Analysis: The 13th juror
Trying to think like a juror while looking at some of the evidence presented in trial
Something to remember about a juror: They don’t have prior knowledge of the case they are hearing. They hear the evidence as presented to them by the defense and the prosecution with no outside influence. Then they convene to make their decision, and all 12 of them have to agree.
I couldn’t serve on this jury. But in this post I’ll attempt to break down how a juror might see the evidence as it was presented in court, and think how I would take it into the jury room for deliberation. And I have to wonder, would what I have seen in the courtroom be enough to convict a man of complicity to murder and another of conspiring with him.
Here’s how I see it:
It’s clear: Brooks lied to police about July 3, 2015
Just days after Crystal Rogers went missing, Brooks Houck wrote an eight-page statement for Detective Jon Snow that was supposed to detail what he had done and where he had been on July 3, 2015.
Geolocation evidence reconstructed by forensics experts make clear that Houck lied — at least by omission — about where he was that day. The prosecution paraded at least half a dozen witnesses to blow holes through his statement. But the biggest strike against him was the location data, which showed that he went to the family farm that morning and didn’t leave until late in the afternoon. Nowhere in his statement did he mention going to the farm that morning.
What is implied by the prosecution’s case is that he lied because he was preparing to kill Rogers when he returned with her that evening. But that is just an implication.
The Houck family acted suspicious
Houck started secretly recording his conversations with police almost immediately after Rogers went missing. Almost the whole family was eventually involved in secretly recording their conversations, and prosecutors can prove it.
They even went so far as to record their testimony during a grand jury and in at least one meeting with their own lawyer. Grand jury proceedings are secret and it is illegal for witnesses to record them.
Houck’s sister, Rhonda McIlvoy, testified for the defense, and said she recorded her grand jury testimony because of all the focus on era family and that “things had been twisted” to make her family look guilty of Rogers’ disappearance.
There’s no physical evidence of the murder
Let’s not pretend that just because there is no body, no blood spatter or DNA or any other type of physical evidence of a violent crime that Crystal Rogers might still be alive. It’s clear she is dead. Prosecutors have taken pains to have witnesses point out how she was dedicated to her children and would not just run off and disappear.
But there has been no trace of her found. And not for lack of trying. Honestly, I have lost count of the number and location of searches. To name a few:
The family farm that is assumed to be the murder site was searched at least four times — in the days after Rogers disappeared, months after and years after. Nothing.
The white Buick owned by Houck’s grandmother that two of three coon hunters say they saw parked mysteriously in the woods on the edge of the family farm. A forensic team processed it and found no incriminating evidence, and while a hair that was similar to Rogers’ was recovered, but no DNA profile could be recovered from it. A human-remains detection dog hit on the car after it was processed.
A farm in Cox’s Creek known as Thompson Ridge. It was the site of suspicious large-scale burning the weekend after Rogers went missing. But that site was not searched until late 2023, and no evidence of Rogers was found.
Drugs and time complicate witness statements
Joey Lawson, Houck’s codefendant, has almost been an afterthought in the trial. Police did not have his cell phone data for forensic examination, only that of his father’s, Steve, who was convicted in May of conspiracy. But the jury doesn't know about Steve’s conviction.
Most of the evidence against Joey has come from witness statements, and many of those were told to investigators many years after Rogers’s disappearance. Many those statements “evolved” during the course of interviews/interrogations. A couple examples:
Heather Snellen, Steve’s ex-girlfriend, told investigators that she heard Steve and Joey talking about moving a body. But she only said that in 2023, during a four-hour intensive interview that turned into an interrogation with Kentucky State Police. That statement contradicts prior ones she made to investigators.
She claimed one reason she did not tell her whole story before was because she had been addicted to methamphetamine and Joey was her supplier.
The defense called its own expert witness to show how coercive her interrogation was. It was brutal, especially for anyone who has not seen or heard a real police interrogation before.
Charlie Girdley, a former framer for Houck’s construction business, testified for the prosecution and related comments he says Joey made about involvement with Rogers’ disappearance.
Girdley was suspected of involvement in Rogers’ disappearance when Kentucky State Police brought him in for an interrogation in 2023 that lasted over four hours. His statements evolved during that session, and differed from past statements he had provided investigators.
On the stand, he was adamant that he recalled the day’s events nearly 10 years prior. But he is also a former addict. He was abusing cocaine in July 2015. When he was brought in for the 2023 KSP interrogation he had been up for four or five days on methamphetamine.
Other witnesses for the prosecution testified to statements or things they saw in 2015 but often did not reveal to police until years later, and many of them were recovered addicts.
Potential witnesses died between July 3, 2015, and trial
Time is more of a factor than just people’s memories. There are also some people central to the days right around Rogers’ disappearance who are no longer alive.
Tammy Lawson, Steve’s ex-wife, was involved in several texts and calls the night of July 3, 2015. Prosecutors have mentioned she might have been involved in the plot. But she died of a drug overdose in July 2017.
David Thompson and his son, Jeremy, are also dead. David died in September 2021. Jeremy Thompson died in November 2022 of a reported drug overdose. They lived at Thompson Ridge. If either of them gave statements to police, those statements have not been introduced at trial. One theory is that Rogers’ body was burned on the property.
Cell tower report gives and it takes
There has been a lot of testimony about the intricacies of geolocation data and how cell phones are tracked. A report by a forensics expert puts Steve Lawson’s cell phone traveling toward the location where Rogers’ car was recovered around the time he called Houck around midnight of July 4. That’s when investigators believe Joey broke down in Rogers’ car, near mile marker 14 of the Bluegrass Parkway and Steve went to pick him up.
But that report also indicates Steve’s phone connected with the north side of the towers. The parkway is south of those towers. The prosecution’s witness said ‘it’s possible” a phone south of the tower could connect with the north side.
But the defense says it connected with the north side because Steve was north of the Bluegrass, traveling parallel to it along Boston Road looking for a car his ex-girlfriend stole out of the parking lot of the bar that night. That ex testified that she took the car that night (it was co-owned by them) and drove it to a house on Boston Road that lies almost directly north of mile marker 14. Steve’s cell logs from July 3 also showed he was trying to call the bank that financed the car loan.
Lack of context
There have been some notable widely known developments in this case that have not been introduced to the jury.
The biggest one that comes to mind is the apparent assassination of Rogers’ father, Tommy Ballard, in 2016. Ballard had run his own parallel investigation into Rogers’ disappearance, and had turned over some evidence of interest to investigators. But he was shot with a high-powered rifle while standing in a field as he prepared to take his grandson deer hunting. This came only a few months after his family had come upon the information about the white Buick in the woods.
There has been no charges filed in Ballard’s death. During a pre-trial hearing, Special Prosecutor Shane Young said the had recovered a rifle Houck’s brother, Nick, had sold under an assumed name that was similar to the one that killed Ballard, although it needed further testing. That did not come up at all during trial.
‘Circumstantial evidence’ and ‘common sense’
In his opening statement, prosecutors said much of the case rests on “circumstantial evidence” and jurors would need to apply their “common sense.”
On Monday closing arguments commence and are expected to last into the afternoon. Prosecutors will attempt to lay out a case based on the evidence they have presented. They have played a good hand with the cards they were dealt. The defense will try to show where there are holes in that evidence, at least enough to fall short of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Both sides have scored some points. If I were a juror, I would think it is a close call.
There’s smoke, but is there fire? Has the prosecution cleared the high bar of beyond reasonable doubt?
It’s safe to say both sides need a strong finish to answer that question.