was also a man who had been awake for 36 hours, whose daughter was in custody in another building who he couldn't talk to,

who had been told his family's freedom depended on the next few minutes. That's not the state of mind of someone that's going to be evaluating the plausibility of federal imaging capabilities. And Kenneth even tells them, I'm tired. Can I sleep? Can we talk about this tomorrow? They asked him if maybe he was protecting someone else. Maybe he knows someone else that was driving his truck. A lot of times detectives are trying to give him.

an out. He asked for a lawyer, but again, they kept going. And the interview ends without a confession. After all that, he did not admit to anything. And then Newton walks out of that building. And Brashear is playing the good cop role. He stays behind. Five minutes, maybe 10 minutes, just two of them. And the video camera's off. What we know about those minutes is from what Bruchier's said happened. That Kenneth asked if he could see his family. He says, I'm a mess. And then he asked to pray. And Breshears asked him whether he wanted to keep talking after that. And apparently Kenneth said yes, because at 725 that evening, the camera goes back on. And Newton and Breshears introduced themselves, and then Kenneth introduced himself. And Newton said to the camera that

Kenneth was ready to talk to them about something and asked Kenneth if he was correct. And he said yes. Newton tells him to begin when her vehicle was broken down and he picked Casey up. How did it happen? He was like, I just picked her up. And Newton asked him, was she in her vehicle? Was she on the outside of it? And he was like she was on the outside. There was a lot of talking going on from Newton using what is usually referred to in court as leading questions. He would ask him like, okay, what made you do a U-turn? Okay, so you came back around, then you saw her standing out there, then you drove your car up to her. So he's basically telling the story for Kenneth.

And all Kenneth would do is either say yes or nod his head. It was not like Kenneth was telling the story in his own words. He was essentially just agreeing to what Newton was saying. Newton goes on and asks him if he told Casey he was going to help her and get her some gas. And he said yes. And he asked, was she calm or was she nervous? And Kenneth responded that. she was calm. She was very calm. And then Newton says he wants to know when the zip tie was applied.

There's a bit of back and forth here. It almost seems like Kenneth is thinking about the question or maybe not wanting to answer the question. And even Brashears was like, well, you don't have to give us specifics. And Newton's like, yeah, just tell us the timing. Tell us where it happened. Kenneth says, just out yonder. And Newton fills in the gap with where her body was found. And Kenneth just nods. I'm showing some of this to you, so you kind of get the picture of how this interview was going on, the back and forth. Kenneth begins to say it was like a whole different person.

And Newton was like, was it like the devil was in you? And Kenneth said, I don't know. It just wasn't me. He said he didn't mean for it to happen. And this is where the detective seemed to kind of give him an out a little bit. Newton was like, yeah, it just got out of hand, right? That's what happened. It just went too far.

You never meant to do this. Just got out of hand. That's sort of the direction that Kenneth begins to go in with the whole thing. Maybe that's a more comfortable way to describe it. And he even added that in his mind, he doesn't really know what happened. You can look at this in different ways. You could see this as somebody that is completely guilty who's withdrawn, who doesn't really want to confess, but feels like it's their best option. So they're doing the least.

Or you can see it as someone who's innocent and wants his daughter released and knows what's hanging over his head. And he's just kind of going through the motions, but not saying too much because he knows he didn't do it. And he has no words to tell them what happened because he's not the kid. But at the end of that video, Newton looks at Kenneth and says, I want whoever is watching this video, whether that's the prosecutor or other investigators, I want them to know the reason why you're saying all this is because you want to get it off your shoulders. And Kenneth said yes. So I don't know if you're zeroing in on anything here or if it's becoming more apparent

or not, but this is not usually how most confessions go. Typically, when a killer is at the point where they're ready to confess, they're the one providing a minute-by-minute account of what they did, all the details, where it happened, why, what the motive was. But this was more coerced. I think that's a good word to use, and you'll know why later. But here's the thing. And I think this is the part that people usually get wrong about interrogations. And once you understand, the rules, what happened in that shed makes a lot more sense. And this usually surprises a lot of people. Police are allowed to lie to you. I kind of already said this, and most of you know from watching true crime regularly. Not just a little lie, they can tell you a big lie. They can lie a lot.

In Arkansas, in nearly every state in the country, an officer can sit right across from you and tell you something like, I have your fingerprints and they have nothing. They can tell you a witness picked you out of a lineup that never even happened. They can tell you your DNA came back from the lab and they haven't even put your DNA in. They can tell you that your buddies in the next room already confessing that they know you did it. And that didn't even happen. And that's all legal. And the Supreme Court said so in 1969. It's in a case called Frazier against Cup. It has been the law ever since. Courts have upheld convictions where officers invented physical evidence out of thin air. So saying they have a satellite photo of his

truck at Canal 43, when there's no satellite photos, that itself is not a violation of anything. Same with telling him a witness saw someone in his truck. Same with telling him his daughter had confirmed it. It's legal. But here's where the line actually is. There are two things police cannot do, and both of them showed up in this case. The first first thing, First is a rule from a case called Edwards v. Arizona, and it is about a clean rule as we have. If you're in custody and you ask for a lawyer, the questioning stops right then. It doesn't start again unless you personally start it again. Not because an officer says, did you change your mind?

You want to keep on talking? Kenneth asked for a lawyer during his first interview and the second, but they kept going. He asked twice in that shed, and they kept on going, and they never ended it. And then that agent stayed behind with him, prayed with him, and then asked, do you want to keep talking? That's a violation. Not the lying. You have the right to an attorney. Even if you can't afford one, one will be provided to you.

But I also use the word coercion on purpose, because this is where it gets more interesting. The test is not whether police were mean, and they think. threatened you, but here's the second thing they did wrong. Promising a benefit, you have no power to deliver in exchange for talking. That's different, especially when the benefit's not even about him. It's about his children. Because think about what that actually does to someone. If I lie to you and I say I have your fingerprints, you can still say, no, I didn't do this. And you can take your chances. But if I tell you that the moment you talk, I would, will let your daughter go, and if you don't talk, I can't help her anymore, and she's going to

jail. I've given you a price, and they dangled it in front of him time and time again. I'm going to tell you my thoughts at the end, and I hope you share yours in the comments below as well. And my members know, we just finished a two-part series, plus a live stream all about something similar, but also different. Technically, Kenneth had confessed twice. He'd already gone over all of this with detectives and then they recorded it as Newton was kind of having him reiterate by asking him the questions and letting him say yes or no. But it was still his choice. He could have just kept insisting it wasn't him if he was innocent. But then again, was he just telling them what they wanted to hear so that his daughter could go free? Afterward, Kenneth was moved to the Southeast

Arkansas Law Enforcement Center and they did let him see his family for about 15 minutes. His mom, his sister, his daughter, and his son. Well, in that building, though, he saw someone else. He saw his buddy, his former boss, Jim Snyder, the guy who owned the shed that he was just in. Well, he walked up to him. And you know what Kenneth said? He said it wasn't me. I was outside of my body watching myself do it. It's kind of like what he said to detectives back of the shed, but it's almost like he's giving a little more details on his own. And Snyder said in his entire career, he had never heard anyone say it like that. So he went and got the agents and he said, hey, maybe we can get a little more out of him

because he feels comfortable talking to me. At 85, they start recording him again. And now with Snyder leading, he has a different rapport with him. And it makes sense. If he feel more comfortable, you might end up giving over more information, specific information. And this time, he did. He explained that he pulled over and he asked Casey what her problem was. and she told him that her truck had broken down and she ran out of gas and asked whether he had a

jug for gas and he said no but he could get one he said that he had never seen her before that morning that she got in his truck cooperatively and that she wasn't even scared but what i thought was odd and maybe this was to account for her being slumped over i don't know but he said she wasn't really that coherent that maybe she said something to him here and there but she was kind of like leaning against the door and that she seemed in and out like she had been drugged. And they know that she smoked marijuana the night before, but she had spoken to her mom that morning and she was completely fine. What they really thought happened was that once she was inside that vehicle, he hit her

or did something to her to render her unable to escape. And apparently the detectives that theorized that at some point she came to near where Canal 43 was located and that's when the fight began. And that's when they think. He grabbed the first thing he saw, which happened to be a zip tie in his truck, and he placed it around her neck from the back to control her. And he clasped it. Snyder asked him, was she awake when the tie went around her neck?

Kenneth said he couldn't remember. But there were scratch marks, so we know she had to have been. He said that he pretty much blacked out. Snyder wanted to know if she fought him and Kenneth shook his head and said not really. but not really doesn't mean no does it he insisted he didn't mean to tie it so tightly but he had no way to remove it and that's scary because if you've ever used a zip tie you know exactly what that's like once it clicks into place it doesn't get looser it only gets tighter especially if someone is fighting and moving that's when he said she was making her way into the woods trying to get it loose

and he didn't even follow her. He said at one point he thought he might have a pocket knife with him, but he didn't. He saw her fall down. Then he got in his truck and he drove off. He said she was just staggering the last time he saw her. But some of that really doesn't add up. Like the rip in her boxers. Snyder asked whether losing his wife could have had anything to do with what he did.

And Kenneth said he didn't think so. though. He said it would take him a really long time to understand why he had done it. But he was saying he did. Snyder still wanted to know why. He said, I don't know. And if I really knew that, then it probably wouldn't have happened. He said that afterward he went home. He finished mowing his lawn and then he washed and folded the clothes he had been wearing. He was charged with capital murder and kidnapping and held at the Dumas County Jail without bond. His family was shocked. But aren't most families shocked? This is not unusual. You see your loved ones in a positive light. You know them. And it didn't add up to his family. They knew Kenneth. He told the judge he didn't even

need a public defender because at his first appearance in front of circuit court judge Sam Pope, Kenneth said his mother had been in touch with attorney in Fayetteville named Irwin Davis, and he was going to represent him. Kenneth also asked if he could be out on bond. He told the judge, if you let me out, I could work. I don't even have to go back to the same company. I could look around and maybe work on a farm or something, but the judge was like, no, you're not getting bonded out.

Thomas Dean was the prosecuting attorney, and he let everyone in this community to know they would be seeking the death penalty. By the 10th of October, no lawyer had been hired by Kenneth or his family. So the judge appointed being Colvin, a public defender. And Kenneth pleaded not guilty. But Colvin, he didn't last. Within weeks, he was asking to be relieved of his duties as Kenneth's attorney. And his reason was that he had become a witness in this case.

and that his office was already also dealing with like four other death penalty cases at the same time. But what it means when a lawyer also says they're a witness in the case, it means they have personal knowledge of a fact in that case that will be put to the jury. And that would disqualify him because he cannot both argue the case and also testify in it. And in Kenneth's case, it seems to have something to do with being contacted when Kenneth began asking for attorney. And that part of the case is going to be challenged. a lot and we're going to get there because I want your opinion on this. Kenneth Osborne's defense eventually went to three attorneys. It was a team, Jim Wyatt, Patrick Benka, and Catherine

Street. And the public was already talking because of what law enforcement had told them. Jim Snyder actually went on TV and said that DNA evidence and interviews is what led to Kenneth's arrest. The Associated Press reported that Kenner's Kenneth had been linked to Casey's death through a DNA sample and other evidence. And at the arraignment, the prosecutor himself told reporters that surveillance tapes and DNA evidence linked Kenneth to the killing. The authorities were confident they had the right guy, and Casey's family believed they had the right person as well. And hold on to that because I'm going to come back to it. Meanwhile, Kenneth's mother Ruth, she had been going on camera even before her son.

had ever been charged, saying she knew he was innocent, and that she hoped the real killer would be found because she knew he wasn't guilty. The trial was eventually moved out of that county because he would have not been able to get a fair jury there. They had already made up their mind, and there were a number of people who wanted him dead. Finally, in January of 2008, 16 months after Casey died, the trial began in Ashley County. The charges were capital murder and kidnapping, and the kidnapping charge specified a purpose, that he had taken her to inflict physical injury on her, to terrorize her, or to force her into an act against her will. The prosecutor's theory was straightforward. A girl was stranded on the side of a highway.

A man came along and presented himself as helpful. She got in because she trusted him. He drove for six miles out to a canal road, tried to have his way with her. She put up a fight. he grabbed a zip tie, ran behind her, put it over her neck, clasped it tight to control her, and realized he could not get it off. So he left her there helplessly to die. It's brutal. But the defense told the jury that what happened to Casey was horrifying, that she did not deserve a second of it. But that Kenneth didn't do it. That someone else must have driven by and maybe their car was hidden. And I thought this was interesting

because it was a fairly good argument. What they said is maybe when this other person's car, the real killer's vehicle, had passed by Sonic footage, maybe it was hidden by a semi-truck. Because let's say the truck and this other vehicle were going at the same speed,

maybe you wouldn't see it because the semi-truck would be the only thing on Sonic cameras. Or maybe they'd be the only thing on Sonic cameras. Or maybe they'd be. just took a different route. And the defense said they were going to present witnesses who saw things that contradicted the state. Plus, the state only had two things, the confession and the CCTV. And remember I told you I was going to circle back to the DNA? Well, it's going to be

quite a big reveal because the truth was Kenneth's DNA was not on anything, not on the zip tie, not on her body. And her DNA was never found in his car either. That was all lies. That was all a lie the detectives told him to get that confession. So the confession was really all they had besides his truck on camera. And the jury heard everything that you have. They saw their surveillance of the truck, southbound at Sonic at 642, northbound at 645, moving faster, and then east. on the dollar general footage on the 165 highway headed out of town. They heard from Casey's mom, the medical examiner, that Casey had died of strangulation, and the doctor described zip tie, how it had been pulled down so tight around her neck

that it formed a circle about three inches across. That was it, that it had not slipped into place, that someone had deliberately clasped it down, that the ligature would have cut off the blood flow to her, brain and that she would have been unconscious within seconds, 20 at the most. And then the jury heard something else. The thing that was hanging over this entire case. The Casey had been outside for six days in Arkansas. And that decomposition was severe enough that they could not determine if there were

any injuries on her body. No defensive wounds. Nothing. Not because they were never there, but because they were never there. but because they could no longer have been proven because they didn't have the evidence. That was the biggest issue, that if there was evidence there, it was already gone. The Crowder family sat through most of this, but when the autopsy photographs went up in that courtroom, they left. Even the state's own DNA examiner from the state crime lab testify that she could not link Kenneth to Casey.

and she explained everything how water and heat degrades DNA that recovering anything usable was unlikely. But it did seem negligent that 16 months earlier, Snyder, the sheriff-elect at the time, had told the public that DNA led them to Kenneth. Even this same prosecutor had said that DNA linked him to the killing. But that's not true. But then the state pointed out the rip in the boxer.

that she was wearing. The state's position was that Kenneth intended to force himself on her, and that tear was the physical evidence for it. But the defense countered that, saying, well, couldn't have been from normal wear? And I get that. Like, maybe at another point, it ripped somehow, and she never changed them or maybe they came from a boyfriend's house. Girls were wearing boxers as regular shorts in 2006. The defense also said it could have been from animal activity in that area, but why not on her underwear underneath then? Didn't really make that much sense. And there was evidence to support the state's theory in the form of a witness named Connie Sparks. She was there to tell the jury about something that happened back in

1981, so 27 years before this trial. She had known Kenneth since they were children. And at that time, he was actually engaged to her sister. Connie was about 18 years old, married, and her husband, drove a truck and he was gone a lot and she said Kenneth just showed up at her house and said that his car had broken down and asked Connie if she would drive him out to his car and she did

and Connie said when they got to an isolated spot near the Arkansas River he grabbed her by the throat tore at her clothing and put his hands on her and tried to get down her pants she said she kicked him

and she finally got away. It sounds very similar to what could have happened to Casey. The defense had fought so hard to keep that information out of that courtroom because it was 27 years ago and it never produced a conviction. But the judge let it in. And then the defense did something that I still cannot explain. They decide not to cross-examine Connie at all. And then, of course, the state had an eyewitness.

Remember her, Nancy Dunn, the person who worked with Holly? She told them all about seeing Kenneth every Sunday. She told the jury that he didn't waive that day and that she saw a person slumped over in the passenger seat. But on cross-examination, the defense attorney went right at her memory and they got the thing that they wanted most. Nancy had described the passenger having dark hair. She actually said it looked black.

Casey had blonde hair. And Kenneth's family had an explanation for maybe why Nancy thought she saw a passenger but actually saw something else. A seat organizer. I'm going to show one on the screen. Most of us have seen these before. Most of us have used one of these before. Kenneth supposedly had one on the back of the passenger seat and maybe was in some kind of position where it appeared to lean towards him. And if someone was driving past like Nancy was, when there wasn't that much daylight out,

she could have thought it looked like a person. When it was the defense's turn, they worked on dismantling the timeline. I'm just going to tell you before you even hear any of this, to me, it didn't really matter. It was immaterial. What the defense was trying to argue was that Casey's vehicle had broken down in the middle of the night way before 5 a.m. But what's the difference? her cell phone data put her there on that road at 5.30 calling her mom and telling her mom in her own voice where she was. And I'm telling you this.

Because the defense was going to almost attack some of Casey's character, saying, you know, she was partying the night before, sleeping at her boyfriend's house, lying to her mom, that there was a house party right behind Exxon, supposedly, and that that car broke down at 1 a.m. and they were about to put people on the stand that were going to tell this court and this jury that they saw that vehicle with its flashers on in the middle of the night. And they did. They called a woman, Debbie Stokes. She said she was driving through sometime at 1.30 that morning, and she and her husband had to change lanes to get around a large SUV sitting on the shoulder. And then another woman, Annette Harvey, who worked at Delta Memorial.

as a CNA. She said she used to be a police officer, which obviously was mentioned because they wanted to boost her credibility. She was working at 2 o'clock in the morning when she saw a vehicle less than a quarter mile down the road out the window with its flashers going. And she knew the exact time because she said a call came into the hospital that night asking about a patient she was taking care of. and she walked out right to that window.

She was walking by and she saw that vehicle out there with its flashers. Three more witnesses said they saw a similar vehicle on that same spot between three and a quarter to five in the morning. And when Annette got off work that morning, she got a better look when it wasn't dark and it appeared to be Casey's SUV. So five different people said that they saw the Durango there before 5 a.m. But again, who cares? Well, the defense did, because they were posing it like this. The state story is that she left Adams between 5 and 5.30, ran out of gas and got picked up shortly

after 7. But if that SUV was sitting there at 2 in the morning, then either it was a different vehicle or Casey was on the side of that highway for five hours before she called anyone. And I was like, no. Because even if they ran out of gas, let's say on their way to the party, and they were like, you know what, let's forget about it. Let's get the car later. We'll just leave it here and we'll get a ride. It doesn't change the fact that Casey was at that car at 5.30 on the phone with her mom. But they were going with the alternative suspect theory.

So they were kind of posing it like, could it have been Adam, her boyfriend? Who, by the way, they had completely ruled out by now. Or could it be Jimmy or Jay? the two guys that saw her vehicle didn't do anything and then told Adam about it later when they got back to the house and then went fishing. Remember, she did make several calls to Jimmy that morning. So could that be reasonable doubt? Because what those witnesses could not establish is that Casey was ever out there before 5.30 a.m. They just saw a vehicle, not a girl. The second direction the defense was going in was a barbecue, which I think kind of best.

backfired as well. There was a cookout down by the river that same morning that Casey was killed. And a woman named Sharon Williams testified that Kenneth showed up at 10 o'clock, that he called her at 9.30 to ask whether he needs to bring anything along. She said that he seemed completely normal. He walked in, he was wearing a white v-neck shirt, cut off shorts, didn't have any blood on them or anything, but I'm like, why would they when she was strangled? However, on cross-examination, The prosecution was able to get her to admit that she noticed the scratches on Kenneth's arms. She said she assumed that it came from his pets. But that was important because she noticed them.

And then she had to explain why they would be on his arms. This was before anyone was accusing Kenneth of anything. And I thought, huh, it stood out enough to her that she had to come up with her own explanation as to why they would be on his body. And on cross-examination, the prosecution was able to get everyone at that barbecue to admit that they had no idea where he was before he got there at 10 o'clock. That would have been plenty of time to do what was done to Casey and go home and shower and wash and fold his clothes like he admitted he did. And all he had to do to get home was to drive that same road that ran right in front of Canal 43. and he wouldn't have been caught on any of those cameras, because he would have been taking the long way back.

There was also his log book. So Kenneth drove for a USA truck company, and drivers keep their own logs. They write down when they fuel up and what route they're taking, and his own logbook put him in Louisiana the day before on the 26th. And he logged that he was still in the last, Louisiana the next day, but he was off duty and just in the city on his free time when Casey

disappeared. Not true at all. Since his own witnesses and his daughter put him at the nursing home on that road and also at a barbecue in town. So even by his own self-recorded paperwork, he contradicted where he had been. That was not a good look. So the defense had to go with the one thing they could possibly attack. And that was the tactics the detectives used by lying to Kenneth to get those confessions. I told you they're allowed to lie. But remember that things got a little unethical because they kept mentioning his children. They were essentially threatening him to tell the truth or else they would put his own daughter in jail. And Kenneth said it himself, those children were his world. When his wife died, all he cared about was at a

children would grow up and they would be safe. And at that point in his life, he said that when he was being interviewed, he didn't care if he lived or died. He didn't care about dying. He would rather be with his wife. So essentially, give him the death penalty if you don't believe him. He'd be back with the woman that he loved. So he went along with it. And he made a false confession. Well, to bolster this, the defense called a man named Richard Leo. He was a sociologist out of San Francisco who studied interrogations and Leo reviewed the audio and the video from that shed and they asked him to rate the techniques on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst and he put it at a 9. That's pretty bad.

And I'm going to admit to you when I watched it, I did cringe at many moments. I don't necessarily agree with how they conducted this interview, but he did confess. And why would he confess to something he didn't do? Well, because people do this. It's documented.

It's not as rare as you might think. Of all the people exonerated by DNA in this country, roughly a quarter of them had made false confessions. People sat in rooms and described crimes that they had nothing to do with

in detail. And then later, their DNA proved they had nothing to do. with it. And when researchers looked at how it even happens, they find some of the same conditions that show up here. Long interrogations, sleep deprivation, being told the evidence is overwhelming when it's not. And a suspect becomes convinced that there's no version of their story that's going to be believed and they're not walking out. So the only question that's left to them

becomes what's the best outcome? And at some point, for these people, confessing feels like a way out, a transaction. It's going to make it all stop. Kenneth had been awake by his account for something like 36 hours. His daughter was in a building somewhere and she was going to get charged in his mind. He had been told there was so much evidence. It was overwhelming. And some of what he told was not true. He had asked for a lawyer three, separate times across two nights and never got one. And then he confessed twice. So here's my thought, which I told you I was going to give you. And you can tell me yours. I hold all of this at once. He confessed, but he's also a man that if he didn't do it, he had every reason to say that loudly.

But he didn't. He was even in the presence of his former boss. And instead of doing something like begging him, like, hey, you know me, you know I didn't do this. Please believe me. He didn't. He did the opposite. He became more relaxed and more detailed about the event. However, the way they went about getting these confessions was not clean cut. Taking him out to a shed, giving him satellite photos that didn't even exist telling him his DNA broke the whole case. Well, actually, it broke him down. And that's what makes this case what it is. Confusing. Which also could be reasonable doubt. Pretty much what the state had was circled. circumstantial evidence, which is still evidence and can still convict someone, which is the prosecutor's point.

In closing, the prosecutor wanted the jury to remember something. Circumstantial cases work by accumulation. He said any skilled lawyer can take the facts, separate them all out, and attack them one at a time. He called it one of the oldest tricks in the book. When Westcham first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board.

Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. And I trust you see through it. What he was trying to tell the jury was that no single piece proves anything, but the combination becomes harder to explain innocently. And he has a point. A truck resembling Kennets, going the wrong direction, turning around, three minutes apart, driven right in location where this young woman was standing, the marks on his body.

Any one of those things could have an innocent explanation on their own. But altogether, in the same 25 minutes, is a different story. The prosecutor was telling the jury not to let the defense dismantle the picture. into pieces small enough to just kind of shrug at. And Arkansas juries are actually instructed on this. Circumstantial evidence can support a conviction, and they're told to consider the evidence as a whole, to put it together. But there is another way to look at it.

A jury reaches reasonable doubt by testing the evidence, and testing does mean taking it apart. And in a case where maybe there's 10 weak things that are stacked up into one big thing, taking it apart is exactly the thing that should happen before adding them all together and getting a verdict. So if you were on this jury, what would you conclude? I think I pretty much know what most of your answers would be. Here's a reminder of what they had. A truck on three different cameras, a man whose story about that morning changed, marks on his body with two different explanations, a woman who saw something in the passenger seat, but it was a wrong color hair,

a tear in a pair of shorts with three possible causes. An accusation from back in 1981, no DNA, and two recorded statements in which Kenneth said he did it and explained how. Those tapes went to the jury. They watched them. And they concluded that Kenneth was guilty. and they convicted him on January 18th of capital murder and kidnapping. And then they went back to decide whether he should die or he should live. And they couldn't agree.

Eleven of them wanted the death penalty, but one didn't. And because they were deadlocked, Arkansas law took it out of their hands, and the judge imposed the sentence himself, life without parole for Casey's murder, and a second life sentence for the kidnapping. Casey's mother, Melinda, spoke, and she said, you could have pushed her out of that truck. You could have done anything else, but instead you put a zip tie around her neck and watched her die.

And she told him he killed a part of her as well. Now, I don't want to drag this out too long, but something else did happen. I think you should know about it. Kenneth appealed immediately, and his lawyers went after the one thing that convicted him, the tapes. It took until June of the first. 2009 but the Arkansas Supreme Court came back and it reversed both of the convictions

yep and it came down to two things if you're in custody and you ask for a lawyer the questioning is supposed to stop and the second ground for reversal was coercion and this is the part that I want to be more precise about it was not the threats of the death penalty or the lies or anything like that what the court could not get past was Holly. Deception is legal. Buying a confession with someone's daughter is not legal. It did not say he was innocent. It did not say the remaining evidence was too weak for a conviction, but it said that the jury should not have heard those tapes. And the state said they would do it all again. Even without the tapes, they were that confident that Kenneth was the killer.

He stayed in custody. And then the fight became about whether Arkansas could convict him a second time and that the death penalty could still be on the table. Because remember, the jurors never acquitted him of the death penalty. They just couldn't agree on it. So guess what? The state was going to seek it again. And on June 18th of 2014, about two months before that second trial was to start, Kenneth pleaded guilty. He got 30 years on second degree murder and 10 years for kidnapping. That was the deal. A consecutive of 40 years total with credit for time served, which was about 3,000 days, give or take, I don't know, 100 of them. But Kenneth wasn't okay with that. He tried to take back his plea deal almost immediately. Okay, Brian Koberger, but it was almost like the same argument. Blame

it on counsel. Kenneth said he was led to believe that he was going to get out in just a few years, but the written agreement he signed said 40 years. And the plea hearing had him acknowledging 40 years out loud on the record, so it was denied. He was staying in prison. I have looked at this case from every angle that I know how to look at a case, and I have to tell you honestly, I don't know the truth. But there is no explanation for why he turned that truck around. None that makes sense, at least, at least not to me, or why he headed towards where her body was found instead of towards home on the same road. I do think, regardless of what perpetrators' own family members think of them, they can and do have all kinds of thoughts and inclinations in their minds that we will know

nothing about. And I think if he is guilty like the jury believed he was and like he confessed to and also pleaded guilty to, then I can get behind one thing, possibly, that he didn't know how tight the zip tie would get. But what I can say is, you know, putting it on someone's neck risks that they will die. So I think his intentions were to have his way with her, but it went wrong, and she fought him. And he chose to use an item that he himself said he could not take off, so he panicked and left. That's the only thing I could come up with. If he's not guilty, and this is a case of being in the wrong, the wrong, place at the very wrong time. And it's a very unfortunate situation where his truck

that's very recognizable just happen to be on both roads related to this case and her murder. I hope that one day maybe DNA testing can get to the point where he can be exonerated and they can prove his innocence. Kenneth Ray Osborne is still in prison. He became eligible for parole on February 5th of 2025 and it went before the board. in August of 2024 and it was denied. And there are two petitions that are still out there as we speak. And one is from people who love Casey Crowder asking the state of Arkansas to never let him out. And the other petition is from his own daughter.

Holly is still out there 20 years later trying to bring her father home. And I have to say I feel for both of these families. But for Casey's family, It has been an unimaginable tragedy. Melinda Crowder refused to let her daughter just be a case number. A year after Casey was murdered. They started a softball tournament in her name. Back to the American Eastern Little League fields in Pine Bluff

where that bossy little girl teased her brothers and spent most of her childhood. They sell concessions and they sell t-shirts and the money goes to a scholarship fund that carries her name. And every single year, Melinda hands out scholarships to girls who played on the same field that Casey had played on. Girls who are about to start their lives, which is exactly what Casey was just days away from doing. So I'm so sorry to her family and for what happened to Casey. And I'm so thankful for all of you being here for Casey's story. I will see you in my very next video.

Bye.