The Murder of Aubrey Nuckolls | Part 1 of 4 | 10/25/2022
The Murder of Aubrey Nuckolls | Part 2 of 4 | 11/1/2022
The Murder of Aubrey Nuckolls | Part 3 of 4 | 11/8/2022
The Murder of Aubrey Nuckolls | Part 4 of 4 | 11/15/2022
On September 11, 1998, Officer Scott Blakely with the Lexington Police Department responded to call for service at a home in Lexington Kentucky.
At the home, Officer Blakely met a woman that stated she had found an apparent ransom note tucked into the front door of her house, demanding $20,000 for the safe return of her husband, Aubrey L. Nuckolls, also know as ‘Al”. Al had not returned home from the day before.
The note read: “Call his pager from a pay phone that rings. He is fine. Do not worry or call anyone!!” “Do as you are told!!!!”.
Officer Blakely contacted the Lexington Homicide Unit and Detectives Paul Williams, Billy Richmond, Craig Sorrell and David Lyons responded, along with FBI Special Agent John Whitehead.
What followed in the search for Mr. Nuckolls was nothing short of a mystery, largely revolving the life of Mr. Nuckolls that was found to be complex and somewhat mysterious in itself.
Join Wendy and David as they sit down with retired Sergeants Paul Williams and Billy Richmond as they recount the investigation. This is one of those sessions where you will feel like you are in the room with the detectives as they deep dive into the why and how of not just this case, but murder cases in general.
Transcript
Part 1
Paul WIlliams:
This was unusual in that it had a ransom note. The call came from the wife patrol responds. She made the statement that her husband had been out yesterday, had left, had not returned. When she woke up this morning, he wasn’t home. And she had found a note stuffed in the front of her door, which was essentially a ransom note demanding $20,000 for his return. And that don’t call the police. And if you want to see him back safe, you’ll respond and go to a, I think it said go to a phone call is pager. Stand by that phone where you can receive calls and we’ll call you back.
Wendy Lyons:
Warning. The podcast you’re about to listen to may contain graphic descriptions of violent assaults, murder, and adult language listener discretion is advised.
David Lyons:
Welcome to the Murder Police Podcast. The murder of Aubrey Knuckles, Part one.
Wendy Lyons:
Welcome to the Murder Police Podcast. I am Wendy.
David Lyons:
And I’m David.
Wendy Lyons:
How are you doing today, David?
David Lyons:
Good. You want to tell her right what we’ve got?
Wendy Lyons:
I do. Today we are going to be talking about the 1998 murder of Aubrey Knuckles and we have with us two former sergeants with Lexington Police. We have Paul Williams and Billy Richmond. Billy, how are you today?
Billy Richmond:
Great. Glad to be here.
Wendy Lyons:
Thank you for being here. Paul, how about yourself?
Paul WIlliams:
Well, I tell everybody I’m better than I look, but that may not mean much.
Wendy Lyons:
Thank you both for being here. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourselves. Billy, let’s start with you. Tell us about your career with Lexington Police. How you got started up to until you retired.
Billy Richmond:
I started in 1990. I was 21 years old. Completed the academy and hit the ground running. Had the good fortune of being around a lot of good people. Had an opportunity to work in some of the areas that had higher volumes of police calls. Really had some good people that taught me how to be a good policeman and how to go about talking to people in the community and learning how to get information to be effective and everything.
So as I progressed, I ended up …through the projects, making a lot of contacts obviously. And at some point when I left that assignment, went back to patrol, I went to third shift, haphazardly caught a murder suspect one night and proudly took him back to the sergeant over homicide, then Sergeant Dan Gibbons, who’s probably one of the smartest people I think ever knew at the police department.
I took the suspect back along. I was an FTO and I had another recruit officer with me. We caught not only the suspect but his buddy too. So I felt pretty good about myself and was going to take this guy over to Dan Gibbons and drop him off. And Gibbons had a different idea. So he ended up telling me, wanted to be involved with that case and basically be the case officer, which I knew nothing about.
So I was temporarily assigned over to the homicide unit for a few weeks to complete the homicide from that night, which was in a trailer park over off South Broadway in Lexington. So with that I gained some experience and some new knowledge and to be honest with you, had no desire whatsoever to stay with the homicide unit. So I begged my way back to patrol, back to my regular life working nights and so forth.
And ultimately Gibbons had other ideas and I got called out one day on a homicide call out and I thought it was a joke because I said, “I’m not homicide and I’m not on call.” And they told me Gibbon specifically said he wanted me to respond. So that kind of started unbeknownst to me a several year tour of the homicide unit. I ended up getting transferred over what I thought was a temporary assignment. I was assigned to another case, worked it along with that, not only did we do homicides, we did assault cases, we did rapes, we did child abuse at that time, we did missing persons, elderly abuse. So I noticed I started getting cases and my caseload was starting to get heavier and heavier. Was more involved with the unit. That turned into basically about a seven to seven and a half year run in the homicide unit.
Wendy Lyons:
You didn’t get back to patrol as quick as you thought you would, did you?
Billy Richmond:
Yeah. So I finally left that and as my career went on, I went to the US Marshalls task force for a few years, basically located people with felony warrants. And these were usually your murder suspects, your bank robbers, your kind of the worst of the people, which I really enjoyed. And then again, really not my plan, but I took the sergeant’s test because many of my buddies were taking it and I was kind of shamed into it. And lo and behold, myself and Paul took the… I think in the same process, both of us got promoted. So I ended up leaving the Marshall’s task force. I went back to third shift patrol for several years and then ended up in special ops over in traffic where I retired from in November of ’20. So I’ve been retired now for almost two years. And all I can say is it was 30 years of a job that I’d do over again in a heartbeat.
I miss it thoroughly. Had the good pleasure working with people like David and carrying people like Paul Williams for years through these cases. But no in all seriousness, we had a great, great group of people that had so many different areas of knowledge. I don’t think there was one genius in the bunch, so to speak, but altogether we were pretty much a genius because somebody had something to add where somebody else lacked. And that’s what made us a really, really strong group of people that worked these cases. And we worked them quite successfully for the several years that we as a group were up there. So it was always a pleasure to work with these guys.
David Lyons:
I’m going to chime in on two things. One is that I’ve always said that was my favorite time in 28 years. People have heard it before. I have a collection of badges in that case up there. But the one means the most is the one that we all shared together. And I mean that sincerely. Secondly, echoing everything you said about Dan Gibbons. I was asked in on a TDY maybe a couple years after you got up there Billy. And I remember couldn’t turn that down and it wasn’t because of where it was going, it’s because of Dan Gibbons. And I could probably count the real mentors in my career in my hand. I think we all could. And Dan today is just an amazing guy. He’s actually been on a podcast early on when we started a couple years ago,
Wendy Lyons:
He did the Trent [inaudible 00:07:11] case with us.
David Lyons:
Just to share something. The audience knows we record these and I’m just going to tell him what it’s been like for the first hour and a half that they didn’t get to hear. But I think all of us have tears in our eyes and our jaws heard from laughing so much because if you get us in the room together, the war stories, we were joking. We could have started a podcast just on the war stories, but it’s probably better to… I don’t think we can change enough names to protect the people that just aren’t innocent. I mean, it’s the way it is. Including one another. But I had to jump in and agree with you that working for people like Dan and then the team dynamic was… Nothing ever in my career got repeated again like that again. So sorry to interrupt.
Wendy Lyons:
Well Paul, why don’t you tell us how you got started, what you did and how long you stayed?
Paul WIlliams:
My story’s a little different than Billy’s. I started late. He started when he was 21. I started when I was 30. Prior to that I was a microbiologist that worked for the University of Kentucky’s Department of Veterinarian Science. And I primarily operated an electron microscope in a virology lab. The thing that kind of fascinated me about police work, I had a cousin that was on the department and he invited me to for a ride along one weekend and did it. Found it interesting, challenging kind of adventuresome.
And I decided that that’s probably something… I was firmly convinced, I was smarter than my cousin. So I figured I could do a better job. I’m still convinced I’m smarter than my cousin. So I applied for the police depart and got on, I started off on patrol and I think Billy mentioned that he didn’t have homicide as his primary focus. That was my primary focus. I’ve always been an outdoorsman. I’ve enjoyed hunting. That was kind of like the ultimate hunt to be able to stalk that quarry.
I just kind of pointed myself in that direction. And I had been on about 14 years, primarily working night shift because that’s kind of where the action was. That’s where you had the burglaries, that’s where you had the homicides. And I decided that at one point I’d apply for that and I’ll second the comments you made about Dan Gibbons. He was a sergeant and I got pulled up there as they’d had a heavy run of homicides. They were kind of behind in their case work. And they wanted some patrol officers to fill the, I guess what you’d call the minor cases.
I’m not sure the victims would care if I’m clarify them is that way. But they had us assigned to that while the detectives concentrated on catching up on some of the hot homicide cases. And after that exposure I decided that’s what I wanted to do and applied and with Dan Gibbons’s pushing me along, I decided to try for that and ended up there.
I did 14 years after I got there I didn’t want to go anywhere else. And after 14 years, I retired in 2010 and have been living the glory days in my memory since then. And I don’t have any desire to go back. And the current climate with things as they are, I’m satisfied to leave that to somebody else. We had enough trouble getting cooperation then and I’m just not sure that it would be as rewarding as it was.
So I’ve kind of decided to strike out with other things, little projects. And I miss the people. I miss the challenges. Just don’t miss getting called out in the middle of the night when you’ve got soccer games that you want to go to and you’ve got children that you’re trying to raise to be good people. And so loved it when I did it. I’m glad that that’s what I did. I wasn’t in any other areas, but it’s time to move on to something else now.
David Lyons:
At some point you do move on, it becomes another person’s game.
Paul WIlliams:
It is like high school. You leave high school, it’s behind you. You leave college, it’s behind you. You leave one job for another, it’s behind you. You’ve got to focus on what’s next and go there.
Wendy Lyons:
Well, very interesting. Thank you all for your service that you did put in there. I’m always fascinated by homicide and everything that comes along with it. This case, I unfortunately hadn’t gotten to research a lot of, So my questions are as they usually are, very genuine. Because I’m intrigued by what I’ve read so far of this case summary. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about this case before we dive into it and pick it apart, so to speak.
Paul WIlliams:
Well, I’ll take that.
Billy Richmond:
Paul was the case officer, so I’ll leave it to Paul.
Paul WIlliams:
We got a notification from patrol that they had had a report of kidnapping. Kidnappings around Lexington are relatively rare. And if you do, it’s not something that usually involves a ransom note. They’re usually related to some other criminal action and it’s ancillary that the subject gets taken or whatnot.
This was unusual in that it had a ransom note. The call came from the wife patrol responds. She made the statement that her husband had been out yesterday, had left, had not returned. When she woke up this morning, he wasn’t home. And she had found a note stuffed in the front of her door, which was essentially a ransom note demanding $20,000 for his return. And that don’t call the police. And if you want to see him back safe, you’ll respond, and I think it’s a go to a phone call his pager, stand by that phone where you can receive calls and we’ll call you back.
So patrol goes, they arrive, they find the note, they contact us, we come out to start the investigation and try to figure out what we’ve got going here. Initially. Part of the problem is the wife and the husband, I haven’t checked on Knuckles’ his age, but I believe he was mid sixties at this time.
Billy Richmond:
63, I believe 63.
Paul WIlliams:
63. And the wife was relatively the same age. They had been married for a long time, somewhat estranged. The relationship was maybe more brother sister than husband and wife. They lived at a home with her 90 year old father who was in very poor health and she was his caregiver. She had control of his finances and his property, which was stored in a storage unit. And there was some inclination that with her relationship with the victim, she wasn’t sure that it was a straight up kidnapping. She was concerned that she was in charge for her father’s money. She was a little concerned that this may have been a rouse to get at that money. Mr. Knuckles had some criminal convictions in his past that she thought might have played a part into it, but she was convinced that he was gone, that it wasn’t of his own accord.
Billy Richmond:
And if I can add to that, Paul, I remember when we talked to her, she was somewhat different. You talk to people and you kind of gauge them and you try to figure out if they’re being truthful, if this is something they’re imagining or how much of it are they interjecting something else in their life. And she was a very nice lady, but she was a bit hard to follow. And I remember at first questioning if all this was true reality, or if it was just her reality, because like Paul said, it was such an odd thing to get truly a kidnapping case. And then just the flow of information coming from her, I would say it wasn’t direct. You had to pay attention to the turns.
Paul WIlliams:
Disjointed to some degree. But I think part of it had to do with the distance in the later years that it may have developed in a relationship between her and the husband. When she spoke with us, to give you a little background, Knuckles himself had done federal time, I believe back in the seventies for trafficking in marijuana. He had been a retired firefighter that went out on disability.
And then according to her, his primary source of income was he was a oil and gas leaseman, which meant he procured oil and gas leases from primarily rural areas for development. In our investigation, we found that his association was, oh, there was folks in West Virginia he was familiar with. Several of them were under indictment for, I think it had to do with counterfeiting or check fraud. There was another subject that was imprisoned on drug charges that we tracked down to talk with, when we started going through his phone records and contact books and things like that.
This subject was just recently indicted. The two people in West Virginia that were indicted were federal charges by the Secret service that had to do with fraud and counterfeiting checks. So there was some inclination that his prior criminal activity may have been certainly a consideration in what had happened to him reportedly now, was it related to why would someone want to kidnap him? How would they know that they had the resources to pay the ransom or whatnot? So there was a number of questions we weren’t originally convinced. And this came from his wife since she was in charge of taking care of her father who was elderly and I believe suffered from dementia. She had total control of his assets and his property and she was the only one that accessed that. And she actually thought that it may have been a bit of a plan to force her to access that money.
Billy Richmond:
And in the past, I think Mr. Knuckles had basically, by his own choosing, had disappeared from regular places and things that he did at some point, I think in their marriage. And I don’t remember exactly when, but she alluded to that and she felt like she knew that basically he was kind of a conman to some degree. And I think that when we started this, that was a question in our minds, like Paul was saying, is he making himself disappear to try and get at-
David Lyons:
Her dad’s money. Possibly.
Billy Richmond:
That money. Exactly. So is he a part of the loop that that’s the only way he can come back and touch that money because she was a good custodian for her father and was trying to protect his interests.
David Lyons:
Well, I’ll tell you, listen there a few things I’ve latched onto. And Wendy, you’re probably picking up on it too because we probably ought to and go in a minute to what it was like when you all got notified and how you got notified. But what I was hearing was this is definitely a mysterious thing and the idea of all the possible motivators that come into it, and I’m sure that as you work through the case, you’ll work through those. But one thing I listened to very carefully too is when you were describing in interviewing the wife.
And I remembered how many people that I interviewed, not just people that were directly involved, but I don’t think people that don’t do this for a living understand that you run into so many different characteristics with people. And one of the difficult things in the interview room or in somebody’s living room is getting that weird feeling that you can’t put your finger on. And let’s just admit it, most of the time it doesn’t turn out to be anything nefarious. How many times, all of us probably had a time where there was enough of that strange behavior in the beginning that it almost deviated your focus. Would you all agree with that?
Billy Richmond:
Absolutely.
Paul WIlliams:
Absolutely. And a lot of times it was warranted. Yeah, I mean, you would get some bizarre stories on what happened to us such and such in a particular situation. And you just go, that is so counter to anything I’ve ever heard or encountered before you. I’ve got to look into that. I’ve got to see what that is. And the more you chip at it and get into it, you may find that it’s fabricated or it opens up a new avenue. But,
David Lyons:
And then sometimes the personalities of people are just, we haven’t dealt with them before.
Paul WIlliams:
And they’re just an odd person. If you’ve ever run into anybody that’s suffers somewhere along the autism spectrum, and it can go from drastic to minimal. For an example, Elon Musk is diagnosed as autistic. And I don’t think you can think that that man’s a failure by any stretch of the imagination. And other people, such as the movie Rain Man, would be a severe form of autism. And you run into people on these scales and it’s got to do with how they socially interact with people. So they can be socially weird, but totally innocent, fine, motivated to do what normal people should do everything else. Or you can talk to them and you’ve got to realize that everybody’s experiences are not like yours. And there are strange different people. And you’ve got to pick through that when you’re trying to wade into how much of their story is credible and how much is not.
David Lyons:
And it strikes me as you see this a lot in public opinion now that the news is instant and we get things and we see statements and one of the biggest criticisms, they’ll see a family member of a victim that’s disappeared and everybody tries to gauge, well, they don’t act like they’re grieving or they took that weird. But again, until you’ve done this job for a while, you learned that you, you’re the spectrum of all personalities. And again, how you can overread that if you’re not careful.
Paul WIlliams:
You can overread it and you can overread it.
Billy Richmond:
And this case was very unique I think because with most homicides, you start out with a body.
David Lyons:
Yes, that’s one thing.
Billy Richmond:
This one, we didn’t have a body for what, almost a month. And that made it very strange. And I think Paul, you might remember, and of course I won’t mention the name, but there was a lady that I got a missing person’s case on that I looked for, what, two, two and a half years. It was a victim of domestic violence from a very controlling husband. She was an older lady in her sixties.
And all along I thought she was dead. And I worked that case and I worked everything and it was multiple states of contacting people and so forth, was in contact with her family. And finally her sister trusted me enough that one day she called me and said, “Look, I’m going to let you meet her in person. She’s terrified because her husband, if he finds her it’s probably not going to end well. And he had told her he was going to kill her if he ever found her.”
And when that case concluded and I finally met the lady, I thought, wow, how bizarre is that? And then you run into a case like this where you’ve got somebody that is supposed to be missing and then it pops into your head again, is this person missing by their own accord is what I thought all along. And until we actually got the evidence and found the body this, we were chasing ghosts to some degree.
Paul WIlliams:
And I want to interject this now before I forget it so somebody can expound on it later or bring it back up. The thing about homicide cases that is interesting to me, you look at this case and you have a guy reported missing. And you have, is he missing? Is he not missing? He’s involved in some criminal activity. Is that an impetus for why he’s not around? Or is it a motive or is it any way linked? It may not be linked. Is he off seeing a girlfriend? Is he off on some nefarious deal to make some money? You just don’t know. But you have to not form an opinion. You have to go… And that’s where my scientific background I thought came in good for me. I mean, we were trained on the scientific method. You didn’t move to conclusion unless you had verifiable facts that you could repeat.
So I tried to apply this in most of my investigations, and this was kind of a primary situation like that. You have to weigh and you can’t let your feelings or your ideas or your first inclinations lead you to, oh, he’s off doing something and he doesn’t want the wife to know about it. And you put it on a second burner because time is critical in these cases.
You’ve got to get the information as soon as you can, while it’s still relevant before you lose it. So you’ve got to assume the worst. And going into any investigation, I don’t think that’s what a lot of people realize, that every piece of information you get, even if it’s good information, you have to set it down, open it up and go, what if this is not true? What if this is true?
And you do the same thing for the other false information or questionable information. Is this possible? Is it true? What’s the likelihood? How do I verify that? So each step requires that, whether it’s the phone calls you’ve got. And on the search warrant, we got into his notes, phone bills, things like that. And we’re contacting people that were in contact with him the last few days trying to set up a timeline. Who did he last talk to? What was he last doing?
Billy Richmond:
He was into a lot of things. He had had this oil and gas enterprise, so to speak. He was into horses. He raised horses and he was very involved with those. We found some of the-
Paul WIlliams:
Scrapped copper with somebody and someone else, he had a deal going with where they were dealing with a bunch of used hires. And I think they were trying to-
Billy Richmond:
He was very interactive with people that were hard to trace is what I’m getting at,
David Lyons:
Which we always talk about victimology and risk factors and everything. And again, that’s what I hit on in the beginning is that this had to be tough because as it develops is all of those things are not high risk like maybe a drug dealer, but they start to go into that dark cloud.
Billy Richmond:
[inaudible 00:26:05]. Well on top of those things then you have to interject his past. Now this is a guy been the federal pin for trafficking narcotics. Is he still involved? Who’s he involved with? Where are the people he did it before? He’s moving we learned very quickly, he was in and out of the state often.
Paul WIlliams:
He had just taken a job or applying for a job that had to do with transporting vehicles, driving vehicles, as transport from Cincinnati to Texas and returning with other vehicles. So I don’t know if this was a dealership or whatnot, but he had just applied for that job. And if you’re looking at somebody that’s been slinging a little dope on the side, well shoot car transports as a job between locally and border states is a great place to kind of go hark, what ho. That does seem a little suspicious.
Wendy Lyons:
Hey, there’s more to this story. So go download the next episode, like the true crime fan that you are.
David Lyons:
The Murder Police Podcast is hosted by Wendy and David Lyons and was created to honor the lives of crime victims so their names are never forgotten. It is produced, recorded, and edited by David Lyons. The Murder Police podcast can be found on your favorite Apple or Android podcast platform as well as at murderpolicepodcast.com, where you’ll find show notes, transcripts, information about our presenters, and a link to the official Murder Police podcast merch store where you can purchase a huge variety of Murder, Police, podcast swag. We are also on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which is closed caption for those that are here impaired. Just search for the Murder Police podcast and you will find us. If you have enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe for more and give us five stars and a written review on Apple Podcast or wherever you download your podcasts. Make sure you set your play or automatically download new episodes so you get the new ones as soon as they drop. And please tell your friends. Lock it down, Judy.