00:00:01
Speaker 1: In November of twenty sixteen. Tommy Ballard was hunting for something more important than a deer or a turkey, and it’s that hunt that may have gotten him killed. That’s next on Blood Trails. It was the second Saturday of Kentucky’s deer season in twenty sixteen, and John Snow expected to spend it in his tree stand. The sergeant in charge of investigations at the Nelson County Sheriff’s Office, had gotten up before dawn with his son, and the pair were just settling into their perch in the tree when he heard a familiar ringing.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: When a dispatch called that early in the morning, I knew it probably was not going to be a good phone call.
00:00:45
Speaker 3: The dispatcher said.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: A fifty four year old man named Tommy Ballard had been walking to his own tree stand with his grandson when he was shot in the chest. Normally, John would assume he was dealing with a hunting accident, tragic but not unheard of. But he knew right way that Tommy’s death was anything but normal.
00:01:03
Speaker 2: Obviously, I think most everyone assumed, or at the very least had a very heavy feeling that it was related to the Rogers Gaze.
00:01:12
Speaker 1: For the previous sixteen months, Tommy had been frantically searching for his daughter. Crystal Rodgers, hadn’t been heard from or seen since July third, twenty fifteen. Her car had been found the next day, abandoned along the Bluegrass Parkway, the same highway that ran beside the property where Tommy was hunting. His search efforts were the subject of regular news reports, and he’d recruited an army of volunteers to help him find his missing daughter.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: He was very, very passionate about finding his daughter and finding who was responsible for it, or proving who was responsible for it, I should.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: Say proving, not finding.
00:01:50
Speaker 1: Tommy believed he knew who was responsible for his daughter’s disappearance, and he wasn’t shy about telling anyone who would listen. That landed him, maybe literally, in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people.
00:02:03
Speaker 2: He was very much aware that some of the things that he was doing to try to find her would put him in danger.
00:02:09
Speaker 1: His hunting partner that day was one of Crystal’s children. The twelve year old boy had gotten up with his grandpa, and the pair had donned their camo and driven out to the eighteen acre family property two miles south of Bardstown, Kentucky. They’d park near the edge of a field and were walking across it to a patch of forest on the other side.
00:02:27
Speaker 4: And then he heard a gunshot and sees that his grandpa is laying on the ground.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: That’s Shay McAllister, who was at the time a reporter for a local TV station. Outside of law enforcement, she knows more about Tommy’s case than anyone, and she spoke with Tommy’s wife, Sherry, in the aftermath of this incident.
00:02:48
Speaker 4: Sherry gets that call and her heart just drops because the guys had just left the house not thirty minutes earlier, and she feared something was wrong. And on the other end of the phone, her grandson told her Papa husband shot and I don’t know what to do.
00:03:06
Speaker 1: Cherry raced to the property, where she found that police and ems had already arrived.
00:03:10
Speaker 4: There’s an ambulance there, but she notices everyone is moving really slow. Nobody’s operating like this is a big emergency, and that was so confusing to her, and she runs down the hill. She runs up to Tommy. She remembers that he looked fine, he looked like himself. He just looked like he was laying on the ground, so she’s shaking him, she’s begging him to wake up, and eventually police officers come over and pull her off of him and say, I’m sorry. You know he’s gone, And immediately everything changes.
00:03:47
Speaker 3: Cherry was already dealing with the loss of her daughter.
00:03:49
Speaker 1: Now her husband and Crystal’s biggest advocate, was gone. Her family was under attack in a real, physical, horrifying way.
00:03:59
Speaker 2: Whoever did it clearly waited for them to get closer to the tree line from where they had parked before they did it.
00:04:06
Speaker 1: Tommy’s grandson told investigators that right before Tommy was shot, his grandpa had spied something in the tree line along the road. The other side of that tree line was nothing but a ditch along a highway. It wasn’t a place anyone would be out for a walk or a hunt, but it might have been a place someone would lie in wait, someone who knew where Tommy would be hunting that morning.
00:04:27
Speaker 2: He had hunted their pretty routinely, was my understanding.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: Tommy parked in the same place he always did and was heading towards the same blind in the same patch of forest.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: I don’t know exactly who else knew about it, but it was clear that the family knew where it was at.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: Investigators didn’t voice their suspicions immediately, but it looks for all the world like an assassination. Whoever had pulled that trigger had been close enough to Tommy to know that on a Saturday in November, he loved nothing more than hunting with his grandson. The circle of people who knew that and would also want him dead was very.
00:05:03
Speaker 3: Very small.
00:05:04
Speaker 4: Tommy was killed because of his drive, ambition, and courage in leading this investigation into the murder of his daughter, and law enforcement have confirmed they believe the two are connected.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: It will be ten years this November since Tommy Ballard was shot in the chest and died in front of his grandson. The road to justice for that horrific crime has been long and full of surprises. An undercover operation to secure the murder weapon, the explosive prosecution of the man responsible for Crystal’s murder, and the troubling suggestion that Tommy’s death is connected to a second assassination along this same highway have shown new light on this tragedy. But in the end, the person responsible for slaying the husband, father, and grandfather may have been at the center of this story.
00:05:58
Speaker 3: The whole time.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: I’m Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails the assassination Tommy Ballard.
00:06:09
Speaker 3: Part one.
00:06:11
Speaker 1: The Protector. Many of the investigators who gathered at the scene of Tommy’s murder were, like John, already familiar with the father of Crystal Rogers. Well, they may not have known him well, they had interacted with him as they worked together to find the missing woman. Many were impressed by how the father could keep his composure even after losing his daughter.
00:06:31
Speaker 2: He was usually pretty soft spoken, even when he was not happy with things that were going on. Yeah, even it was clear he was upset, but he would not get loud or you know, abusive in that way. So he was always pretty calm about things.
00:06:47
Speaker 1: Shay had likely gotten to know Tommy as well as any of the investigators. She’d been reporting on crystal disappearance from the beginning, and she’d come to think of Tommy not just as a source, but as a friend.
00:06:58
Speaker 4: Tommy was protector. He was very powerful presence. He took things very seriously, but in the same breath, you know, after we finished talking about, you know, the search that he was doing, the evidence he had found that his newest question for law enforcement. He would ask, how is your family? How are things back there? How is the drive down? You know, don’t forget, it’s going to be really cold next weekend. You probably want to run your water, trickle your water, you know. He was He was such a dad through and through, such a protector of his family, and so kind, and it was such a gut wrenching loss for so many of us.
00:07:48
Speaker 1: That tall, soft spoken father didn’t just advocate with his words. He was well respected in the community as the owner of a home building company, and he used his position and connections to make real progress in his daughter’s case.
00:08:01
Speaker 4: He was truly leading his own investigation. He had a group of volunteers known as Team Crystal, who would come together every single weekend and search a new property. He was searching both in the county where she went missing and the surrounding counties. He was organizing the people behind it, and he was collecting tips.
00:08:26
Speaker 1: Tommy understood that working with the media would keep Cristel’s case top of mind, and he spoke on a regular basis with journalists like Shay. He understood what was needed, in part because he’d been in this situation before.
00:08:39
Speaker 5: What fueled the fire uprom Me Moore was in nineteen seventy nine, Tommy’s oldest sister, Sherry, went missing.
00:08:47
Speaker 1: That’s Tom Roby, Tommy Ballard’s brother in law. Roby had married Tommy’s sister and the two men had gone to the same high school. In the late nineteen seventies, during Tommy’s junior year, his other sister had been killed by her husband, and it had taken the state police five years to close the case. The first great tragedy in Tommy’s life devastated his family, and the Ballad patriarch wasn’t about to let the same thing happen again.
00:09:12
Speaker 5: He was a man at peace with his family. He was happy with his life, and then when they took Crystal. Truly, he never had a moment’s risk, and he’s reliving his sister’s scenario, almost mimicking his daughters. I can’t imagine the pain. And a lot of people were just going to town and give up, you know, They’re like they’re just mentally exhausted, and he fought through it.
00:09:39
Speaker 6: He never gave up hope, He never gave up faith.
00:09:44
Speaker 1: Some people respond to tragedy by turning in on themselves and becoming bitter or bad tempered. But Tommy did the opposite.
00:09:51
Speaker 6: He was a very giving individual and he didn’t want to appreciate. He didn’t want acknowledgment.
00:09:56
Speaker 5: You know, he did a lot of things that nobody knew about charity wise, like even at the Barstown Police Warm when I was there, he would allow them access to a storage unit to store large Christmas items that you know with the shop with cop and helping needy families for Christmas, so bicycles, no large items. Yeah, never asked for a penny or anything. He’d just been over backwards to help. He would donate and anything he could to help help needy kids.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: He enjoyed deer hunting in turkey hunting, but Roby says he wasn’t interested in big antlers or a long spurs.
00:10:29
Speaker 5: He didn’t care about killing a one hundred and twenty inch eight pointer to say, you know, he’d be happy, he’d be happy to knock down a big dough or a couple of dos.
00:10:38
Speaker 6: But he loved.
00:10:39
Speaker 5: Hunting with his son Casey and his grandchildren. He you know, he relished that. I know a couple of times they’d be turkey hunting, and they would double, you know, and you know, Casey may have a bird that had an inch and a quarter spurs, and you know Tommy had seven to eight spurs or some three quarter inch spurs.
00:10:58
Speaker 6: He didn’t care.
00:10:59
Speaker 5: He would just tickle to day with his son, got a great bird and they got to experience things like that together.
00:11:04
Speaker 1: Roby said Tommy would sometimes go out with a crossbow, but he especially liked his two seventy Winchester rifle. He didn’t own a huge amount of property, but he had several spots where he knew he could reliably shoot a dough. That’s exactly what he was doing the day he was killed.
00:11:20
Speaker 5: This thing was like a honey hole. If you wanted to go and get a doe real quick, it was easy.
00:11:26
Speaker 7: It was.
00:11:26
Speaker 5: It was just something about that area. It was if you wanted to take a grand cheet a kid and let him go shoot something, it was a good spot.
00:11:34
Speaker 1: Even in the midst of his search for Crystal and the grief he must have wrestled with every day, he took the time to take his grandson hunting and offer him a sense of normalcy, at least for a few hours.
00:11:44
Speaker 6: I think all anling.
00:11:46
Speaker 5: He’d loved going and being with you know, with the kids, with the grandkids.
00:11:51
Speaker 6: He was truly just a really great guy.
00:11:54
Speaker 5: Yeah, he’s a type guy that everybody wants to be around, would like.
00:12:02
Speaker 3: Part two the shot.
00:12:06
Speaker 1: Roby and his wife received the call about Tommy early that Saturday morning and rushed out to the scene.
00:12:12
Speaker 6: And by the time we were about two miles away from the farm there, Barber’s brother Michael Calder and told her said, it’s too late. He’s gone. He’s gone. My mind was racing, like, was it honeting Nix? I mean, you know, you don’t know.
00:12:29
Speaker 1: Law enforcement didn’t immediately call Tommy’s death a homicide, and local media outlets initially reported that the shooting had been accidental. Investigators ruled out Tommy’s grandson as a potential shooter, and it was clear that Tommy didn’t shoot himself, either accidentally or otherwise. But if you look at this property on ONEX, you’ll see that there is a wooded seventy four acre parcel just across the highway in the same direction the bullet came from. Roby had to wonder, at least at first, if his brother in law was the victim of bad luck rather than malice.
00:13:02
Speaker 5: I thought, you know, is it the magic bullet scenario?
00:13:07
Speaker 1: Roby got permission to search that other property, and he soon found a deer stand.
00:13:11
Speaker 5: Now mark my location, and it was like eight hundred yards, and so I’m thinking, let’s take it best to time a seven mag at eight hundred yards. You’re going to have what sixty inches of drop? And I’m like, there’s no way the shot came across this bluegrass parkway and dropped down into them, Like, there’s no way.
00:13:32
Speaker 1: Of course, it’s possible a neighboring hunter was closer than eight hundred yards. It’s also possible a rifle went off accidentally while being pointed at some upward angle, which would have increased the potential range. Hunters are unintentionally shot every year, but when it’s not self inflicted, it’s often by another hunter who misidentifies his target. That’s not a scenario that seemed likely here. Since the shooter would have had to fire across four lanes of a highway, the odds of ten Tommy being struck by a totally random stray bullet were astronomically low. What’s more, no neighboring hunters, ever, came under suspicion, and as you already heard, Tommy had spied something in the tree line, and his work on Crystal’s case had made him some enemies. Taken together, all of these factors clearly pointed to homicide.
00:14:19
Speaker 6: This was no accident. This was absolutely a murder.
00:14:23
Speaker 1: Roby didn’t know how the shooter had pulled it off. But as he sat in his car and watched investigators process the scene on the morning of Tommy’s murder, he began to formulate the theory.
00:14:32
Speaker 5: And so I’m looking and I see a little hole in the woodline. The former Economy is killed. It was like sixteen or maybe eighteen acres, and it ran parallel to the Bluegrass Parkway on the eastbound lanes. And I’m like, that shot came from the damn Bluegrass Parkway. There’s no doubt in my mind that shot came from the Bluegrass.
00:14:57
Speaker 1: Roby’s theory came from a place of experience. Though he’d recently retired, he spent many years as an investigator with the Bardstown Police Department, as well as a special deputy with the US Marshals. He didn’t know what evidence the Kentucky State police had collected, but once they were done, he conducted his own investigation with one of Tommy’s sons, a man named Casey Ballard.
00:15:18
Speaker 5: I went right to the area where I saw this gap, you know, that kind of caught my attention, and not far from a third there was a tree that had a slight chunk of bark that had been knocked away. So I stood like, I’m aiming a rifle right there, I said. Somebody whoever did this is about eight to ten inches taller than me. I said, somebody leaned here and shot.
00:15:42
Speaker 1: Roby wondered whether the missing piece of bark had been knocked away by the stock of a rifle as the recoil pushed it back into the tree. The next day, he and Casey came back to test their hypothesis.
00:15:54
Speaker 5: And I said, I’m gonna take his cheap scope and going out here and I’m going to had I wasn’t in Camo. I said, I’m going to hide down here in the woods and I’m just going to see how clear I can see you, you know, And it’s still not daylight. The lunar loading was so bright, you know, and I’m looking through this chief scope. I can only imagine what a high dollar scope wild. But this chiefs cope I could see so detailed, and I was like, there’s no doubt in my mind, this is exactly where the shot.
00:16:21
Speaker 1: As Roby searched the area he believed the shot came from, he found another piece of evidence that someone had stood at that spot along the highway.
00:16:29
Speaker 5: There was a piece of orange landscaping tape rn’t there and it looked like mud on a couple of the runs of water, you know, the interwoven wire fence, And I’m like, somebody’s crossed this right here, shot and then crossed back.
00:16:45
Speaker 1: A car parked on the side of the highway would likely have been noticed, so Robi guessed the shooter was dropped off before Tommy drove out to that property. He waited in the tree line until he saw Tommy walk within range and fired.
00:16:59
Speaker 5: I made my mind up then and there, this is exactly where the shot came from. I don’t know if the police have come to the same conclusion, but as someone who’s investigated a lot of different things in different crimes and worked with federal agencies and state police and other local agencies, there’s no doubt in my mind and It was basically one hundred yard chip shot.
00:17:22
Speaker 6: Even the most.
00:17:23
Speaker 5: Beginning deer hunter with any deer cartridge that would be you know, if you got to state arrest should be a chip shot.
00:17:32
Speaker 1: I reached out to the Kentucky State Police to speak with the investigator in charge of Tommy’s case, but I was told that they’ve declined most media requests over the last few years. Say told me she’s never been allowed to speak with anyone at the KSP, and as of this recording, I haven’t received an official response to my request. What happened to Tommy was unbelievable, almost like a movie, and certainly not something that anyone predicted in Bardstown, which the USA Today once called America’s most beautiful small town. But what’s even more incredible is that something similar happened just three years before and on the exact same highway.
00:18:10
Speaker 4: The Bardstown cases start with the ambush of a police officer in twenty thirteen. His name was Jason Ellis. He was a Bardstown City police officer and he was working the night shift. So he’s on his way home from work. He’s taking the exit ramp that he takes every single day, and notices tree limbs in the road, and investigators believe he turned on his lights and sirens, got out of his police cruiser to go and move the tree limbs off of the exit ramp, and at that point he was ambushed. He was shot and killed and left for dead right there in the road, and his case is still unsolved today.
00:18:54
Speaker 1: Jason was killed around two in the morning on May twenty fifth, twenty thirteen, and Robi was one of the officers responded to the sink.
00:19:01
Speaker 5: If you can imagine, it’s almost like a clover leaf ramp off of the Interstate. Well, there’s some high rock walls there also, And I’m thinking to myself and I’m looking up and I’m like, this is the perfect ambush point high points. I’m like, you know, hell, this is like a turkey hunter, you know, you just want to sit up here and wait for the old gobbler to come by. Well, that’s what I think they did. They I think there was probably more than one. So if he drug brush on either side of the ramp, someone was ready to shoot. And you know, I can’t prove that, but that’s my beliefs. Under a bright moonlit sky, there’s no doubt in my mind. That’s my belief what happened. And to go further, you know, that night, if somebody had even hinted or suggested that a police officer may be involved, I’d have been ready to fist fight you right there. But after a thing that I have witnessed, experienced and seen, nothing surprises Mede these days.
00:20:06
Speaker 1: Two innocent men gunned down by disappearing assassins, all within the span of three years. Between that time, a young woman had been kidnapped and was presumed dead, and her car had been found along the same highway where the murders had taken place. But the location and means of death weren’t the only thing that connected these three cases. From the moment Crystal disappeared, her family suspected that her boyfriend might be involved. This boyfriend, a man named Brooks Hawk, had a brother in the Bardstown Police Department named Nick, who had worked with Jason Ellis. Like the Bluegrass Parkway, the Hawk brothers tied these crimes together. Investigators didn’t know exactly how or why, at least not at first, but they knew the Hawk family was the first place they should start digging.
00:20:56
Speaker 3: That’s next after the break Part three. The Crusade.
00:21:06
Speaker 1: Crystal Rogers was thirty five years old when she went missing. She was Tommy and Sherry’s oldest child, and she’d spent her whole life in Bardstown. While Shane never got a chance to meet Crystal, she told me that everyone mentioned how much Crystal loved her five kids.
00:21:20
Speaker 4: She couldn’t wait to be a mom. Being a mom was her favorite thing in the world, and it was a very defining characteristic because every job she had, she it was important to her that it would not interfere with being a mom. So, for example, when she was working as a landlord kind of helping run a rental house business, and she would have to take her tenants to court to evict them, she would take her kids with her, and the judge just knew that, you know, that was part of doing work with her. So she was really valued that part of her life. Her kids were incredible important to her.
00:22:01
Speaker 1: She’d been married previously, and not all of her children were from the same relationship, but she said that despite these personal difficulties, Crystal still valued family above all else.
00:22:12
Speaker 4: Her cousins were her best friends. She confided in her mom and her dad when things weren’t going right in her relationships, and she was just very close with her family.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: Crystal began dating Brooks how a few years before she disappeared. She’d rented a house from him, and once the two became acquainted, she worked for his rental house business. The two moved in together and soon they had a son, Cristel’s youngest, but the relationship had been souring in the months leading up to her disappearance.
00:22:42
Speaker 4: It wouldn’t be until many years later when we started hearing from other people who had had conversations with Crystal that she was worried that he was cheating on her. She wanted out. She thought that he was going to be trying to get rid of her, you know, in a way that where he could still keep their shared child.
00:23:03
Speaker 1: Christel was reportedly not well liked by the other members of the Hawk family, including Brooks’s mother Rosemary. Rosemary was keen for Brooks to get full custody of her grandson, but that was unlikely while Christel was still around. When Cristel disappeared, the Ballards immediately suspected Brooks, and they weren’t the only ones.
00:23:23
Speaker 4: It happened about three months after she went missing, Brooks Hawk was not part of any searches at the beginning. He really kept to himself, stayed quiet. And then about three months after she is reported missing, the sheriff names him the main suspect in her disappearance and that Brooks Hawke’s brother, whose name is Nick Hawk, is considered a person of interest.
00:23:49
Speaker 3: Cristel was presumed dead.
00:23:50
Speaker 1: No arrest or conviction could bring her back, but with this news, the Ballard family could at least hope for justice to be served. Officials said they’d collected eight pages is worth of circumstantial evidence pointing to Brooks and the Ballards expected a quick arrest, but that didn’t happen. Days, weeks, months went by, and still brooks Houck was walking the streets of Bardstown.
00:24:12
Speaker 4: This is so frustrating for the family. This is so frustrating for the community because not only is he not arrested at this time, brooks Howck is building a multi million dollar rental house and construction empire in this small town. He is living his life to the fullest. He is raising the sun that he and Crystal shared. He goes to bat in court to keep Crystal’s family away from the little boy, and they are watching him just live this, this big, full life while he’s named the main suspect in their daughter’s disappearance and presumed murder.
00:24:55
Speaker 1: This is key to understanding what Tommy did next with his own sister’s murder in the back of his mind. He didn’t just launch a search effort to find his daughter’s remains. He launched a crusade against the man he believed was responsible.
00:25:09
Speaker 4: And he wasn’t just saying that, which you know he did multiple times. He put up billboards, paid for billboards that had Crystal’s face and said, detectives say brooks Houke is responsible for the disappearance of Crystal. You know, help us make the arrest. There was signs all over town that said, you know, brooks Houck is a killer. It was not just this, you know, kind of quiet belief. He was very outspoken about it.
00:25:40
Speaker 5: And everybody in the family knew he did it. But how can you prove it and how you know? And you don’t want to you don’t want to do some things to jeopardize the case by becoming too vocal and making allegations that you know, So Tommy didn’t give a shit about that.
00:25:56
Speaker 6: He let people know that he thought Brooks help killed his daughter.
00:26:00
Speaker 1: You can’t blame a father in this situation for taking matters into his own hands, but he nonetheless created an unprecedented situation for law enforcement.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: I don’t know that I have ever had a case in my almost thirty years now where a family got that actively involved in it.
00:26:19
Speaker 1: John Snow was one of the lead investigators on Crystal’s case. He told me that Tommy’s crusade was sometimes helpful, sometimes not.
00:26:27
Speaker 2: Well, it was really kind of a mixed bag. There were times when things that Tommy and Sherry and the other family members were doing that generated really good information. There were times that some of the information that they would get would end up being not pertinent to the investigation, and we would spend some time on it, you know, rather than spending it on other things that we thought might be more helpful to the investigation.
00:26:57
Speaker 1: Roby was also a longtime investigator, so he understand stood the dangers of what Tommy was doing, but he was also Tommy’s brother in law and Crystal’s uncle.
00:27:06
Speaker 5: I had words with another police officer along those lines, and then I said, don’t give me that shit.
00:27:12
Speaker 6: If that was your child, you would be doing everything you could you know?
00:27:16
Speaker 5: Damn will you could? And I said, and if you wouldn’t, then you’re a piece of shit. I said, So don’t give me that shit that he’s.
00:27:21
Speaker 6: Going too far. Nobody’s going too far.
00:27:23
Speaker 1: Tommy’s actions may not have always been comfortable for law enforcement, but they were effective.
00:27:28
Speaker 4: We would hear years later that some of his work became critical to building the case to indict people and arrest people for Crystal’s murder. You know that was shocking to us to hear because he wasn’t an experienced investigator. He was a home builder. But more than that, he was a desperate dad and he was going to do anything and everything to find his daughter.
00:27:55
Speaker 1: With this background in mind, you can see why everyone pointed the finger at the house when Tommy was murdered. They had motive, but they also had means.
00:28:04
Speaker 5: Brooks help knew where that farm was, and he knew that Tommy often took his grandchildren soul. I think that the Howks truly thought or was afraid, Tommy was going to get close. They knew he was never going to stop with Tommy. It was never going to be on the back murder. He was going to be pushing to heat it.
00:28:24
Speaker 1: Was Tommy murdered by the Howkes because he was about to expose them for killing his daughter. Or had Brooks and his brother been falsely accused and Tommy was murdered for some other reason that had yet to be exposed. Those questions haunted Bardstown, and they weren’t about to be answered anytime soon. That’s because even after Tommy was murdered, investigators appeared to make little progress on the case, not just for weeks or months, but for years. The Ballards were left with a missing daughter and a slain husband, and it didn’t seem like anyone could offer them the resolution they were so desperately search for. Part four, The prosecution of Brooks. How to find Tommy’s killer. Investigators believe that focusing on Crystal’s case could be a productive strategy.
00:29:17
Speaker 2: What you’re really hoping for, and I think you know, what we had always hoped for, was that if we broke one of the cases, perhaps it would lead us down the road to breaking the other cases.
00:29:30
Speaker 1: But the evidence wasn’t working in their favor. They had Tommy’s body, but little else. In Crystal’s case, they didn’t even have that, despite her father’s best efforts, her remains had it been found, and Shay told me that by twenty nineteen, the cases appeared to be going cold.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: At this point, the investigation appeared to be at a standstill. We had not gotten new information on either case in several years. It was really difficult to even get the investigating agencies to do interviews about it because they would just tell us we have nothing new to report.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: Shay launched a podcast called Bardstown in twenty nineteen to shine light on Crystal’s case. The journalists didn’t confirm it, but I have to think that the attention from that podcast helped shake things up. Sure Enough, less than a year later, the FBI got involved and things began moving in the right.
00:30:20
Speaker 4: Direction, and it was very clear that they were working toward and arrest, that they were doing interviews and search warrants and making major moves to gather the evidence they needed to indict Brooks. How this includes massive digs FBI activity out in the public in Bardstown, both on properties were familiar with, such as the Hawk family farm, and new properties that we had never heard of, like a neighborhood where Brooks Houck had been building homes when Crystal disappeared.
00:30:54
Speaker 1: It’s not that local and state law enforcement hadn’t been doing anything, but the FBI offered more resources, more manpower, and more technology. It also felt like they were making more progress because federal agents were far more public with their investigation. In fact, according to Shay, they developed a plan to release information strategically to move the case forward.
00:31:14
Speaker 4: They put up a website where people could turn in tips for Crystal, and they used that website for many things beyond accepting tips. Of course, they were accepting tips, they were collecting leads, but they were also looking at who was on the website and what exactly were they looking at when they would release things to the media. They were releasing very strategic pieces of information to see what certain people would do with it, and what phone calls would they make and how would they react.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: For the first time in years, it felt like progress was finally being made.
00:31:52
Speaker 4: So it was no longer this does anyone care about this? Is anyone working on this? We weren’t wondering that anymore. We were just wondering when will they have enough to bring the agnitement.
00:32:02
Speaker 1: Three years later, in twenty twenty three, those indictments started coming down.
00:32:07
Speaker 4: And first it’s a name we’ve never heard of. That’s Joseph Lawson, a completely unfamiliar name. Nobody knew who he was, including the Ballard family.
00:32:18
Speaker 1: Joseph Lawson was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with physical evidence in connection to Cristel’s disappearance. The Bardstown community spent the next two months wondering whether they’d accuse the wrong man, until September when Brooks Howck was arrested and charged with murder. Two months after that, another man, Steve Lawson, Joseph’s father, was also charged with complicity to commit murder. Joey and Steve Lawson were employees of Brooks Houck, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how they helped him murder Crystal and hide her body. What was clear was that investigators had collected a mountain of circumstantial evidence against Cristel’s former boyfriend.
00:32:56
Speaker 4: For example, there was witness who talked about how Crystal thought she was going on a special date night with Brooks. That night, she had canceled plans with a friend because Brooks wanted to take her on a rare night out just the two of them. And then there’s forensic evidence showing that they end up going to his family farm. There’s no proof that she left that farm alive, and we know that because we could see her cell phone moving from her house with Brooks, and we have surveillance video of them going to the farm, and then there’s nobody sees her alive after that.
00:33:40
Speaker 1: Brooks was the last person to see Crystal alive. He was also caught lying about what he was doing the day she disappeared.
00:33:47
Speaker 4: He had turned his location services off. However, he didn’t know that Google Location was ultimately recording him, and when he provided police with an alibi, they were able to disprove it.
00:34:00
Speaker 1: Brooks had given an initial statement to police in twenty fifteen describing what he was doing on July third. He said he’d been visiting various businesses around town and handling evictions for his rental company. In reality, his phone data showed that he’d spent most of the day at his family’s farm. He’d left the farm in the afternoon, but then returned around seven thirty pm, where he stayed until close to midnight.
00:34:23
Speaker 4: He said they went to the farm, they spent the night out on the property, They fed the cows, they packed up and went back home and had their two year old son with them. Brookes says that he went to bed, Crystal was still up on her phone playing games on the cell phone, and when he woke up the next morning, she was gone.
00:34:45
Speaker 1: But even this claim didn’t hold up under scrutiny. Cristel’s phone was recovered from her car, and investigators determined that she’d been using it until around nine thirty that evening, when it appeared to run out of battery. It was turned back on around eleven to fifty pm, but then annually shut off at the same time. It was clear to investigators that Crystal hadn’t really used it after nine thirty, which casts doubt.
00:35:07
Speaker 3: On everything else. Brooks claimed.
00:35:11
Speaker 1: There wasn’t much physical evidence in this case, but there was some, and investigators got it thanks to Tommy and a pair of raccoon hunters. These hunters were out near the Hou’s farm the night Crystal disappeared. One of them testified at trial that they’d spotted a white Buick parked on a gravel road. They thought it was weird for a car to be parked there on a rainy night at ten thirty pm, so when they heard about Crystal’s disappearance, they contacted police. Tommy heard about this development, and he posted on Facebook asking for help locating the car and identifying its owners. A few days later, a detective received a tip that the car belonged to Brooks Howke’s grandmother, but it had recently been sold. Fortunately, investigators were able to track down that car.
00:35:55
Speaker 4: Years later would be examined as evidence in the case, and a cadaver dog hit on the trunk of that car.
00:36:05
Speaker 1: Blonde hairs were also found in the car that could have been Crystals, but forensic scientists were unable to determine if the DNA was also a match.
00:36:14
Speaker 4: There was DNA found that that could not for sure be matched to Crystal, but also could not be ruled out.
00:36:20
Speaker 1: Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, at least from the public’s perspective, came from a separate trial. Joey and Steve Lawson had been accused of helping Brooks move Crystal’s car. The plan was, according to prosecutors, to drive the sedan far away from Bardstown and get rid of it, but they ran into a problem. About eight miles west of town, the car blew a tire on the Bluegrass Parkway.
00:36:43
Speaker 6: Not true to.
00:36:44
Speaker 5: Think that God calls that blowe, because if that car hadn’t been found, that may not have led to this case. That car could have been disposed of in so many other places. And I think guess what their intention was. I think God intervened and that tolera bleue out and they left it there, and that was the beginning of the end.
00:37:05
Speaker 6: It just took a long time, on a lot of hard work.
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Crystal’s killers couldn’t follow through on their original plan, so they had to improvise. Phone records show that Joey Lawson called his dad several times that night, and then Steve called Brooks and spoke to him for about thirteen seconds. Prosecutors argued that Joey had been driving the car by himself and he was calling his dad to ask to be picked up. Steve then called Brooks, presumably to figure out a plan B. In the end, Crystal’s car was abandoned on the side of the road with her purse, phone, and keys still inside. It was also left running to make it look like the woman had for some reason left in a hurry. Here’s the important part of this story. While Joey Lawson joined Brooks In denying every part of the prosecution’s theory. Steve admitted to trying to hide his son’s involvement.
00:37:55
Speaker 4: Steve Lawson takes the approach with his own defense that yes, he’s guilty of tampering with physical evidence. Brooks Howck asked him to help move this car. He agreed to do that, but he had no idea of any plan to kill her, and he was not part of any plan to kill her.
00:38:12
Speaker 1: Steve admitted to driving out to where Joey had pulled over Cristel’s car the night she disappeared. He said he moved the driver’s seat forward to make it look like Kristel had been driving, and he also removed a mini baseball bat that Joey apparently was known to carry. He denied having any knowledge of Cristel’s murder, but the jury didn’t buy it. He was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. This testimony raised several awkward questions for Brooks Houck. If something nefarious didn’t happen that night, why would Joey Lawson be driving Cristel’s car out of town. Why would he leave it on the side of the road with all of Crystal’s things in it, and why would Steve lie about what happened if Brooks and Joey weren’t involved. The problem was Steve’s testimony was not admissible evidence in Brooks’s trial, and even if it was, the case wouldn’t have been a slam dunk. Almost no murders are prosecuted without the body of the victim, and there was very little hard physical evidence proving Brooks killed the mother of his son. According to Tom Roby, the Hawks knew they were still in a good position.
00:39:15
Speaker 5: I think they were so smug they thought they were going to beat it. When they were released the jury, he would stand.
00:39:21
Speaker 6: Up prim and proper, looking straight ahead, you know, and then as soon as the jury got out of eyesight, he would look over at.
00:39:29
Speaker 5: The whole section, the family and friends of Crystals and just make a shit eaten smirk, grin, you know, just.
00:39:36
Speaker 6: Just trying to goat someone in on. I thought you arrogant, pastored.
00:39:42
Speaker 1: Roby said that arrogant demeanor lasted all the way until the jury came back from four hours of deliberation on July eighth, twenty twenty five.
00:39:50
Speaker 8: In regard to Commonwealth versus Brooks William Hawke. We the jury find the defendant guilty of murder principle or a complim. We the jury find the defending guilty of tampering with physical evidence.
00:40:04
Speaker 5: And then when the jury did the sentencing phase, they were out just I mean a very very short time frame which the jury recommended life in prison and I think five editional years for tampering with evidence. So you know, the jury saw throwing.
00:40:21
Speaker 1: Brooks got life and Joey, who was being tried at the same time, received a twenty five year sentence. Roby said the guilty verdicts were a relief for everyone in the community. That was true of the Ballards as well, but their emotions were more complex.
00:40:35
Speaker 5: When we came back to town, the folks in Bargetown, it was the main street, North third Street was lined no we drove all the families, we all drove back from the Bowling Green courthouse and it was just I mean it, I think there was not a dry eye in a vehicle. Literally hundreds and hundreds of people lying in the street celebrating his conviction.
00:41:01
Speaker 6: But we still don’t know where she’s at.
00:41:04
Speaker 5: We still want to bring her home, if you know if she’s you know, she’s dead, she’s presumed dead. We want to bury her with some dignity, and so that’s still missing, and then that the same token is okay.
00:41:17
Speaker 6: Now can we get focused on Tommy’s case? Now? Can we get Tommy’s case.
00:41:22
Speaker 1: What John and the other investigators had hoped for had it happened. Brooks Howe had been convicted of murdering Crystal, but that investigation hadn’t turned up enough evidence to charge anyone with her father’s murder. Investigators weren’t shy about their beliefs. They told journalists like Shay that the Hawks were responsible for Tommy’s assassination.
00:41:41
Speaker 3: Proving that would be.
00:41:42
Speaker 1: More difficult, but they already had evidence pointing to someone else who was implicated at the beginning of this case but has so far escaped consequence.
00:41:57
Speaker 3: We’ll be right back.
00:42:01
Speaker 1: Part five, Nick Howck. Brooks Howk wasn’t the only member of the Hawk family to be implicated in the Bardstown murders. Brooks’s mother, Rosemary, was named as an unindicted co conspirator, and the jury heard testimony that she asked one of Brooks’s employees if he knew anyone who could quote get rid of Crystal. And as you heard at the beginning, Nick Hawk, Brooks’s brother, was named as a suspect. All the way back in twenty fifteen. At Brooks’s trial, the public learned that from the very beginning, the family had tried to hamper the investigation.
00:42:35
Speaker 4: There was these little lies that the Hawk family was caught in. There was situations where they were secretly recording their encounters with police. They were talking about how they needed to be on the same page. They were laughing about investigators following what appeared to be phony tips.
00:43:00
Speaker 1: These alleged attempts to impede law enforcement stretched back to when Nick Hauck was still an officer with the Bardstown Police Department. He refused to cooperate with interviews, take a polygraph, or allow his cruiser to be searched for evidence. He relented when his job was threatened, but he didn’t stop meddling to keep himself and his brother out of trouble.
00:43:19
Speaker 4: When Brooks Hawke was in a police interrogation and he gets a phone call from his brother, Nick Hawke, and Nick asks him, are you still there at the police department, And Brooks says yes, and Nick says well, you need to get out of there. You know you’ve done enough answering questions. You’ve got nothing else to tell them. You should leave And he hangs up and Brooks tells the officer, you know, my brother’s advising I should leave. And the officer tells him, you’re not under arrest. You’re free to leave if you want, and he said, yes, I’m gonna go ahead and leave.
00:43:50
Speaker 1: This was a bridge too far from Nick’s superiors at the police department, and they began the process of firing him. Tom Roby said he never worked a shift with Nick and didn’t know him well, but he was an assistant chief at the time, so he sat in on some of these proceedings.
00:44:04
Speaker 5: And I was there with the chief when he was talking to Nick, and I was sitting behind him, and I’ll never forget Nick was just like so cool, like cool as a cucumber. As he’s talking, he was just blank. And then when Chief mccobbin mentioned failing the polygraph and knowing where crystal.
00:44:24
Speaker 6: Is, all of a sudden, one of his feet like a dog, he.
00:44:29
Speaker 5: Just started shaking. He couldn’t control that reaction. And I said to myself then, I said, you signed for a bitch.
00:44:36
Speaker 6: You’re involved.
00:44:36
Speaker 5: You know, there’s no doubt in my mind how he reacted to that.
00:44:42
Speaker 1: Nick was eventually fired from the police department, but despite his extremely suspicious behavior, he was never charged with a crime. He was allowed to walk free in Bardstown, where, according to Roby, he seemed to revel in antagonizing Crystal’s family.
00:44:56
Speaker 6: Six or seven years ago.
00:44:57
Speaker 5: And this was in the Loew’s parking lot and I’m walking in. I didn’t realize that I had parked beside his truck. And I’m walking into the loaves and he saw me.
00:45:06
Speaker 6: He comes walking toward me with his hand out. And you know, my nicknames Boo. Everybody calls me Boo. And he said, hey, hey, Boo, Hey doing And uh, I don’t know if? And I said, get the get the fl with me, and you f F. I ain’t shaking your IF and handed. It’s surprised him. He wasn’t expected it.
00:45:21
Speaker 5: But when I came out of the store, he was leaning against the tailgate of his truck.
00:45:25
Speaker 6: Which I’m part rapped. I had parts representing so my ego, my arrogance and anger and everything else. I thought, oh you you saw a bitch. You don’t pump me.
00:45:35
Speaker 5: I just started walking into a dead line and we made eye contact, and I was just I mean, I was running, I was walking with with purpose. And he jumped in his truck and took off and spun his tires and took off. And I know maybe he was thinking I was just going to walk out, and he was going to try to.
00:45:54
Speaker 6: Do or say something.
00:45:55
Speaker 5: But uh, and that’s the last time I’ve had any contact with him my at all. Brooks was notorious for walking up to the family, Hey, how you doing, buddy, you know, after Crystal was missing, just almost like he was trying to irritate them and hurt them.
00:46:13
Speaker 1: I tried reaching out to Nick to ask him about these accounts, but as you might imagine, he’s hard to get a hold of. He’s kept a low profile in the wake of his brother’s trial, and as far as I know, has never given an interview to the media. We don’t know exactly why investigators named Nick as a suspect or what role he played in Crystal’s disappearance. However, in a shocking moment from a routine hearing in twenty twenty three, a prosecutor released information about how Nick was involved in Tommy’s assassination.
00:46:42
Speaker 2: We were waiting for testing to come back on the farm we believe was used to murder Tommy vallenor the farm that we purchased from nipol As how who was using a fague name, we sold.
00:46:59
Speaker 1: The We don’t know the circumstances of this sale or how investigators knew it was Nick using a fake name, but we have good reason to believe it’s the same rifle.
00:47:10
Speaker 4: They ran testing on it and it matched four out of the five markers that would make it a match for the gun used to kill.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: Tommy Brookhowk’s defense attorneys filed a motion noting that this rifle had been tested by multiple law enforcement agencies and the results were inconclusive. What’s more, the prosecutor didn’t say what these criteria were or which one wasn’t met. It’s tough to judge from the outside how persuasive this evidence is, but we can speculate towards that end. I reached out to Derek Pleasance. Derek runs an expert witness service called P two Consulting, but he spent twenty years as a special agent and investigator for the Bureau of Alcohol tobacco, firearms and.
00:47:50
Speaker 3: Explosives, or the ATF.
00:47:52
Speaker 1: Prior to that, he served in the Army Special Forces as a green beret, so it’s safe to say he knows his stuff when it comes to firearms.
00:48:00
Speaker 7: So when that projectile is recovered, if I recover in a pristine condition, what I’m looking for are the five characteristics.
00:48:08
Speaker 1: Four of those characteristics are relatively easy to identify on a projectile, the caliber, of course, along with the number, direction and width of lands and grooves. Lands and grooves refer to the spiraling grooves inside a barrel that spin the bullet and leave corresponding marks on the copper jacket of the projectile. These four characteristics can point to a specific make and model of firearm, but that’s about it.
00:48:33
Speaker 7: Those four characteristics are those are class characteristics. I’m going to be able to have an idea of what I’m dealing with, but that only gets me in the game. The fifth characteristic, which is the one that’s most difficult, is also the one that is essentially the firearms fingerprints, and that’s the striations on the projectile.
00:48:53
Speaker 1: The bore of a rifle isn’t perfectly uniform. It has small imperfections that leave tiny, almost microscopic sts on the bullet’s jacket as it travels down the barrel. In a perfect world, a ballastition can use a microscope to compare a recovered projectile with a projectile they fire through a suspected crime gun. If the striations on those two bullets match, the recovered projectile was most likely fired through that suspect’s gun. Of course, this isn’t a perfect world, As most hunters are well.
00:49:25
Speaker 7: Aware, projectiles are considerably more difficult. Like one of the things you touched on is when, hey, if you shoot game and then when you go to dress it and you happen to recover your projectile, it’s often mangled. You know, it is shocking. Sometimes the deformity that can occur with that or even a high velocity round will come apart.
00:49:46
Speaker 1: The prosecutor didn’t say this, but Derek thinks it’s likely that the bullet recovered from Tommy’s murder is too deformed to clearly see its triations.
00:49:54
Speaker 7: What I can infer from the information that I have is they believe that the weapon they have is the right caliber. It meets all those characteristics, but they just cannot link it by striations. I could be wrong, but my professional opinion would be the striations or what keeping them from being definitive, and what’s keeping that from being definitive is likely the condition of the projectile.
00:50:20
Speaker 1: They haven’t ruled out the rifle they purchased from Nick Hawk, but they clearly don’t have enough evidence to say with certainty that his rifle fired the bullet that killed Tommy. They need more to go after the other Hauck brother in a court of law, and no one else has been named as a suspect. But Roby doesn’t need any more convincing. His conviction is grounded in his experience with Nick, his law enforcement background, and where the shooter stood when he pulled the trigger.
00:50:46
Speaker 5: So in my mind, I’m thinking, if it’s somebody in law enforcement, this would be an easy shot. I mean, because I knew right off the band I thought Nick Count’s name as who I thought was involved.
00:51:06
Speaker 1: Part six the waiting game. There’s an old saying that says, the wheels of justice turned slowly but grind exceedingly fine. I don’t know who came up with that, but I think they were onto something. The wheels of justice and the Bardstown murders have indeed turned slowly. That’s frustrating to all involved, but it might be necessary to get the fine flower of justice everyone is hoping for. John Snow says he doesn’t have any doubt that investigators are doing everything they can to figure out who killed Tommy.
00:51:38
Speaker 2: I know most of the detectives that are involved in the in Tommy’s murder, and I’m one hundred percent convinced that if something comes in tomorrow, somebody’s going to.
00:51:46
Speaker 3: Be checking on it tomorrow.
00:51:48
Speaker 1: Detectives and prosecutors haven’t moved forward, he believes, simply because they don’t have enough evidence and the stakes are too high to be wrong.
00:51:56
Speaker 2: You have to be relatively that you’re going to convict that individual, because if you take them to trial and they get acquitted, that’s the end of that case. They could go out on the courthouse steps and scream I did it and I’m glad I did it, and there’s nothing else you could do to them.
00:52:16
Speaker 1: The problem is Tommy’s case may be even more difficult to prosecute than crystals. If Robi is right, and the assassin was dropped off, took the shot, and was picked up again, there will be little evidence for investigators to find. A single shot from a bolt action rifle won’t leave any brass, and DNA is tough to collect in an outdoor location.
00:52:36
Speaker 2: This certainly appeared to be a very calculated, thought out homicide, and when you have one of those, it compounds the difficulty in proving that case.
00:52:53
Speaker 1: The Ballard family is offering a fifty thousand dollars reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Tom’s murderer. Separately, the FBI is offering ten thousand dollars. It’s still possible someone comes forward, maybe a passing motorist saw something, or the killer confesses to a friend in a moment of weakness, But Shay is doubtful anyone involved is about to have a change of heart.
00:53:17
Speaker 4: The people who were involved and the people that have been named publicly as being involved were all members of the Hawk family, and this very tight knit family will never tip over on each other.
00:53:31
Speaker 1: But there are other means of extracting new information from evidence already collected. John pointed out that DNA testing is always improving, and scientists might come up with new ways to match a bullet to a gun. Derek also mentioned this, but he cited a reason why we might see an advancement in bullet analysis in the near future.
00:53:49
Speaker 7: We just had the Charlie Kirk assassination and the government is facing that same challenge that investigators are facing a mister Ballard’s homicide. The technology because a high profile case at a national level may make a leap because the resources being brought to the table that can also be applied mister Ballard’s case.
00:54:10
Speaker 1: It’s also possible that investigators will find a new lead from one of the other Bardstown murders because remember, Crystal’s case isn’t the only.
00:54:19
Speaker 3: One that might be connected to Tommy’s.
00:54:21
Speaker 5: And twenty twenty four, the special prosecutor noted that during the discovery to Crystal’s case included evidence related to Jason Ellis’s murder. So in my mind, I’m thinking, was where the Houks involved one way or another and killing Jason Ellis and Crystal stumb across something or overhear something, you know. Speculation, you know, can run wild, But when you have a prosecutor that says that, then going back to twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, there does seem to be a connection.
00:54:57
Speaker 1: There are still threads to pull in Tommy’s investigation. The prosecutor on Crystal’s case, Shane Young, was also assigned to Tommy’s. According to Shay, he told the Ballard family that he’s actively working to secure the evidence he needs to go to trial, and when he does, that wheel of justice might just turn back around on those responsible. Until then, Tommy’s friends, family, and the people of Bardstown are waiting and hoping.
00:55:23
Speaker 2: You know, nobody ever thought that we would prosecute Brooks Haug for Crystal’s murder either.
00:55:29
Speaker 6: It really is a long game.
00:55:32
Speaker 2: I still hope that someday we’ll we’ll get those answers and be able to prosecute the individual or individuals they are responsible for his murder.
00:55:47
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you’d like to see images from this episode, including photos of Tommy, Crystal and a map of relevant locations along the Bluegrass Parkway, head over to the Meat eater dot com slash blood Trails and click on the case file for this episode. Huge thanks to Tom Robie, John Snow, Derek Pleasance, and Shaye McAllister for their time and willingness to speak with me. Shay’s podcast, Bardstown is the authoritative source on the Crystal Rogers disappearance and subsequent investigation. We focused on Tommy’s case in this episode, but there’s much more to dig into, which you can check out on Bardstown. As always, send me an email at blood Trails at themeaeater dot com if you have a tip about this case or no about another you think we should cover.
00:56:35
Speaker 3: See you next time. Stay safe out there.
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