Transcript of Jessica

Introducing IVF Disrupted: The Kind Body Story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. It grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients.

You think you're finally in the right-hand.

You're just not. Listen to IVF Disrupted: The Kind Body Story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield.

It's a freaking war zone. These people are animals.

The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Gregoriades, this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime. My husband said, Your dad's been killed. This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast, Exploring the murder of Jim Melgar. I was just completely in shock. Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound. It didn't feel real at all. More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers. We're still fighting. Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Heads up, this series contains graphic descriptions of violence. On the morning of August first, 2000, a teacher preparing for the first day of classes noticed something on the ground near the flower beds behind the Mayfield Middle School.

I saw this sandal laying right by the door. There's a little concrete pad there, and I saw the sandal laying there, and I just thought, I wonder what that sandal is doing there.

As her sight shifted away from the sandal scanning the school grounds, the teacher saw something else.

When I looked over to the left is when I saw the body.

There's not a lot of bodies found in Mayfield, Kentucky. No. When you heard there was one, what were you thinking?

Our mind was racing. But when you've never had nothing like this happen before, it gives you a little thought that, No, it's not happening to me.

This is Joe Curran. For two days before Jessica's body was found, he and his wife, Jean, had been searching for their 18-year-old daughter. The next day, police identified the body with the help of dental records and Joe and Jean. It was Jessica. They recognized the jewelry on their daughter's hands.

It's the loneliest crime scene I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot.

You met Dara Wollman on the last episode. Like me, Dara has poured over pictures and video of the crime scene.

She just looked as if she had been tossed out the back, the way her shoe was. All the jewelry still on her. And it was like everything that she had that she felt it was a value She had on her still, but she was all by herself. It was just long way.

According to police, Jessica's murder was the first in Mayfield in over a a year and a half. They told the press that the school grounds appeared to be the scene of the crime, that there were signs of a struggle and then a homicide.

We're getting the information that she was beaten, strangled, stalled, and burned. I don't know how it could get much worse. And then her body was dumped behind the middle school.

I first Joe Curran in 2023. He was born in Graves County in 1957, just a year after Mayfield started to desegregate its public schools.

I'm a country boy, and I went to some few schools out in the county, and they didn't have any Black students at all.

You were the only Black kid?

Yes.

What was that like?

Well, I mean, it's like most of my life.

Joe was among that first generation of Black children to study in what had been white only schools in a county that has always been majority white, 90% as of the last census. This is the world Joe grew up in.

I ride horses and go to rodeos and stuff. A lot of places that I go, the basketball games and football games. It's a whole stadium full of people. A lot of times, I'm the only Black person there. I go to a lot of farmers meetings, 300 people. I may be the only Black person in the room. I mean, it don't mean anything to me.

Joe learned to thrive in this world. He played defense for the high school football team, the beloved Mayfield Cardinals, worked as a bailiff, and ran his own business.

I'm a fish farmer, so I eat fish ponds there.

What fish? Catfish. Catfish. He became a lieutenant in the fire department and went to church every Sunday. Joe Curran did right by Mayfield. So when his daughter was brutally killed, Joe thought Mayfield do right by him. Instead, local police bundled the case, and it went unsolved for years.

This is Graves County, Chapter 2, Jessica. Depending on who you ask, there are dozens of versions of what happened to Jessica between the time she was reportedly last seen and the time her body was found. You already heard one version last episode. But that's different from the story about the final days of Jessica Curren's life that were first put on the record. This is according to my team's own reporting, court testimony, police interviews, and private investigator interviews, which you'll be hearing throughout this episode, all of which have been edited for length and clarity. In July of 2000, Jessica had a seven-month-old baby named Zion. She was close with her family, shared a room at home with Zion and her baby's sister, but she wanted her independence. So Jessica got her own apartment at an affordable housing complex in the southeast part of town. Though she was slow to fully move out, says.

The first whole week, she stayed at home. In the second week, she moved out on Thursday. She went to her house on Thursday, and she was there on Friday and then Saturday.

That Saturday morning, Jessica dropped off Zion with her parents, and she went to hang out with some girlfriends, including her boyfriend's cousin, Vinisha Stubblefield. You heard her name last episode. Vinisha and Jessica had become friends earlier that year.

Me and Jessica just started really actually hanging out in 2000. She was going to a dark learning center to get her GED for when she dropped out of high school when she was pregnant. She went to the GED school.

They crossed paths after class.

When she was coming from GED school, and I was coming from summer school.

Vinisha, a wiry girl with giant eyes, was among the very first people interviewed by police.

. She was 16 at the time.

According to Vinisha, she, Jessica, and a few other girls hung out at a friend's house playing cards and having drinks that night.

We all sit there, play a course, listening music. We had a few drinks.

We did. Meanwhile, in another part of town, there was a party on a street called Chris Drive. It's about a 10-minute drive south from where Jessica was hanging and a little more rural, surrounded by fields. Hanging out were a handful of locals and 24-year-old Quincy Cross. Quincy lived in Tennessee, but a friend had convinced him to go to Mayfield and hang. He could even sell some drugs there.

He was like, Come on, man. If you go, we'll bring you back later on.

Some partygoers say Quincy stood out that night, not just because he was an out-of-towner, but because he was rowdy. He kept wanting to play drinking games and was fidgeting with his braided belt.

He had a black-braided belt on, and he was swinging it around the night. Because while he was talking to us in the living room, he was flickering at the end of it, flicking around while he was talking?

It stuck out in my mind because he had taken the belt off and was swinging it around and wrapping it around his hands and making noise with it.

I think at some point, Ashley and I both looked at each other and thought, That's annoying.

Meanwhile, back at the other gathering, the low-key one with the girls playing cards, Jessica decided to call it a night around 1: 00 or 2: 00 AM. Her friends tried to get her a ride home, but no one was available, so Jessica had to go back to her apartment on foot. Venetia walked Jessica outside to say goodbye.

We stood there, we talked for a brief minute. Then after that, she left, and she walked by herself.

Vinisha says she told Jessica to take care and watched her disappear into the night. So this was the night that we think everything happened. She leaves there and it starts walking.

She's walking somewhere along here.

I charted that with Joe Curran and a private investigator. It would have been at least a 40-minute journey, alone in the dark.

But that'd be a long walk for her at that time of day. Not that she wasn't capable of doing it, but I don't know how smart that would be.

The middle school is halfway to Jessica's place, and it would have been desolate.

This town pretty much dies in the dark.

Back at the party on Chris Drive, Quincy asked to borrow someone's car around day break. He says he wanted to go find food.

I'm hungry now. I'm like, Man, how do you get to town? So he wanted in a direction. I asked him, Let me use this car.

But some of the other partygoers remember it differently.

He was on the phone quite frequently that night and was calling back to Unis City in different places, saying that he found some women at a hotel or something or another.

He He recalls Quincy saying he wanted to- Get some bitches.

Sorry. Get some bitches.

So he borrowed the car and drove off. But remember, it's 2000. He'd been partying. We didn't have Google Maps or anything like that back then. So Quincy says he got lost on those rural roads.

I can end up making a big loop, a big old circle. So when I do that, the car runs out of gas.

It stalled about two miles from Chris Drive. That's when a local jailer saw Quincy pulled over and asked if he needed help.

I popped his trunk and it was a gas can. You know what I'm saying? It was in his trunk.

The jailer watched him put gas in the car and spill some on himself.

It was gas. He's standing right beside me. So he see me drop a couple of drops of gas on my parents leg. He see me doing.

There's no disputing that the jailer found Quincy putting gas in a car. But there doesn't seem to be a consensus as to where exactly the gas can came from. Here's the car's owner at trial.

Was that your gas can? No, sir. I didn't have a gas can in my car. Did Mr. Cross tell you where he got that gas can?

He said he stole it from a building or something somewhere around the road.

He got to put gas in my car to try to get the gas station, so probably.

Either way, around 7: 50 AM, a state trooper driving by guy noticed Quincy right away.

He had no shirt on, could see multiple tattoos. He had a pair of dark pants on with no belt.

Quincy quibbles with some of those details.

I had a T-shirt on. He kept saying, I didn't have no T-shirt on. I did have a T-shirt on.

But the trooper says he specifically noticed Quincy didn't have a belt on.

The pants were drooping. I could see his boxer shorts. He kept having to pull him up while we were having conversations.

The state trooper gave Quincy a ride back to Chris Drive, and when the trooper went to retrieve the stalled car, he says he found marijuana seeds on the front seat and a handgun in the glove box. That gave him enough to go back to Chris Drive and search all the partygoers for more drugs or weapons. Quincy, along with a few others at the party, ended up getting arrested early Sunday for drug possession. One of the guys booked with Quincy remembers the smell.

And he stunk of gasoline. I mean, it was just rigging on him. He smelled like gas.

Later that Sunday morning, Jessica's parents, Joe and Jean, went to pick up Jessica so they could all go to church with Zion, but they didn't find her. At first, Joe thought she's probably still out with friends. When did you realize something was really wrong?

Well, working at the fire department and the Sheriff's Department, I knew that once a person is a grown up at 18, you can't really do nothing with a missing person until so many hours. But we're already feeling like something wasn't right because she hadn't been calling.

Sunday went by, then Monday, and still no sign of their daughter. Until the teacher found the body on Tuesday. She'd been burned. Part of her dress charred onto her body. Her sandals were strewn as if she'd been dragged or had run. Her underwear was found ripped in two next to her on the ground. According to the medical examiner, Jessica appeared to have been hit in the head. Her nose was broken. She had some cuts around her face and what appeared to be stab wounds in her back. He determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma plus strangulation, based on another piece of evidence found near Jessica's body. The fragment of a black-braided belt laying near her neck. More after the break. Power struggles, shady money, drugs, violence, and broken promises.

It's a freaking war zone. These people are animals.

There's no integrity, there's no loyalty.

That's all gone.

In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield.

Book, book, book. It's like deals. Let's get models in. Let's get them out.

And the models themselves, they carried scars that never fully healed. Until this day, honestly, if I see a measuring tape, I freak out. The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Gregoriades, this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I started trying to get pregnant about four years ago now.

We were getting a little bit older, and it just felt like the window could be closing. Bloomberg and iHeart podcast present, IVF Disrupted: The Kind Body Story. A podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. Introducing Kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care. Backed by millions in venture capital and private equity, it grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients.

You think you're finally with the right people in the right hands, and then to find out again that you're just not. Don't be fooled.

By what?

All the bright and shiny.

Listen to IVF Disrupted, The Kind Body Story, starting September 19 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My is Ed. Everyone say, Hello, Ed.

Hello, Ed. I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer, and my mom is a cousin. So it's not like...

What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago.

I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.

On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear. On the 22nd of July, 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wise Crack, where stand-up, comedy, and murder take center stage. Available now. Listen to Wise Crack on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For a brief moment in time, Joe Curran had everything he wanted. He and his wife, Jean, got married young, and their plan was to have two boys and two girls.

I wanted boy first, then girl second, and that's the way we had them. We had a boy and a girl, and then another boy and a girl.

All their names start with J. Is Jessica the youngest?

No, she's the second oldest. Okay.

Joe Curran is the man who looks like he carries the weight of the world. He stands tall and proud with the build of a football player. But his eyes are sunken and tired, revealing decades of pain.

That's a picture I heard her older brother.

I'm sitting with Joe going through old family photographs.

This is a picture of my wife, and she's holding her there.

A tiny Jessica in a frilly white dress and white bonnet.

Probably going to church.

Jessica was pretty with big, brown, almond-shaped eyes and a wide, perfectly white smile. She looks like Joe, a spitting image of her dad. She usually wore her hair in a cute short bob, and she was tall.

Was she tall? Yeah, she was about 5'9, 5'10.

Yeah, she's like a little string bee in here. She's tall and skinny. Yeah. And athletic. She ran track, and she was a solid '90s teen who liked Tupac and the X-Files.

She was the only one that would watch the X-Files with me. She could keep up with it. My wife gets lost on it, and she can't keep. She don't have the patience.

Joe's wife, Jean, isn't sitting with us.

I have to apologize for my wife. She's still pretty shook up.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. While she's talked to press in the past, Jean just isn't up for it today. I can't say I blame her. After years of telling strangers about your dead child, what else is there to say except, I'm in pain and I miss her.

She still goes down to the gravesite at least once or twice a week sometimes. They were close. They were close friends. I mean, about as close as you could be for A mother and a daughter. It's her oldest daughter, yeah. Yeah, almost like two sisters. It really, really hurt her.

She told me- After two years of reporting on this case, I can say that from all I've gathered, Jessica was sweet and loving, but she was also feisty and brave.

Jessica cut a boy one time for calling her the N-word. She pulled out a blade in cutting.

This is an old police interview of Jessica's best friend saying Jessica once pulled a knife on a boy for calling her the N-word.

If she had a problem, she would hit you or whatever she felt necessary to defend herself.

Jessica Lindsay met Jessica Curran at Graves County High.

I consider her one of my best friends. She was a very outgoing person, very down to earth. What caught my attention about her in school was that she stood up for people like when they would get picked on, and she didn't allow that. If she seen it going on, she would put a stop to it. So I mean, she was just a very, very kind girl. Very, very kind girl. She would pretty much do anything for anybody.

And she was also a teenager who, in the summer of 2000, was getting over heartache. She had her baby in December 1999, a little boy named Zion. And Jessica thought that baby's dad was a boy named Marcus.

She used to sneak out her bedroom window to go see him.

But after Zion was born, Jessica got the news.

She was trying to get child support ordered for Marcus or whatever, and they'd done a DNA test, and it came back negative. Or however they'd come back, it wasn't his.

It hit her hard, especially when she realized that if Marcus wasn't the dad, then it had to be a local drug dealer named Jeremy Adams, a guy she barely knew and didn't even like. According to her friend, they had just hung out once and smoked some weed.

We all went back to my house and we smoked a blunt and hung out. Who was that? Marijuana. And we hung out or whatever. And that night, he forced Basically, took her around the building and they had sex. It was like two seconds. They were around there and came back, and he walked off, and that was that.

That was that. A baby came nine months later.

She was very upset when she found out it wasn't Marcus. She was very upset. This was after Zion was born. She stopped messing with Marcus, and she started messing with Lolo.

Carlos Lolo-Saxton, Venetia Stubblefield's cousin and another local drug dealer. A dreamy one at that. A year older with sad puppy eyes, they started seeing each other in the spring of 2000.

I mean, she liked him. She really liked him.

It was panning out to be a good summer for young Jessica. Meeting a boy she liked, moving out on her own. So much to look forward to. In the months that followed his daughter's killing, Joe walked around in a daze, in a nightmare. He remembers sitting at a restaurant.

I was sitting at the table by myself, and this waitress come over and said to me, You look like you lost the last person in the world. You look like you'd all lost your best friend. She didn't know. She had no clue. She apologized later because she found out what happened and she knew who I was. And she apologized later. She said, I had no clue that that was your daughter because it just showed on my face me sitting there by myself. It just showed.

One of the few comforts the Curran family had was believing that soon, eventually, they'd find whoever did this to Jessica, and they'd be able to ask how and why, and hopefully, get some sense of justice. The man put in charge of Jessica Kern's murder investigation was Tim Fortner, a patrolman who had just been promoted to detective. This was his very first murder investigation. And according to interviews, press reports, and court filings, Fortner and his small town police Department were out of their depths. The problem seemed to have started from the get-go. Here's again.

Okay, so it took forever for them to rope off the crime scene. Right.

They didn't log who came and went or properly canvas the neighborhood.

No statements were taken at the scene.

They also threw away the maggots they found on Jessica's body. Maggots could have helped determine how long her body had been decomposing. Without them, it was hard for the medical examiner to determine an exact time of death.

In supplemental The reports that I've read by the police, they're like, Do we keep her underwear? What about the 7 Up bottle?

They threw away part of Jessica's dress, and a couple rape swaps from other crime scenes were mixed in with the evidence boxes for Jessica's case.

So no one is in charge? Is the blind leading the blind?

I found Fortner's number and called him to ask about the investigation. Hello. Hi, I'm looking for Mr. Tim Mr. Fortner? I interrupted his evening at home. This is Tim. Hi, Mr. Fortner. My name is Maggie Freeling. How are you?

I'm well. How are you?

He still lives in Kentucky. As far as I can tell, his last gig in law enforcement was as a school resource officer in another county, and he hosts a show on the side for WKMS, the local public radio station. I am a journalist, and I am reporting on the Jessica Curren case. Going through the documents, you were the first responding officer, so I was hoping you'd want to talk.

Yeah, I was, but I'm in the middle of dinner, and I don't have any... There's nothing to comment on.

Okay. Well, I appreciate it.

Okay.

Well, yeah, I'm actually in town. Could I meet you tomorrow, perhaps? Well, probably not. Probably not, as in no.

Do you could contact the state, please?

Okay.

I'm not sure to appreciate you calling me.

A very polite no. Thank you. Have a great day. All right. You too. Bye. But Fortner has spoken to the press before, and he's admitted that he wasn't the man for the job. In 2004, he told Tom Mangold, the BBC reporter, that, I didn't have a clue what to do next. He said, I didn't know how organize a crime scene or look for forensic evidence. Frankly, I was scared stiff. He even admitted this to the currents.

Told us, me and my wife, that he had no clue what he was doing. He didn't know what he was doing.

He tells this to you. The lead detective on your daughter's homicide case says to you, I don't know what I'm doing.

He said, I don't know what I'm doing. That's his words.

On top of that, the Mayfield Police Department was dealing with a flurry of internal investigations and allegations of malfeasance. The chief and assistant chief were ousted and eventually pled guilty to felony charges for misusing public funds, including money that police had confiscated from drug arrests. Mayfield Police Department was a mess. Fortner and his team had chased some leads, interviewed many people, and pinpointed a few suspects, but it all fell apart. The rookie detective's first big case, a failure. In 2003, Fortner quit, and the Kentucky State Police had to step in to take over the case. The state police pursued some lines of investigation, but didn't seem to get far either. And as the years went by, Joe had to fight to keep his daughter's case top of mind.

We've had protests at the court House several times. We've had one at Mitch McDonald's office, the leading senator from Kentucky in Paducah.

Even Reverend Dow Sharpton's National Action Network got involved.

We went to Frankfurt to the attorney general's office. We went to the FBI office, the US attorney's office. We didn't do all of that stuff.

But what Joe didn't know at first was that another person was also growing increasingly frustrated by law enforcement failures and decided to stop watching from the sidelines. Susan Galbraith, the citizen sleuth who you met last episode, embarked on a whole investigation of her own. As she started digging into the files, a name stood out. Quincy.

Quincy. Quincy. Quincy. Quincy. I don't know what's left. I don't know what's left. Is it Cros?

After the break. Power struggles, shady money, drugs, violence, and broken promises.

It's a freaking war zone.

These people are animals.

There's no integrity, there's no loyalty. That's all gone.

In the 1980s, modeling wasn't not just a dream. It was a battlefield.

Book, book, book. Nice deals. Let's get models in. Let's get them out.

And the models themselves, they carried scars that never fully healed. Until this day, honestly, if I see a measuring tape, I freak out. The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Gregoriades, this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless This is Ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I Started trying to get pregnant about four years ago now.

We were getting a little bit older, and it just felt like the window could be closing. Bloomberg and iHeart podcast present IVF Disrupted: The Kind Body Story. A podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. Introducing Kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care. Backed by millions in venture capital and private equity, it grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients.

You think you're finally with the right people in the right hands, and then to find out again that you're just not. Don't be fooled.

By what?

All the bright and shiny.

Listen to IVF Disrupted, The Kind Body Story, starting September 19 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Ed. Everyone say, Hello, Ed.

Hello, Ed. I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer, and my mom is a cousin. So it's not like...

What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that was my reality nine years ago.

I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.

On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear. On 22nd of July, 2015, a 23 old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wise Crack, where stand-up, comedy, and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wise Crack on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Susan said she'd felt a connection to Jessica Curran since the day her body was found, and she went to look at the crime scene, that she was called a divine power to help find her killer. But as far as I can tell, she didn't actually act on that calling until four years after the murder, when Susan began talking to the Kentucky State Police and getting updates on the case.

Hello. Susan? Yeah. Hey, this is Sam.

And started both prying on and cooperating with the investigation.

Hi. How are you? I'm fine. I'm surprised I hadn't heard from you. Well, I've been off. I hadn't been working any this week. In reviewing her correspondence, tape recordings, and court testimony, I found that at times the detectives kept Susan at arm's length, but they often entertained her ideas and followed up on her tips. But Lieutenant Ken had called and said he spoke with you and said that you had some new information or something that you wanted to be paid. No, it was the same information I need to find where I'm going.

And this emboldened Susan to start conducting a parallel investigation, even though, as she testified in court, she had no experience. Other than that, have you had any law enforcement training or education in the area of law enforcement?

No. Just a lot of court TV.

It was also around this time that Susan started working with British journalist Tom Mangold, who flew to Mayfield in the spring of 2004.

So So he was in Mayfield for 10 days. When he left, I continued to dig.

Susan kept digging through police records that Tom helped get and interviewing people. She even started wearing a wire.

I kept a recorder pinned to my body or ducttaped at all times.

All with a main suspect in mind.

Quincy became the top of the list.

Susan had seen Jessica's autopsy, pictures from the scene of the crime, and the police from the weekend she was last seen alive. And there she noticed that a man named Quincy Cross had come to town. Witnesses heard him asking about finding girls, and he had been arrested, smelling of gas with his belt missing. So she connected the dots.

I just know he killed her.

In an email to Tom, Susan wrote that from the beginning, she knew who the suspects were, and her job was proving it. Tom helped her publicize her main suspect's name, starting with his first article in the summer of 2004 and in subsequent reports through the years. Here's Tom and Susan in a BBC broadcast.

Here was a man shortly after the murder of Jessica Karen. His black-braided belt is missing because it's around the throat of the dead girl. Correct. And he stinks of gas. Yes. Everything just started coming together. It was like a deck of cards just fallen. I really, really got emotional because I finally started feeling that there's going to be an end to this.

Now, not only did Tom introduce Quincy Cross as his main suspect in his articles, but as far as I can tell, he was the first reporter to really hint at the idea that there was a sexual element to the crime against Jessica. Up until then, every time law enforcement talked about Jessica's to the press, they did not mention rape or sexual assault. But Tom took those descriptions of Quincy at the party as wired and wanting girls and wrote that Quincy's demeanor, suggested a sexual predator on cocaine. Years later, he would go even further, saying that early on in his reporting, he and Susan knew something more nefarious had occurred. We were pretty certain by now that Quincy Quincy Cross, together with other accomplices, had murdered Jessica in a sex and drugs frenzy. In his digging, Tom also found that a small souvenir bat had allegedly gone missing from the car Quincy had borrowed. A bat that, according to Tom, could have been used to bludgeon Jessica since no other weapon had been found. Tom and Susan shared all their findings and theories with the police, but they were both disappointed to learn it was not enough to make an arrest.

The Kentucky State Police were no closer to arresting the perpetrators than their hapless predecessors, the Mayfield Police.

But Susan did not give up. Instead, she continued to pursue another one of the suspects on her list, Vinisha Stubblefield, the last known person to see Jessica Curran alive. Susan already knew Vinisha from around town. Remember, Mayfield is small.

I want to say the first time I met her, she was 13 years old.

But her interactions with Venetia increased when she started investigating the case.

After 2004 is when I talked to her a whole lot more.

In their first investigation, Mayfield police suspected that Venetia knew something, but they never really got anywhere with her. Then came Susan. She became convinced that Venetia had to know who killed Jessica. The police let her off too easily. In their recorded conversations, you mostly hear Susan talking, trying to convince Venetia to come clean.

The reason that no one has pushed you any further on this for these four years is because no one's really listened to you talk. Well, every time I see you, I listen to you talk.

I listen.

No one's done that to this point. Tell me, wait, wait. That's what I'm saying. I listen to you. When I listen to you, I hear what you're to me, probably more than anyone has in these four years.

In Susan's mind, if Venetia knew the killer, and the killer was Quincy, then she had to get Venetia to rat him out. Susan also tells Venetia that if she confesses, she'll help broker a deal with police.

And honestly, when we were in the car that day, I just felt that he was going to tell me then. I really did. And I kept thinking, okay, I could go to Mills and I could say, Look, she's willing to talk. You got to guarantee her safety and guarantee her no jail time.

But still, Venetia doesn't deviate from the original story she told police, the one about the small party, playing cards, and saying goodbye to Jessica around 1: 00 or 2: 00 AM. And she doesn't even admit to knowing Quincy.

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know. We know. But what I don't get is, who is this Quincy guy? That's what I'm trying to figure out. All right. I don't think I got you.

Susan tried another angle. If Venetia wasn't going to crack, then Susan would have to get the suspected killer to confess. She would have to talk to Quincy Cross herself. It turns out Susan knew one of Quincy's cousins from around town.

I would go to her house and work on her computer. In the meantime, always talk to her about Quincy. Just try to I'd get anything I could out of her.

She used her to set up a meeting with Quincy under the pretense that she was a researcher for Tom Mangold.

Which I was. I did help to research for him. After he went back to London, I just kept up the spiel.

She even told her she could help Quincy.

I told her that I was there to try to clear his name.

Susan told the Kentucky State Police about her planned sting operation.

I called Kentucky State Police and invited them to help me on that.

The police did indeed help her. They gave her a cell phone to record and a few officers to wait outside of the house for protection.

It was all set up very professionally. We had code words. If I needed any assistance from them, my code words were, I wish my big brother was here, and they would come right into the residence.

Quincy did not know he was being recorded. I don't have the recording. I asked law enforcement for it, and they said they can't find it. But according to Susan's court testimony, a transcript and a police report However, these are some of the things Quincy allegedly says, that he was wearing a sweatsuit that night.

That he didn't have a belt and that he was wearing a jogging outfit.

But then he says they kept his belt at the jail when he was arrested Then, according to Susan, Quincy says that as soon as they smelled gas on him, he knew police would blame him for what had happened. Susan perkt up at this. Was this a confession, a slip? How did he know that night that a girl had been burned unless he was there? Tom Mangold also thought she'd struck gold. She didn't get a full confession, but she got an interview view which contained self-incriminating remarks. She'd made more progress in a day than the police agencies have made in five years. But still, no arrests. Another failed plan in Susan's citizen investigation and another year with no major inroads by the Kentucky State Police. Until the Kentucky attorney general stepped in a year later, in 2006, with a new set of agents and brand new set of ears for Susan Galbraith. Around this time, Susan was pursuing what would be her final scheme with a little help from the internet. She set up a MySpace account.

It's titled, murdered, Jessica Kern at my space.

This was pre-Facebook being widely available, and Susan used the page to track down anyone from Mayfield and add them as a friend. That's how she first made contact with Victoria Caldwell, the state's main witness you heard from last episode, the one who eventually confessed to being an accomplice to the crime. The first message between them that we have a record of is from January 2007. Here's Victoria reading that message for Tom's piece on the BBC. January 24, 2007. I don't want anyone to find me.

I am afraid for my life. I'm sorry about what happened. I will help the police as much as I can, but I really don't know who to trust. I am afraid someone might kill me if I testify the things about this.

Victoria was living in California at the time, far away from Mayfield, apparently in hiding. Victoria turned out to be Susan's missing puzzle piece. She would not only point the finger at Quincy, but at many others, including her own family. Her story would find a captive audience in the investigators from the attorney general's office. Sometime after Tom Mangold published his first piece on Jessica's killing, her father, Joe Curran, told a local TV news station that he thought maybe this was it. Finally, they were getting closer to solving his daughter's murder, thanks in part to a journalist from England.

This gentleman had come over here and investigated about a week or 10 days on this case. He had found several pieces of information that hadn't been discovered and hadn't been checked out when the Mayfield police had the case.

All the information Tom and Susan uncovered was stuff the original investigators with the Mayfield Police Department had. But according to Susan, the police had missed it, either on purpose or because of ineptitude. Tom and Susan took a few threads, a belt, a gas can, a missing miniature bat, and they used them to weave together a story, one that was incomplete until Victoria showed up. All I have right now is Quincy's account saying he was just at a party that day, took a drive, got lost, and then the car ran out of gas and he got arrested. But the problem with people's stories is they can be inconsistent. I call my producer, Rebecca, to discuss a few things that are nagging at me.

Hello, Maggie.

Hold on. First, Quincy told me he left the party to go find something to eat, but none of the other partygoers seem to have ever supported that claim. One of the also only consistent things is that the entire night Quincy is saying, I'm going to find girls. I'm going to find girls. He took the car to go find one of his girls. That has been consistent from the beginning, which is also sketch because it's like, he, again, told me he went to get food.

I think either Quincy is misremembering or he was like, Well, I was also hungry, or he's like, No, that makes me sound creepy and bad.

Yeah, I think he thinks it makes him sound bad. Again, that's just really sketchy. The night that a girl goes missing, you're driving around. I get it. I get why they're onto him. Second, the infamous belt. According to police records, Quincy wasn't arrested wearing a belt. But then he also says the police kept his belt. He also told Dara this, by the way. Dara is like, No, the police kept his belt once he was arrested. I was like, Okay, what belt? What are we even talking about right now? Lastly, the gas. We know Quincy smelled like gas, and the jailer saw Quincy spill gas on himself. But I haven't been able to corroborate where the gas came from or what exactly he was doing in the time he left the party and his car stalled. Like, this is where the breakdown all happens. So this is where I'm like, this is it. This is where Quincy gets pinned because of the belt and the gas. And like, what is the truth? Do you think Quincy Cross killed Jessica Curran? I No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. On the next episode.

And I told Joe Curran that day. I said, If I'm elected, I will do my best to solve that case. We're here to conduct an interview with Tambra Calwell. We're presently located in the conference room of the Drury Sweets. It brought down The defenses of the people they were interviewing. Because you're in a hotel, you're not in a police station. Everyone felt like, what the fuck is happening? But just to sit there and to see the Kangoo Court that they done, they would not even let us sit through picking the jury. They kicked us out of the courtroom. Graves County is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company number one.

This show is written and produced by me, Maggie Freeling, and senior producer, Rebecca Ibarra. Jason Flam, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Werdes, our executive producers. Our editor is Martina Abrahams-Ilunga. Dania Suleiman is our fact checker. Sound design and mixing by Joe Plourd. Music created by Wrench. Our theme song is the gangsta grass version of the one who's holding Star by Leo Scofield and Kevin Herrick. Dara Wulman is investigative producer. Our head of marketing and operations is Jeff Clibern. Ismani Guadalajara is our social media director, and our social media manager is Sara Gibbons. Andrew Nelson is Art Director, with additional production help from Jackie Pauley, Kara Cornhaber, and Kathleen Fink. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and threads @LavaForGood, and follow me at Maggie Freeling. We know there's a lot of names for you to keep up with in this series. For a detailed list of characters, please go to our show notes. Introducing IVF Disrupted: The Kind Body Story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. It grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients.

You think you're finally in the right hands?

You're just not. Listen to IVF Disrupted, The Kind Body Story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield.

It's a freaking war zone. These people are animals.

The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Grimoriades, this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime. My husband said, Your dad's been killed. This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast, Exploring the murder of Jim Melgar. I was just completely in shock. Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound. I didn't feel real at all. More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers. We're still fighting. Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.