Accused
Page 1
Copyright © 2015 by Brittany Ducker
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, including electronic, mechanical or any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission should be addressed to:
New Horizon Press
P. O. Box 669
Far Hills, NJ 07931
Brittany Ducker
Accused: A Heartbreaking Death and the Quest for Justice
Cover design: Charley Nasta
Interior design: Scribe Inc.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938452
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-88282-485-7
New Horizon Press
191817161512345
Author’s Note
This book is based on the experiences of the author and reflects her perception of the past, present and future. The personalities, events, actions and conversations portrayed within this story have been taken from interviews, research, court documents, letters, personal papers, press accounts and the memories of some participants.
In an effort to safeguard the privacy of certain individuals, some people’s names and identifying characteristics have been changed. The events involving the characters happened as described. Only minor details may have been altered.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1:The Crime Scene
2:Trey
3:Big Josh
4:Little Josh
5:Coming Home
6:Dark Reality
7:Covering the Bases
8:Escape Attempt
9:Accused
10:Master Manipulator
11:The System
12:…And It Begins
13:The Prosecution
14:Mask on the Monster
15:The Defense and the Media
16:Closing Arguments
17:The Verdict
18:The Real Culprit?
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Prologue
“There’s a dead body!” a teenaged student shouted as he approached the drainage ditch behind his school shortly after 1:00 P.M.
Responding to the cries of her student, Molly Varner, a teacher at Liberty High School in Louisville, Kentucky, walked briskly toward the creek bed. Her heart sank at what she saw, the unmistakable body of a young male sprawled face down in the shadows of the surrounding trees. She dashed back inside with her students in tow and notified school security. School officials immediately contacted the authorities.1
On May 11, 2011, Varner had taken her students for a walk around the grounds. The two-story brick school building was set back from the main road, American flag flying high in front with dogwood trees in full bloom. It was a beautiful, sunny day and she’d felt they would benefit by taking a break from the classroom and enjoying the weather. It was not uncommon for teachers at Liberty High School to allow students the opportunity to walk the grassy grounds of the school, especially when the weather was so lovely. Predictably, the students had opted to walk in the direction of the creek bed, an area known to most of the neighborhood kids as a social gathering place where, outside school hours, teenagers could hang out and talk, free from adult interruption. It was a place with which many of the students were familiar. However, instead of observing the small fish and turtles which were never in short supply, they had observed something different.
The Louisville Metro Police Department responded to the school’s 911 call. Officers arrived quickly and began to secure the scene, stretching yards of yellow crime-scene tape around the perimeter of the creek bed. The concrete culvert at the opening of the creek led into a long, dark tunnel formed by the road that ran above it. The tunnel and the slant of the bed partially obscured that particular part of the culvert. Only hours before, another class at Liberty High School had taken a walk around the perimeter of the school but, due to the layout of the creek bed, those students had strolled by without noticing the gruesome scene just feet away. As uniformed police officers secured the area, they too were confronted with the shocking sight of the face-down, decomposing body of a young male on the banks of the creek.
The creek bed was muddy, so as the first responding officer, John Pittenger, inched close enough to confirm that the young male lying on its bank was deceased, his feet squished into the muddy ground below. The victim on the ground was not breathing. Realizing there was nothing he could do to save this person’s life, Pittenger did his best to leave the scene undisturbed and waited for the arrival of homicide detectives.
Within minutes of the arrival of the first police officers and their detection of the body, Detective Leigh Maroni of the Louisville Metro Police Homicide Unit arrived at Liberty High School. Careful not to get too close and contaminate the scene, Detective Maroni took mental notes of what she saw. The victim was dressed in dark clothing, wearing a pair of blue jeans, a black t-shirt and all-black sneakers. He appeared to have brown hair, although most of that hair was matted with blood. Upon closer inspection, it looked like someone had struck the person with a hard object in the back of the head: a gaping open wound, long and wide, covered the back of his skull. He appeared young but, without seeing his face, Detective Maroni was unable to determine whether the victim was a teenager or an adult.
The victim remained face down and Detective Maroni took note of the blood pooled around the face, which rested close to the water line. Later, as the body was removed by the coroner, detectives would note that the young male’s face was nearly obliterated, eyes blackened, nose broken and countenance caved in, his teeth fractured in pieces. However, as the detective observed the scene at that time, she was unaware of the brokenness of the victim’s face, the hate and madness that must have enveloped the murderer as he attacked the victim. Instead, she focused on the head wound and noted the specifics of the person’s body she could see as he remained face down in the culvert. She noticed that his left arm was folded beneath his body, while his right arm was outstretched and sprinkled with blood spatter, most likely from his head wound. She also noticed that a set of footprints remained visible in the mud near the body.
The young male lay abandoned and broken in a dreadful resting place. The culvert was littered with trash and debris; cigarette butts and candy wrappers were visible near the body and graffiti covered the concrete tunnel at the mouth of the creek. Officers did their best to catalog each and every piece of trash that they located in the vicinity with the hope that they could link the items to the person responsible for the murder. They collected the neighboring rocks and tree branches which were speckled with blood spatter; they even recovered a lawn mower blade that some thought could be the murder weapon. Detective Maroni interviewed several people in the area in the hopes that they could shed light on the investigation or the identity of the deceased.
As the investigation progressed, Detective Scott Russ, who would become the lead detective on the homicide, arrived and began to supervise the inquiry into the murder. He and Detective Maroni continued to survey the scene and by that time a crowd had gathered in the area, anxious to ascertain what had happened and the identity of the victim. It was not surprising that a mass of people gathered near the creek bed and buzzed with questions about the body found quite literally in their own backyards. The area off Indian Trail near Liberty High School was a close-knit community. Many of the families in the neighborhood had resided there for generations and, in several cases, grandparents, their children and grandchildren resided together in the same home. Most of the neighborhood children played together and many of the adults residing in the neighborhood had grown up there themselves.
; Word traveled fast; once one person in the neighborhood noticed the scene at Liberty High School and the arrival of the police cruisers, it was only a matter of time until a crowd of locals gathered. Indian Trail is a well-known street that runs between Preston Highway and Poplar Level Road, two main thoroughfares in Louisville. Although no one would deem the area upper class, the murder of a child was definitely not something that anyone in the neighborhood expected. The majority of the people residing in the area were employed in working-class jobs and worked hard for what they had. Both Preston Highway and Poplar Level Road were littered with fast-food restaurants, car dealerships and gas stations in which many of the area’s adults and teens worked.
Nestled between those two main streets was the neighborhood that contained Liberty High School and the surrounding houses. The small yet cozy homes featured petite yards, some unkempt, some meticulously maintained. Older cars were parked in most of the driveways. On school days, students could be observed congregating at the bus stop or riding bikes in the street. It was the type of place where parents felt comfortable allowing a child to play outside or walk to a friend’s house. As the crowd assembled outside Liberty High School on that swelteringly hot afternoon, the residents of the neighborhood agonized about whether the person in the creek bed was one of their own. Sadly, their question would be answered in a way no one could have imagined.
Chapter 1
The Crime Scene
Terrence “Terry” Zwicker was just arriving home. An electrician by trade, Zwicker owned his own electric company. He had worked a big job that morning in Trimble County and he came home to an empty house. His wife and their young daughter were absent. His son Trey, fourteen years old at the time, was spending a week with his mother, Amanda McFarland.
Though never married, Terry and Amanda enjoyed an amiable relationship, sharing joint custody of their son. Per a court order established years earlier, Amanda and Terry followed an alternating week-by-week schedule. They generally did their parent swap on Sundays. May 11 fell during Amanda’s week.
His cell phone rang and, recognizing the phone number of his friend and neighbor, Terry picked up the call on the second ring.
“Terry, there’s a detective here that wants to talk to you,” his friend blurted out and then a second voice came through the phone.
“Mr. Zwicker,” the officer began. “We’ve got a problem here at the school. You need to come find your son.”
Jumping straight up, Terry started for his truck. Hopping into the vehicle, he called his wife and explained there was a problem with Trey as he drove toward the school. The neighborhood sur-rounding the high school and Amanda’s residence consisted of two ditch lines. One of those ditch lines led directly toward the school grounds. Terry had spent his childhood years in that neighborhood. Familiar with the area, he parked his car and followed the ditch line on foot, because he knew it was the quickest way to reach Liberty High School. Recognizing a friend in the crowd gathered near the school, Terry tossed his friend the keys to his pickup truck and dashed toward the barricade. As he ran toward the large assembly of uniformed police and neighborhood residents, officers intercepted him and refused to let him closer to the area roped with yellow crime scene tape.
Terry noticed that his son’s mother, Amanda, and her husband, Joshua Gouker, were standing in the crowd, along with Gouker’s fifteen-year-old son, Joshua Young. Terry waited nervously until Detective Russ approached him some time later.
Raising the paperwork clutched in his hand, Detective Russ explained that the papers contained a list of all the children who were absent from school that day. The list contained Trey’s name and Detective Russ inquired whether Terry had spoken with his son. After leaving his home en route to the school, Terry had called Trey’s cell phone repeatedly. He explained to Detective Russ that Trey always responded to his phone calls and texts but that as he rushed to the scene, he had been unable to reach his son. He knew something was desperately wrong. Terry begged the detective to explain what had happened. Those nearby could easily hear his terror and frustration.
“Detective, I’m not ignorant. I know there is something in that ditch that I need to see,” he said, gesturing toward the creek bed just yards away from the makeshift waiting area where he and other neighborhood folks stood corralled by police.
The detective regarded Terry for a time and after some consideration, Detective Russ instructed Terry to follow him, explaining that he could not take him to the ditch, but that he would need to view the scene from fifty feet away through a chain link fence. Terry rushed toward the fence with Detective Russ at his heels. From behind that fence on a low hillside, as Terry’s eyes focused on the scene below, he recognized his fourteen-year-old son Trey Zwicker face down and lifeless on the muddy banks of the creek bed. Terry would later remark, “It didn’t take two seconds to look over and know that was my boy laying there.”1 As his head dropped and he fell to his knees, a wail could be heard in the background. Watching Terry’s reaction to viewing the ditch bank, Amanda McFarland, Trey’s mother, crumpled to the ground.
Terry and Detective Russ sat in the detective’s car, going over every detail and down every avenue they could think of to figure out what had happened to Trey the night before to cause him to end up in the ditch. They’d covered friends, the possibility of Trey skipping school (but Trey was a good kid who didn’t skip) and strangers. But there was one person Terry wanted to talk about, one person of whom he was very suspicious.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Terry spoke up. “I didn’t get a phone call at ten-thirty last night…I would’ve expected a call from him. Me and Amanda, we usually stay pretty close on Trey’s experience.”2
“Right.”
Terry looked pointedly at the detective as he continued to speak, “But see, she moved him back in. Me and Amanda have a custody agreement that he was never supposed to be back in Trey’s life,” he emphasized as he referred to Amanda allowing her husband, Joshua Gouker, back into her home. Only seven months prior, Gouker had been released from prison after serving a little over nine years. Within weeks of that release, he had moved in with Trey’s mother.
“Really?” Detective Russ asked, his interest piqued. This was a new angle to the case and necessitated further questioning.
“And this is dating back since Trey was three years old. We went through a horrible custody battle. We didn’t get along for a long time. You know we pulled it together shortly after her and him got into trouble and he was in the pen for eight years and she was in jail for a little while, due to something they did. Now typically, anything goes on with Trey, she usually calls me or I already know about it. Now, I didn’t get no phone call this morning when they seen the backpack and I didn’t get no phone call when he didn’t come home from school today…Yeah, being as I couldn’t get ahold of Amanda and [my friend] couldn’t tell me anything, I was going wherever. I went to Trey’s mom’s house and then I went to [my friend’s] house, ’cause I had no clue where to go, and then Amanda said they were up here, ‘Hurry, hurry,’” he mumbled as he related Amanda’s words once he’d finally reached her via telephone.
“Do you think that Amanda wouldn’t call you because she would be scared that you would go off if she told you that he might have skipped school? Do you think it’s possible that Amanda or [Joshua Gouker] would have anything to do with it?” the detective asked.
“The way our custody battle went, it went like this. I went down there and I did all the drug testing and stuff through Child Protective Services and they came back with a bunch of findings that she was an unfit parent, especially when she’s with him,” he related, referring to Gouker. “And, you know, there was a lot of me blowing up at her then, because that wasn’t an environment that I wanted Trey into.”3
Nodding, the detective encouraged Terry to continue. This was a piece of information that could be important to the investigation. “Absolutely, I can understand that.”
“Well, when he got outt
a prison, he showed up on her doorstep and evidently from what I understood, they were still married. He was coming around but last I heard, he was thrown out of her house and was living two doors down…”
“His name, you say, is Josh?” the detective clarified.
“His name is Josh Gouker.”
“Now do you, and I’m just gonna ask. Uh, I don’t know Josh from anybody.” Russ paused and prepared to pose the question that dangled on the tip of his tongue, “Do you think he’s capable, do you think Josh could have done anything to your son? Everybody’s on the table at this point. I’m not ruling anybody out.”
“I’m not saying that he did,” Terry began, “but is he capable of it? Oh yeah. He’s stupid.”
The detective seized on the opportunity and pressed further, “Would there be a reason? I mean, has Trey ever come to you and said that anybody in the household is hurting him, physically abusing him or anything like that?”
“The only thing that stuck in my mind is those don’t look like hickeys on [Amanda’s] neck.”4
“I was thinking the exact same thing,” the detective said as they both looked in the direction where Amanda and Gouker had previously stood. One of the first things both men had noticed upon seeing Amanda was the trail of purplish-red markings that laced around the front of her neck. Noticing their concern, Amanda had volunteered that the marks were hickeys given to her the evening before by Gouker. They weren’t buying it. The markings appeared more akin to strangulation marks or some other type of neck trauma.
“If her and Josh were in a fist fight, well, Trey would intervene. He would try it,” his father said, sure that the family-oriented teen would jump into any fracas to defend his mother.
“But it looks like whatever happened, happened right where you saw him today. So if they were fighting in the house and he tried to intervene…I just don’t think it was something that happened somewhere else.”
“Well, I can tell you that I do believe he is on very strict probation,” Terry offered.