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
In this episode, we hear detectives Paul Williams and Billy Richmond move the case further down the road. Who Aubrey Nuckolls is only gets more mysterious. A search of a storage unit becomes and eye opener, a search of a post office box leads to more interviews, phone records tick away at the case and an uncashed check reveals a relationship that was in the dark itself.
And simple things, someone dropping a car off in a rural area and getting a ride home, prove to be major breaks in the case. Oh, and did me mention you might hear the name of a suspect? Well, there is that…
Show Transcript
Billy Richmond: … and it’s funny in these investigations how things start to unravel and you start to find new people, new things. Again, this gentleman was into a whole lot of things. I think on the surface you could see him as one person. In fact, he was another.
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.
Welcome to the Murder Police podcast, the murder of Aubrey Nuckolls, part two of four.
Billy Richmond: On top of those things, then you have to interject his past.
David Lyons: Yeah, there we go.
Billy Richmond: This is a guy had been the federal pen for trafficking narcotics. Is he still involved? Who’s he involved with? Where are the people he did it before? 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, his 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 go, hark what ho. That does seem a little suspicious.
Wendy Lyons: Wow, guys, it sounds really interesting. Well why don’t you tell me and our listeners how the case transpired from there. It went out as a possible kidnapping. So where do you take it from there? If you all were in homicide, how did you get involved with the kidnapping?
Paul Williams: At that time, the homicide unit hadn’t been separated into… It was a total personal crimes unit. So we had sex crimes, serious assaults, homicides. Kidnappings fell under that. Later as the police department expanded a little bit, of course, homicide went off to itself, serious assaults went to a unit by themselves and sex crimes went to a whole unit by itself. At that time, we handled the ball. So we got it because it was assigned to us.
Wendy Lyons: So who gets the call first? Which of the two of you?
Billy Richmond: It’s been a long time-
Paul Williams: I think I was up. I think it was me. I was the next one up for the next case.
David Lyons: So did you get a copy of the report or is it one of those things-
Paul Williams: [inaudible 00:03:09] copy of the report for the next case-
Billy Richmond: I think if we had talked to Scott Blakely at that point, who was the original reporting officer, if I’m not mistaken, he may have came to headquarters because this was so-
Paul Williams: Unusual.
David Lyons: Different.
Billy Richmond: And unusual.
Paul Williams: Yeah, I think right.
Billy Richmond: He came and started telling us a little bit about it and I think he’d actually collected the initial evidence with the letter that was stuck in the door.
Paul Williams: I believe you’re correct.
Billy Richmond: And probably when he came down to book it and take care of it, then he took the time to come up, talk to us in person I think.
David Lyons: And that’s Scott Blakely?
Billy Richmond: Yeah, he retired as a lieutenant.
David Lyons: Exactly. Good guy. Good guy.
Billy Richmond: Yes. Very good guy.
Wendy Lyons: So where did you all start on this? Did you take our listeners through when Scott came to see you? What was your first step?
Billy Richmond: Well typically we would start out, first off you look at your victimology as we talked about earlier. We started looking at what information we could find on the victim and that’s just basic things so to speak. We got a lot of that information through his wife. Somebody would go and check the records, whatever we had as far as his past that we could find as far as arrest records and things like that. And then I think in that case we actually did do a neighborhood canvas at some point just because we were trying to figure out who may have left the letter in the door. So we had several good things to start with in terms of just building a base.
But probably the most solid information we got as it turned out was from his wife. And even though at first we really couldn’t gauge exactly how good the information was. Was this things that she actually knew or was imagining or that sort of thing? She was a bit of a fragile lady, I guess you could describe her. Somewhat soft spoken, a little bit… Obviously she was upset and that probably added to her demeanor and everything. So we really didn’t know how to take her.
But as far as the basics go, we knew the car was missing. So we started trying to find out some information about the vehicle and that sort of thing.
Paul Williams: The other thing that jumped out at us was she made the comment that she had a self storage unit that she kept all her father’s property. She had a key to it and the victim had a key to it. And those were the only two keys that worked at that storage unit. We thought that was curious and decided to do a little follow up on that. Got permission from her as the owner of the unit for a search. Got her key, went to that location. Because we were a little curious about his past to see if it would give us any insight into what he had been up to. We actually contacted the narcotics unit cause of his previous drug conviction. They executed, on our behalf, a search that was consensual from the victim’s wife, to that storage unit. And we found 12 pounds of packaged marijuana there.
Billy Richmond: High grade.
Paul Williams: Yeah, it was good doobee. And at that point we decided this may be… We knew from her description that he was in business with a male Hispanic that she had seen him with, had known for several years, but she didn’t really know his name and only knew him by sight. And then we have the marijuana connection. She kept trying to lead us back to this Hispanic individual that she thought was associated with a horse that he owned. And she made some statement that she saw this subject sitting in a car across from the house a couple of days after she received a ransom note. She thought that was curious and suspicious. It turned out it was no relation whatsoever to the case. But it got us focused on a Hispanic subject.
But it turned out that was not the subject that she thought she had seen him doing business with. We tried to locate and center on that subject. We contacted the FBI cause number one, it’s a kidnapping case. And the resources they have are so much quicker and faster than what we could come up with. We had suspects in West Virginia, South Carolina, that we needed to interviewed. The FBI was very helpful. The two agents involved, Tommy Gehart and John Whitehead, local office, they were able to connect with those people, have agents doing interviews with those subjects. They were able to access phone records. Their subpoenas were much quicker turnaround than ours were. So the resources they had, they have jurisdiction over kidnapping investigations. We got them involved, they were very helpful. Their resources really pushed us to get a lot of information quicker than we would’ve had going through our resources. And having to find.
David Lyons: Real quick, because I want to keep on a timeline. When you went to her, what was the evidence of a kidnapping? How did this evolve? Scott Blakely-
Billy Richmond: I think it was actually the letter that was placed in her door basically alluded to, we’ve got him and you need to respond to this. And like Paul talked about earlier then that was the pager era. There were cell phones around and so forth. And also we should point out, like I said with her, she was a little bit unusual but they did not have a home phone. Anytime she need to use a home phone, she would have to walk from her residence probably I would say a couple blocks. She’d either walk over-
Paul Williams: She went down to that shop center on Richmond Road and used a pay phone.
Billy Richmond: Home Depot. Or she would walk somewhere several minutes from her home to make calls. And I think from past dubious activities with her husband, they knew what phones it could be called back and so forth. So there were specific places I think that she would go to. So all this, like I said, when we talked to her, a lot of this stuff was kind of bizarre to be honest with you.q
Paul Williams: Different. Very, very different. Not what your average…
David Lyons: Yeah, I’m picking that up because back then again the pager thing. There may be some young kids that are like, “I don’t know what that is.” But back then some people didn’t have phone service and pay phones, which are antiques in museums now themselves. But like you said, the familiarity with that becoming your ad hoc phone, that’s one more piece of that thing that makes it so weird about what you’re dealing with.
Paul Williams: Well and when we got tracking the information from him, trying to figure out what he had been doing in the last few days and we were contacting these different people that… Most of them we found either through talking to the wife and she knew their names or a few that we had a paper trail. He’d left notes or written them checks or those kind of things.
Billy Richmond: And I think, like Paul said a few minutes ago too, the FBI was very helpful because very quickly several of these leads ran out of state. We’re talking about Texas.
Paul Williams: I think Texas, West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio.
Billy Richmond: Ohio, West Virginia. Yeah, so very quickly as we started looking at before us to follow up on leads, we were going several different directions. And when you look at a local jurisdiction like us, we can reach out to other local jurisdictions but it slows things way down, where the FBI had those resources that their field office could contact the field office in another state and say, “Hey, can you get on this and check it?” So that really sped things up.
David Lyons: And you had them like right there…
Paul Williams: From day one. Yeah.
Billy Richmond: Yeah. They were with us side by side. Yeah, they were great. A big asset for us.
Wendy Lyons: Well had she told you that she was successful in reaching someone when calling that pager or had she not-
Paul Williams: Oh no. Yeah, she told us she called the pager and of course that reiterated the money aspect, the ransom.
Wendy Lyons: So she did receive a call back?
Paul Williams: Yeah, she went to a phone and made a call, called the pager, which was the victim’s pager. And then she gets a call back and asks… It’s a male voice. She said there was no accent she could discern. And he was the one that… I think he told her that he was, had there been a drug deal gone south, he was being held, it would take $20,000 for his release and, “Oh, don’t call the police. Don’t get anybody involved and you’ll find him tied to a mesquite bush.” That’s what it was.
David Lyons: A mesquite bush?
Paul Williams: A mesquite bush.
Billy Richmond: So what do you think… We talk about Texas.
Paul Williams: I ain’t seen many of them around here.
Wendy Lyons: Not around these next other woods. So did he disclose where this mesquite bush was?
Billy Richmond: No.
Wendy Lyons: So she didn’t know at this point if he’s in Lexington or in Texas.
Billy Richmond: I think at this point she was still not really believing that he’d actually been kidnapped.
Paul Williams: She was about halfway-
Billy Richmond: She was concerned but she was still a little, I think in her mind, probably a little up in the air of whether or not this was an effort on his part to get her to give up some cash so that he could get on it. Because we did also learn that he liked to gamble and he was a high stakes gambler. And I think a few times as the investigation went on, we learned that he had in fact got into a little trouble with gambling debt.
And I think at one point another witness that was talked to, he had actually left cash with that witness with instructions. And of course that witness didn’t really know how much it was or anything like that. It was sealed in a package left with that witness. And that witness was instructed that if he ever called, that she needed to get that package and have it shipped to wherever he said. Which we found out later in the investigation, that actually did happen. And that package was intercepted, if I remember, by the local police. Yeah. Somebody intercepted it and I think the DEA got involved then trying to find out the origin of that cash. And it was a substantial amount of money. So this gentleman was wrapped up into a whole lot of things, not only in and of a business nature, but also on the other side of the law. He was quite active.
David Lyons: And that cash thing, that all happened sometime, I assume, well before the kidnapping?
Billy Richmond: Yes. That was before the kidnapping.
David Lyons: So how long did it take to start? I know we’ve heard all these… And everyone here is a risk factor. How much time? And it probably, I guess day to day you learned a new thing. Was that it? Or?
Paul Williams: Day to day we were chasing down learning new things on the individuals he knew, the stuff he’d been doing the day of disappearance, trying to figure out what kind of business locations he had been visiting. We ended up finding out he had a post office box over at the post office in Garden Springs. So we executed a search warrant on that post office box after the postal inspectors kind of said, “Yeah, it’s loaded.” Got the stuff out of that. And of course gained a bunch of new contacts to contact and that type of stuff.
The curious thing about that was we had no idea that a state warrant, and we should have known, was not sufficient for federal property. We got a state warrant executed, post office did have any problem. We searched the post office box and only found out later talking to the federal prosecutor that they actually, the state didn’t have any jurisdiction over that property. So they couldn’t issue the search warrant, that would’ve had to been a federal judge. None of the evidence was contested. But it was a time error thing. Learned that went, “Oh well that’s a little note to make for later.”
Billy Richmond: And it’s funny in these investigations, how things start to unravel and you start to find new people, new things. Again, this gentleman was into a whole lot of things. I think on the surface, you could see him as one person. In fact, he was another. He ended up having a girlfriend in Tennessee which shed a whole lot of light onto a whole lot of things. And he had been with her for 10 years, I believe. She had no idea he was married.
Wendy Lyons: And I guess wife didn’t know about girlfriend either.
Billy Richmond: Wife didn’t know about… Like Paul said when we started out, the relationship with his wife unfortunately had turned into, I think it was more of a brother sister convenience, we’re older, we’ve been at it this long, let’s just stick with it. I think the romance clearly had been gone. But then we found this other person and this person was oblivious, again, to the other side of his life. Had no idea who and what he really was until investigators started talking to her and really poking-
David Lyons: How did y’all find her? How did it-
Paul Williams: There was a check.
Billy Richmond: The check? Yeah. In a vehicle. Was it in the vehicle?
Paul Williams: She had, I think it was in the house or in the vehicle when she had written him a check for cash. He was kind of using her for a little cash on the side.
Billy Richmond: Yeah, and she had a little bit of money I think.
Paul Williams: She was fairly well off.
Billy Richmond: But she was a very sweet, seemed like a very sweet lady, Older lady, I think close to 70. Genuinely I think at one point cared for him. But I think she even told us that after a while she realized that he was a consultation man and she went from a romantic interest to just friends and she continued to be friends with him, I guess, up until his death. But it’s very interesting relationship.
David Lyons: One thing that speaks to me, and again the listeners will get this too, is that significance of every little thing. Because here you’re talking about you go bang a post office box with a warrant and you’re getting mail and those names become potential leads, right?
Billy Richmond: Right.
David Lyons: And then you find a check, right? And that sounds obnoxious and very simple in of itself and everything. But again, the name on that check how that… James Carlos, I think, somebody in an earlier episode said it’s like taking a thread out of a sweater and it starts to pill.
Billy Richmond: Well and we’ve got to look too, we got to step back in time a little bit. This is 1998.
David Lyons: Yep.
Billy Richmond: Technology has changed tremendously since then. I remember one of the headaches we always had with any homicide was phone records. Number one, the subpoena process, different carriers had different rules. Some of them would be reactionary to a subpoena, others would tell you, “Nah, We’re not doing that.”
Paul Williams: Turnaround time on getting it back.
Billy Richmond: Yeah. It could take… Some of them, you could get within a few hours, some of them you could get in a few weeks, some of them you didn’t get at all. And with this one, one of those things that you ask about, what did we find, was phone records. And very quickly those phone, I think that fairly quickly anyways, we got those phone records and I don’t know who, I assume Paul, went through those phone records and started identifying who was attached to what numbers. And that really helped because that gives you an idea of who he’s currently dealing with and leads you in a direction of what that business is about too, so to speak.
Paul Williams: We’re getting ahead of ourself but it speaks to what you talked about, the little things. The suspect who, it’s probably about time to get into how we identified him or not. The suspect had taken the car, the victim’s car with the body in it, and hidden it in a rural area in another county. And he told the lady who owned the property that he was buying the car from a friend. The friend owed money on it and the car was about to be repoed. So he needed a place to hide that car until after the repo had been, until the supposed buyer paid off the debt and it wasn’t under threat of repossession. And so he asked her if he could stash the car at that location and she hesitantly said yes.
We find out that he shows up at that location, drops off the car, but he’s got no way to get back to Lexington. This is a neighboring county. Your county here in Jespen County and how do I get home? So he calls, he has the people where he parked the car, call a friend in Lexington that for money, will give him a ride back. On the ride back, when we interview that guy, he says, “Oh yeah, I saw that car parked over there. The guy I was given a ride back to, the suspect made the comment that, “well that vehicle, I had to leave it down here because it has, I got a problem with universal joint.””
Billy Richmond: Broken down.
Paul Williams: The guy that was giving him a ride thought, “Oh, I can make a little more money off this. I’ve got a friend that can help repair it. Could we take you someplace to get your parts?” But he remembered specifically he told him the car was there because it had a universal joint probably wouldn’t run. Well, he never talked to the landowner who told us, “Oh, he said he had to have it.”
So you’ve got two contradictory stories that jump up immediately if you’re paying attention and go, “Hey, somebody here stopped telling the truth.” That’s what keys you in on one particular suspect. And he told one lie to one and one lie to the another and never knew that we would connect the two.
Billy Richmond: And then if you look at it just on the surface of what Paul’s talking about, kind of bizarre that somebody would show up, if I remember right, I think it was a Sunday night, 9:30, 10, and this guy needs a ride from the next county over. If that doesn’t jump out at you, I don’t know what does.
David Lyons: Well, we might have jumped, and it was a good point in everything, but we might have skipped a couple things to we did to get… We might leapfrogged. So if we can fill in those gaps and everything… But again, the devil’s in the details and if you’re not paying attention-
Paul Williams: Those little small ones
David Lyons: -then they would go right past you if you’re not paying attention.
Paul Williams: For sure.
David Lyons: So how do we get… You get the call from Scott Blakely, you go out, you interview her, you get enough information, you get some really cool stuff in the beginning, which would be the storage shed or the storage facility.
Paul Williams: Yeah.
David Lyons: And pop that in. And where else do you go from there that starts to work this? Where’s the chronology with this?
Paul Williams: Luck.
David Lyons: Well, it’s always, yeah, for sure.
Paul Williams: Luck. We had the information we had. We’d been to the storage unit and searched it, found the marijuana.
Billy Richmond: Which turns it in a different direction immediately.
Paul Williams: Exactly.
Billy Richmond: It turns the case.
Paul Williams: We talked to the manager of the storage unit, a very helpful, friendly individual. And then we go about following our other leads. I believe it was the first of the week on a Monday or a Tuesday after he had been reported missing on a Thursday, we get a call from the storage guy. And he says, “Hey, I’m sitting around last night. The alarm goes off for the victim’s storage unit. If you don’t punch in a key code, then we get an alarm.” So he goes to the storage unit and there’s a guy in the unit and he says, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” And the guy says, “Well, I’m a friend of the victim and I’m here to pick up a briefcase.” And the storage owner goes, “Well, your briefcase is probably not there because the police were here yesterday and they searched it and took stuff.” And then the guy who manages the storage unit says, “Hey, how about you come up to the office and let me give the police a call. This is just kind of strange.”
Billy Richmond: He asked him who he was.
Paul Williams: Yes.
Billy Richmond: And he gave him a fake name.
Paul Williams: Robert Rivers.
Billy Richmond: Rivers was the name, yeah. And then pretty quickly, once they get up to the office, the guy takes off running and runs over around behind a fence, jumps in a vehicle, takes off. Fortunately the guy who ran the storage place was pretty savvy, managed to get a good look at the vehicle. And he was very knowledgeable with vehicles because he’d been a car salesman.
Paul Williams: He was one of these car guys.
Billy Richmond: He was a car guy.
Paul Williams: He gave it to us within a year of the year model.
Billy Richmond: Yes. And then I think he may have even got the plate.
Paul Williams: He got. Yeah, he got-
Billy Richmond: And that’s where we-
Paul Williams: I think he got all the plate, but one letter or number.
Billy Richmond: Yeah. And we ended up coming up with the suspect’s name with the vehicle registered. So-
Wendy Lyons: Which wasn’t Rivers.
Billy Richmond: It wasn’t Rivers.
Paul Williams: No.
Billy Richmond: So everything started really to fall into place.
Paul Williams: Ruben Rehost Salinas.
Billy Richmond: Yes.
Paul Williams: Was the name. And when we started then focusing on him, one of the things we did was the wife had seen this guy. So when we could show her a picture, she was like, “Oh yeah, that’s the guy. That’s the guy.”
Billy Richmond: “That’s him.”
Paul Williams: So that was the key break. And it was blind luck. And it was based on his greed. He had to go back for the money in that storage.
Wendy Lyons: And the marijuana possibly right?
Paul Williams: Well that’s the money.
Wendy Lyons: But the, okay.
Paul Williams: Yeah. That’s the value, that’s the money. He had to get that. And another… Well, I’ll get into this a little later, another thing that I just wanted, they don’t make it easy for you but their greed or their animus makes some overlook mistakes. The money, what he could get for that marijuana, he’s pushing for this $20,000 ransom. He can’t just go, “I’ve killed a guy, let’s get away with it.” He’s got to make that extra little push. And that was his mistake.
Billy Richmond: And I think that was the point that we were up over the top of the hill. We’d reached the summit and we’re going down-
Paul Williams: Yeah, from there on.
Billy Richmond: Because very quickly, we had a gentleman that, it was a guy that I knew, that contacted us. I got to talking to him. He came down and gave an interview. And it was a guy I knew from the streets, I guess best I remember. And he said-
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 hearing impaired. Just search for the Murder Police Podcast and you will find us.
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Lock it down, Judy.