Unmasking the Serial Killer Robert Smallwood | Part 1 of 3 | April 12, 2022
Unmasking the Serial Killer Robert Smallwood | Part 2 of 3 | April 19, 2022
Unmasking the Serial Killer Robert Smallwood | Part 3 of 3 | April 26, 2022
Continuing the hard-fought battle for justice on behalf of victims Sonora Allen, Doris Roberts and Erica Butler, we will hear in Part 2 more about:
· The testing of untested sexual assault examination kits using grants
· Victim Erica Butler is found dead in 2006
· Bizarre behavior in a suspect interview that seems to shore up his involvement
· Another DNA sample that did not hit and in fact aided in exoneration
· “Congratulations, my friend, you have a serial killer” Marcie Adkins
· Feeling the heat on the investigation get turned up in the PD
· A witness provides a broad description of a suspect
· A 1993 kit is processed where an 83 year old woman was raped in her home. She provides a more narrow suspect description
· Another suspect is identified and launches an in depth investigation that included detail cleaning an entire parking lot, with a crazy ending
Show Transcript
Part 2 of 2
Matt Brotherton:
Get the call that there’s a woman in a house. Her name’s Erica Butler, Erica Butler was found bound. Her hands and feet were tied. She also had a scarf around her mouth. She had signs of pretty significant trauma around her face from when she’d been assaulted. Also, her pants had been pulled down, signs of sexual assault, and she had been strangled and killed.
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, Unmasking the Serial Killer, Robert Smallwood, part two of three.
Matt Brotherton:
Even though we could link these two women, the value for that for moving the investigation forward was really quite limited because their exposure to folks, was just too broad for us to be able to start limiting down suspects. And so we worked those two cases and eliminated everything we could. And eventually, the cases just went cold.
David Lyons:
What were the age ranges of the two victims? Even just a rough ballpark on how old we’re talking about.
Matt Brotherton:
30 to 40.
David Lyons:
Gotcha. It’s interesting too, because I like the way you talked about the risk factors is it’s a non-judgmental thing, but it’s critical to have those on board because you can’t even start without those. And I think probably you had some cases sometimes where family and friends weren’t real forthcoming in the beginning.
Matt Brotherton:
Sure. Of course.
David Lyons:
It slowed things down. So mission critical stuff. And you’re right. That stuff impacts everybody as far as drug addiction and challenging.
Matt Brotherton:
Oh, it’s horrible.
David Lyons:
It’s all over the place.
Matt Brotherton:
It’s what it’s seen. And when men are in that sort of addiction, they generally turn to petty crime. They turn to petty crime to support the addiction. Women, generally what I’ve seen in my 23, almost 24 years of policing is often turn to sex work.
David Lyons:
Yeah. I’ve seen that a bunch too. So where’s it go from here? So you’ve got these things. How long did they lay dormant like that with this?
Matt Brotherton:
So really quite some time. And these things like these DNA cases, having these DNA samples while this is going on, there was a new lieutenant who’d come to the section, James Curless, who was our lieutenant over homicide. And he saw that what we had were a bunch of kits in the basement, a bunch of DNA collection kits that were in the basement of headquarters that had just never been sent to the lab. And a lot of this is back what we are saying that in 98, 99, 2000 before that. We started collecting kits long before that, but people just didn’t know a lot about DNA, and CODIS works because we keep getting more and more samples into it. It’s only as good as the data that are in the system. And Lieutenant Curless saw that we had these kits and started applying for grants and sending those kits to the lab.
Matt Brotherton:
And there’s a lot of talk across the country about untested sexual assault kits. And there’s been some, I think, unfair demonization of law enforcement about that. And a lot of it is just, it frankly is ignorance in the most non-judgmental sense of the word of folks just not knowing what DNA really could do 20 years ago and 10 years ago, and today, frankly. Now people think DNA will solve everything and you can get the results back in 15 minutes.
David Lyons:
That’s the way it is on TV.
Marci Adkins:
There’s another issue too. We didn’t have, until the early 2000s, we didn’t have PCR. I think we talked about this in the forensic podcast. Prior to that you had RFLP.
Matt Brotherton:
Right.
Marci Adkins:
And so you needed a lot of sample, and frankly, most cases just did not have enough DNA to test with RFLP. And so we really were limited in what we could do up to a certain point. And I don’t think CODIS even came along until mid to late nineties, not totally a hundred percent sure there, but it was pretty new. It was pretty fresh when I started. Now, I think that in around 2005, I think the laboratory, I think we got some grant money and that’s when we came and we wanted to clean off your shelves. So I think that’s how we ended up at the next case.
Matt Brotherton:
So I may be flip flopped. Well, I’m going to go to another case and then back to the next case.
Marci Adkins:
Okay.
Matt Brotherton:
But yeah, so we just had these kits sitting in the basement that weren’t sent, but anyhow, aside from that, and that’s kind of a side note. To talk about another case, in April of 06, I was next up in the rotation again. And as I was driving into work in the morning, I got a call from a patrol officer saying, “Hey, Detective Brotherton, are you the on-call detective?” “I sure am.” “Okay. We have a homicide victim over here on Kenton street.” So Kenton Street’s a small street in Lexington, Kentucky, downtown, right near Transylvania University, for out of town listeners. Transylvania University is the oldest university west of the Allegheny River. So a little bit of trivia there, but there’s a bunch of housing right near Transylvania University, which amusingly they’re pioneers instead of the bats or the vampires or the hunters, whatever softball joke you want to make, but get the call that there’s a woman in a house.
Matt Brotherton:
Her name’s Erica Butler, Erica Butler was found bound. Her hands and feet were tied. She also had a scarf around her mouth. She had signs of pretty significant trauma around her face from when she’d been assaulted. Also her pants had been pulled down, signs of sexual assault and she had been strangled and killed in the house. This was a shotgun house in a small neighborhood, an older house in Lexington. In the bedroom with her during the assault was a guy that kind of called himself, her boyfriend. And he was an older guy who would get a check. He struggled with addiction and whenever he would get his monthly check, they would meet up and he’d kind of call her his girlfriend. She struggled with her addiction, with cocaine addiction. He was more of a drinker. And what he said was that everyone was hanging out in this house and then they’re in the back bedroom and this guy comes and knocks him out and then ends up assaulting Ms. Butler.
Matt Brotherton:
And he says, he’s in there. He sees it. And it’s a guy who’d been in the house earlier in the evening, but he, the boyfriend, the elderly male pretended he was knocked out during the assault, but he spoke to us about it. Ms. Butler was killed in the bedroom while this guy was in the bedroom with her and he was able to give us a suspect description, a guy who was in the house. We identified a suspect who was in the house, who fit the description given by the witness in there. And Rob Wilson and I went and spoke to the guy. He was a low-functioning adult. He had some significant developmental disabilities and he was he’s like, “Yep. I was there.” And Rob and I are asking him, “So did you end up having sex with her?” And the guy would give just kind of answers where he was looking for approval from us.
Matt Brotherton:
We could tell he was, again, low functioning. “And were you there with her?” “Okay. Was I? Is that what y’all want?” “Okay. Did you have sex with her?” “Did I? Did I have sex with her?” “Well, did you?” “Okay. Did you kill her?” “Okay. Okay. I killed her.” Well, Rob and I got a DNA search warrant, swabbed him. He wasn’t going anywhere. We weren’t in a real rush about the case and it was going to hinge on the DNA because his statement wasn’t great as far as did we feel like he really knew what he was saying, what he was answering. And we sent the DNA sample off convinced he was the guy and then the DNA sample came back and it wasn’t him.
Marci Adkins:
You remember the day I called you?
Matt Brotherton:
I don’t.
Marci Adkins:
So Matt and I have been working together for a very long time, and sometimes there’s been times where we would mess with each other. You would sometimes call me and disguise your voice and ask some crazy question.
Matt Brotherton:
I would that I have been a model of professionalism throughout my career.
Marci Adkins:
So I did the DNA.
Matt Brotherton:
I remember what I did right after I got the information.
Marci Adkins:
So I did the DNA on the Erica Butler case and I called Matt up and I said, “Matt, it doesn’t match. And I’m going to need you to sit down for this next thing I’m going to tell you.” Because I said, “It hit to Sonora and it’s hit to Doris Roberts.”
David Lyons:
Holy cow.
Marci Adkins:
Congratulations, my friend. You have a serial killer.
Matt Brotherton:
So I have clearly blocked that out because the next, what happened right after that is I immediately called Dave Richardson, Rob Wilson, Bill Breslin and Chris Schoonover into James Curless’s office. And I said, “Guys, this is what we just had happen.” And we then started to freak out because we knew, as Marci clearly remembers, because a sadist, she remembers well tormenting people and giving them information that’s going to be traumatic for them. But I knew at that point that this was going to get attention. And frankly, in something like that as a detective, as a homicide detective, I’m not really worried about attention or pressure from the community per se or the family because I’m working for the family. I expect them to want us to work hard and to have expectations of us. It was internal pressure that this is now when you have a serial killer, it’s now in the media, it’s now political.
Matt Brotherton:
And now that I sit in management, I think it’s completely reasonable for us to have these expectations-
David Lyons:
Of course.
Matt Brotherton:
Of investigators. But as a young homicide detective, and I guess when this came in, I’d been in the unit for five or six years. What we wanted was to be able to work the case, to be able to work the case as the case needed to be worked without external political pressures. I love that you remember that, I wish we had talked about that beforehand, because I don’t remember the phone call at all. There’s another phone call I remember that comes up. But so at this point now what we have is, as she said, we had a serial killer.
David Lyons:
That’s an amazing epiphany. And again, that’s like a, oh shit. I think that’s a Latin description for being surprised that way. And you make a good point too, about the internal pressure thing, is that I think that when people are in these investigations, you’d be immature not to understand that’s there. And the trick is understanding it’s there and the dynamics, but still, like you said, working the case, without that influence in any of your decision making or anything. That’s one of the challenges in that work because that is going to get a lot of attention, for sure.
Matt Brotherton:
And that is the thing that I look back on, the work that James Curless did. Of all of the many accolades I could give him, one is what a good job he did shielding us from it, the interference that he ran so that we could work the case. And that’s a difficult job. And as the lieutenant over Special Victims, there were cases that I worked that were very high profile, public cases that I had to manage that, the external and internal pressures, as much as I had to work on let’s make sure that the case that we worked is the best case possible, regardless of any of those pressures.
David Lyons:
Regardless of who the victim is.
Matt Brotherton:
100%.
David Lyons:
That’s the struggle is, we take the victims or by the way, I’ve always looked at, we take the victims as we find them. And no victim in my mind can ever be elevated against another one that is out there on an unsolved case.
Matt Brotherton:
Not at all.
David Lyons:
That’s the ethical part of it. So interesting. What a day. What a day, especially. Were you giddy when you called him? Were you just like busting to get him on the phone?
Marci Adkins:
I knew it was news that he needed to hear.
David Lyons:
Sure.
Marci Adkins:
Immediately.
David Lyons:
Yeah.
Matt Brotherton:
And I’m sure she did delight in it, but no.
Marci Adkins:
The reason I brought that up is because the way you paused, but when I told you it didn’t match him, it was almost like you were trying to assess whether I was messing with you or not.
Matt Brotherton:
Well, and that is the truth. Rob and I, when we walked away, because we could put him in the house through other witnesses that he matched the suspect description given by her boyfriend, his statements that he was a good size guy. Rob and I had zero doubt that this guy had done it. And then to hear that he hadn’t.
Marci Adkins:
Yeah. Because once the profile does not match the suspect and it goes into CODIS, it goes through peer review before it gets searched. And then as soon as you do that search is when you find out who else or what other cases it has hit to. So we had that information.
Matt Brotherton:
And that’s the other thing that I think is important to point out is, I’m honored to have worked with Marci and to call her my friend, but we don’t work for the same organization. Her job is totally different, and rightfully so. The DNA testing does not happen in the police department. It’s why you have a separate prosecutor’s office than the police department. There are all these other things that she is governed, she would love to help me put cases down, but her responsibility is the integrity of that DNA testing. And as much as we beg and plead for things to happen at a certain rate, or put my case in front or can you tell me right now, can you tell me this? She can’t, and that’s the way it is supposed to be, that there has to be a wall between us so that there is no tainting of the legitimacy of the work that they do.
David Lyons:
Yeah. It’s got to withstand a lot of tests later.
Matt Brotherton:
Yeah, a lot of tests.
David Lyons:
And our thing too, is that you all picked up on some of the indicators in that interview that he made, we could use the word not right, but in a less ethical environment, some things could have happened right there and then. But did you ever had anybody do a false confession with you before?
Matt Brotherton:
I have not. I know of some that have happened.
David Lyons:
I had at least one and that’s what you have to guard against too is to make an assumption based on that. But if you’re paying attention, a lot of times you can start to pick up on little things going on in their character, or like you said, the leading is that you said it best when we’re trying to. But in unethical situations that has a really bad result sometimes, so at least you’re were cueing in on that. That’s good stuff have too. So where we go?
Marci Adkins:
So at this point, the frenzy begins, right?
Matt Brotherton:
The frenzy begins. We now had a third victim. But again, our victim was someone who was exposed to a high risk lifestyle. She was someone who had been arrested before, that traded sex for drugs. But we now had a timeframe, we had the late nineties case of Doris Roberts. And I don’t want to misspeak, I want to say it was 99. So she was 99. We have a 99 case. We have an 02 case with Sonora Allen. Now we have an 06 case of Erica Butler. But what we so have is a suspect description, and we have a suspect description that was great. And that he would able to say it was a male black. But our witness, the guy who was in the room, just said he was a big guy and the maximum level of confidence we could have in his suspect description was that it was a black male between the ages of 18 and 70.
Matt Brotherton:
That’s really all we had. He was unfortunately not a great witness, but we were now narrowing it down. We had someone from 99 to 06, that we’ve got seven year time span. And so how old are they going to be? And we start working it. And we end up putting out a suspect composite that unfortunately pressure came about this, about that we had a serial killer. We had the witness in the bedroom meet with some composite artist. We put some composites together and we put them out. Against the investigators better interests, it was put out to the public, if anybody knows these guys. And I don’t know how much you put on your website as far as people can look at the composites. I don’t know if the composite is in open records.
Matt Brotherton:
I would think-
David Lyons:
Yeah. Would be, sure. Yeah.
Matt Brotherton:
And so folks can look at it, but if you look at the composite, it’s just kind of a guy. If you want the suspicious guy who lives down the street from you to be the dude you see in that picture, you would be able to convince yourself. And so we ended up getting a tremendous number of calls. And so when Marci says the frenzy began, we now started getting calls of all sorts of suspects that we had to eliminate. And we had people assigned to the unit, but we also started up kind of this triage station of when a suspect came in, could we eliminate them or did we need to go get a DNA sample from them? And we had three dates. We had the 99 the 02 and the 06 dates.
Matt Brotherton:
So the first thing we were doing was eliminating people based on incarceration records. That our first call, whenever a suspect came in, was to the Bureau of Prisons and then checking our local jail websites. Was this guy in prison during the death of Doris Roberts, during the death of Sonora Allen or during the death of Erica Roberts. Because if they were, then we could eliminate them from all of that. But on a lot of folks, we couldn’t. And so there were a lot of cold calls that were happening or a suspect name would come in. We’d see, Hey, is this guy … then we’d call the lab. “Hey, we just got this name in, is this person in CODIS?” And we ended up eliminating well over 150 suspects. And Marci, how many QTIPs did we bring you?
Marci Adkins:
Well, there was at least 35 males that were tested and compared to the profiles from these cases, at least 35.
Matt Brotherton:
And these are suspects that were called into us or that we identified through investigation and went and met with them. And whether through consent or through a search warrant, ended up getting enough to take a buckle swab from them and then driving that swab up to the lab.
David Lyons:
And all the time when these are coming in, that’s stressing the workload at the lab already, right? It’s like everybody’s actually to bump them up and they just get dumped in.
Marci Adkins:
Yes. They often come in, we think this is the guy and you’re excited and you want to do it right away. And it’s disappointing when it’s not the guy.
David Lyons:
Sure.
Marci Adkins:
But it is what it is. And there was even one where I guess you couldn’t get a sample from the individual, but you were able to get a sample from their mother. So we even did some kinship comparison on one of those cases and eliminated that person as well.
Matt Brotherton:
So we’re working the case and it’s going on and then we get another hit. And as you remember, I said that there had been the grant to clear off the shelves. We got another hit that came in and what this one ended up being was a kit that was collected in 1993. And this case was a little different than the others. One, it was before. It was a sign significant amount of time before. We’re talking six years before the death of Doris Roberts. What it was was a woman was at home. She lived over in kind of the west end of Lexington, downtown. And she was 83 years old at the time and the suspect kicked open the back door, came in and raped and robbed her. And he made her take a bath before he left. He took some of her jewelry and she called the police and it was reported that he had raped her and robbed her and a sexual assault kit was collected in 1993, but it was never sent to the lab.
Matt Brotherton:
And it was never sent to the lab again, I think, in good faith by the investigators because CODIS may or may not have existed, what evidence truly existed, but we started sending the kits off and we started sending these old kits and this kit got sent to the lab and this 83 year old woman, a retired school teacher, she was sexually assaulted in her house by this individual. And now what we had were three murders and now a sexual assault of an 83 year old. Now, what this also did is she, as a retired school teacher, was able to give us a little bit better description. She was able to say that, she was able to bracket it. She said early twenties, but we gave a little more on the front and the back of it. But what we could say now is, if it’s an 06, that what we’re looking for, we’re looking for someone who is at least of a certain age, because we were looking for someone who was at least 17 in 1993 and no older than 35.
Matt Brotherton:
So that was able to narrow our scope a little bit about how our investigation would go when people would come in and what we could say out to the public, as far as the suspects that we’re looking for. So we’re working this case, we’re running down all these different suspects. And then one night we get a call about an individual that some folks are saying, hey, this guy, he hangs out around a lot of the women who walk in the east end, who are out on the corners. We think this is your guy. And we identify him as a suspect and we start looking into the guy a little bit. And so we get a name, I find an address. And understand, we’re getting 10 of these a week where people are calling in about suspects. There’s one that Rob Wilson and I got a call. We were also, at the same time, dealing, doing a lot of outreach work with women who were on the streets trading sex for drugs because we’re looking for who are the guys y’all think are weird.
Matt Brotherton:
We did several undercover operations where we had a Lexington police officer pretend to be a woman prostituting on the street. And we would arrest the individuals who stopped and picked her up. We would go work with the women and try and help us identify any sort of a suspect that these are. They’re going to know who the guys who are out being a little rough or make the hair on the back of their neck stand up. We were doing all sorts of outreach, but eventually we got one suspect identified, got a name about him, look him up, find he’s got a house. So it was a Friday at 4:00, wrapping up because you know how working through the names. And Dave Richardson and I go to this guy’s house to try and get a Q-tip from him to try and get a buckle swab from him, frankly, before happy hour on a Friday.
Matt Brotherton:
Dave and I go to this guy’s house. I go to knock on the door. I have my cell phone on in my pocket, it’s called Dave and I’ve got a pocket recorder in the other pocket. I’ve got Q-tips and business cards and I’ve got the recorder on to record the conversation and hopefully to get consent from him to get the swab. I’ve also got the phone on so Dave can hear, and I guess our thought process back then was in the event this guy killed me, Dave could come in and avenge me so that all of that would be fine. So I go knock on the door and the guy is painting his house. He’s painting his kitchen. And I knock on the door and I gave him the same spiel that I gave probably 30 to 50 other folks during this investigation. “Hey, my name’s Matt Brotherton. I’m a detective with the police department. Do you got a minute for me to talk to you?”
Matt Brotherton:
He said, “Sure, come on in.” He’s in painting his kitchen. Said, “Well, I’m here about the investigation. Have you seen the bit on the news about this woman named Erica Butler who’s killed?” And he looks at me and goes, “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t watch the news.” And I said, “Well, she was killed. We’re out trying to find a suspect. We have a DNA sample. And what I’m doing is going around and asking folks, if they’ll submit to a sample. We get all these phone calls. There was a composite put up on the news. It’s a terrible picture. Gosh, dang. It’s crazy. I’m sorry to bother you, Tom. But I got a boss and I get a list of names every day. I’ve got to eliminate. And here’s what I’m asking. If I can just stick a Q-tip in your mouth, it’ll get DNA sample. It’s not anything we can clone you from. This isn’t the X-Files. But what you’ll get in exchange for that is my business card. And that’s good for one get out of a speeding ticket for free in Fayette County.”
Matt Brotherton:
And I did this over and over again, talking to people, just trying to get people to consent, to getting a Q-tip so I could send it off. Because we got so many tips that we knew were likely not the suspect, but we still had to eliminate them. And so I give this guy the spiel and he looks at me and he says, “Nah, man, I ain’t going to do that. And besides, I was working when she was killed.” Have you not heard this story?
Marci Adkins:
I have not. Okay. First of all, that answers a lot, because I’ve always wondered how you guys managed to get people to cooperate with standards.
Matt Brotherton:
Yep. And so I-
Marci Adkins:
Second of all, how did he know when she was killed?
Matt Brotherton:
My point exactly. So at that point, I looked at him and I said, “Thank you so much for your time. I won’t bother you. Please have a good weekend.” And I walk out and as soon as I get in the car, I drive around the corner and Dave was like, “Did he just say that? Did he just say that?” And I was like, “Yep.” So two things happened. The first, of course, being that happy hour was canceled. The second is that Dave and I went back to headquarters and then began really digging into this guy. So we found out through an NCIC check that he had changed his name. We found out that he had a misdemeanor conviction for a sexual assault out of county. So now, we have this suspect who fits our age range is called in as having matched the description and yeah, and says to us, and for the listeners at home, as soon as I said that, Dave and Marci both just, oh [crosstalk 00:28:29] stood up straight and their eyes opened incredibly wide, exactly as I did. But back to what you said about, I’ve said how we got the swabs. A friend of mine always said he wanted me to come work for him in sales because my entire career in homicide was selling a product I knew people shouldn’t buy.
David Lyons:
There we go. So true.
Matt Brotherton:
You shouldn’t ever talk to the police. Not ever, don’t ever talk to us. But anyhow-
David Lyons:
But you can talk to me.
Matt Brotherton:
Yes, absolutely. So we go back, we look this guy up, we find out that he’s fairly recently moved to town, that he has changed his name, that he does have a misdemeanor sexual conviction. So we start following this guy. Now at this point, we want to get a DNA sample from him, because we want to see if this is the guy. What we need to get is a DNA sample from this guy without him knowing we have the sample. Because how long was it taking us to get an answer back then?
Marci Adkins:
I would start on the samples as soon as I possibly could, but even then going through the review process, we could be looking at anywhere from two weeks to eight weeks, so yeah.
David Lyons:
That’s nothing like on TV. So you all must have been, I don’t know what you were doing there [crosstalk 00:29:45]
Matt Brotherton:
And this also was usually, so evidence gets booked into police headquarters and if it’s going to go to the lab, it usually waits. So an officer will book in evidence, they’ll fill out a lab request and then there are folks who work at headquarters, who drive whatever’s going to the lab that week. They go once a week. I made that drive to Frankfurt by myself, hand- delivering these swabs. When I thought I had a good suspect, I drove them myself, immediately. I would get the swab. I would book it in. I’d have it checked out to myself. I’d immediately run it to the lab. So even begging and pleading, and I know that they prioritized it because it was a serial killer case. It was still, would you say two to eight weeks?
Marci Adkins:
Yes. Yes. Standards are a lot faster to run. So we don’t make people wait from scratch all over again. We tell people that we try to work the cases in the order that they come in, but that is the original evidence. When they develop a suspect standard and they bring that in, we typically run those through pretty quickly. But even in a best case scenario, we’re talking about weeks wait.
Matt Brotherton:
Yeah, because if you have a small amount of semen in a sex assault kit, you’ve got to separate it. You’ve got to separate the DNA from the victim’s versus the suspect. I’m handing you a Q-tip that’s preserved with the cheek cells in it. It’s an easier thing to process. So we needed to get a DNA sample from this guy without him knowing, because I had enough, I believe, at the time that I could have written a search warrant. I could have written a search warrant to go to this guy to compel him, to give me a sample of his DNA, but I wasn’t going to get an answer for best case scenario two weeks, so now this guy’s in Mexico.
David Lyons:
That’s what I was going to say. You run him underground. He has to come up with a plan, so I’m with you on that. You push him into a corner.
Matt Brotherton:
Yeah, so one of the things we did it in the investigation, we followed him for a little bit and then found out that he worked at a t-shirt place in Lexington. This place that prints t-shirts in Lexington, Kentucky. And a lot of it is like sports t-shirts. And ends up, I have a buddy who knew the owner of this t-shirt place. So I called the owner and I said, “Hey, does this guy work for you?” And he’s like, “Yeah, guy’s a great employee. Here every morning, works day shift.” And I said, “Oh. Right on. Can you tell me, was he working on April 4th?” April 4th was the date that we discovered Erica Butler being killed. And he’s like, “Oh yeah, great employee. He gets here every morning at 7:00 AM. He works the morning shift. Never late.” Erica Butler was discovered at 7:30 in the morning was when the other people in the house called and said she was dead.
Matt Brotherton:
The guy’s like, “Yeah, April 4th. Yeah. I’m sure he was working. Never late. Oh no, I’m sorry. On April 4th, he didn’t show up to work until 11:00 AM.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Thank you so much for your time.” So now we start following him more and more and more. And what we see is, this guy gets to work at this t-shirt place. And every morning at 10:00 AM, there’s a smoke break and the people come out and he would come out to the back parking lot of this business for a cigarette every morning at 10:00 AM. And we’re thinking great, a cigarette butt to get a sample of this guy. Well, of course, the big problem is what is on the ground wherever there are smoke breaks?
David Lyons:
A few more.
Matt Brotherton:
What I have never understood is how, what appear to be more cigarettes than have ever been manufactured in the United States always exist on the ground at every single place where smoke breaks happen.
Matt Brotherton:
And so this place, this t-shirt place was running. It ran from 7:00 AM until midnight, every day printing out shirts because it’s the heart of Kentucky basketball country, right? They’re printing those blue shirts. So what we needed to be able to do as investigators is, from a distance, be able to say that the cigarette butt we collect, because we obviously can’t stand next to the guy and say, “Hey, remember me, I’m detective Matt Brotherton. And I’m just waiting until you drop the cigarette.” We had to make sure that we could determine from a distance, the cigarette butt that you dropped on the ground, that we have that specific one, because we didn’t want to grab someone else’s and that one gets says, no, it’s not your guy. And in fact, we get a false exoneration.
Matt Brotherton:
So at three in the morning, Dave Richardson and I went with a push broom and a leaf blower and cleaned that entire back parking lot off and made it the cleanest surface in Fayette County so that when the cigarette butt, hopefully that he was going to go to work the next day, and hopefully he was going to drop the cigarette, that we’d be able to see it from a distance. So what happened the next day is I was with Detective Matt Sharp in one vehicle, looking from an angle with binoculars. Dave Richardson and Rob Wilson were in a surveillance van a little closer where they could see it. And when the smoke break started to happen, I got on the radio and said, “Hey, they’re out doing the smoke break.”
Matt Brotherton:
And then what happened is Chris Schoonover and Paul Williams came driving up in a work van that they had borrowed from some people they knew who own a printing company and they roll up. But they even and have like the embroidered work shirts for this printing company. And Chris Schoonover gets out with a clipboard and a little box and walks up to the people smoking and says, and I can’t remember the owner’s name, but they say, Hey, where is so and so’s office? And they’re like, “Oh, it’s back there.” Well, Chris starts to walk back there. And Paul who happens to be a smoker, says, “You know what, I’m going to stop and have a cigarette.” And so Paul stands out there in this shirt. And if your guests get to hear, retired Sergeant Paul Williams, they’ll see that he is one of the most gregarious guys who’s ever lived, who can talk to anyone about anything for any period of time, stands and talks to these folks having a smoke break. And then when everyone went inside at the end of the smoke break, Paul took the one hand that had been in his pocket the whole time with the rubber glove on it and he bent down and he picked up the cigarette butt and put it back in his pocket and off they went.
David Lyons:
What a great piece of work.
Matt Brotherton:
It was fantastic. It couldn’t have gone better. We got that cigarette butt and we drove it out to the lab to be tested. And I’m sure we all went for a great lunch after that.
David Lyons:
It’s neat to look back at how many times, things like that were scripted or developed in at work. It reminded me of, I fly out at the Lexington Airport a lot and I still walk by the bar. And remember the day that the FBI came and wired that bar to get a statement from the guy that killed Trent DeJero. And every time I walk by, I can almost … And funny, coincidentally, me and Paul were the seat holders that day, because we had to occupy all the seats and I think people would die if they knew how much goes into that and how fun that is to pull that off. One of the FBI agents was running around in a little Delta jacket. And what you had to do in that bar that day is you had to occupy a certain amount of seats to where when the target came in is that we stood up, took our newspaper and our coffee and walked away. And that was the only seat they could sit in. I love these stories. What a great piece of work.
Matt Brotherton:
Yeah. I couldn’t be more proud of the work that we did as a unit. The cigarette butt goes off to the lab. And then I think it was three weeks later, four weeks later.
Marci Adkins:
It didn’t match.
Wendy Lyons:
Hey, you know 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 the presenters and much, much more. We are also on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which is closed captions for those that are hearing impaired. Just search for the Murder Police Podcast and you will find us. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe for more and give us five stars and a written review on Apple podcast or wherever you download your podcast from. Make sure to subscribe to the Murder Police Podcast and set your player to automatically download new episodes so you get the new ones as soon as they drop. And please tell your friends.
David Lyons:
Lock it down, Judy.