Hi, I'm Holly and I'm Hailey. Welcome to Mountain Mysteries Tales from Appalachia. Go, go, go. Get to it.
Go through it. Suck it to it. Yeah. Go, Holly.
Oh, yeah. You do it. The house in the club. Listen, no, this is my club movie.
You ready for this? I love it. Thank you. You're welcome.
Listen, I've been doing this thing now where I have found on... Are we on actually? We sure are. Welcome back.
Y'all in the middle of our conversation. Hello. No, we're talking about our club dancing here and I found on... So I finally did the thing where I downloaded TikTok.
I've heard the youngsters are doing that. It's fun. You should... It's addicting.
Gotcha. But you should... You would enjoy it. The cleaning stuff, I think.
The cleaning stuff's really fun, but there's this new thing going around now where people are posting aggressive dance moves to keep people away from you and like... I don't need that. I just use my set. It's like a lot of punch dancing, a lot of aggressive movements to keep people away.
Just like super awkward, so nobody will approach you. It's done. So it's just me anytime I can dance. I'm like...
So yeah, that was my two cents for this. I feel like this is why we instantly at work became friends with each other. We were like, ah yes, we started both doing the dance that keep away dance. Like, oh my god, you know the keep away dance?
Or like, oh no! Or the dance for the keep away. It's just so different. Please stay away from me.
Well, don't have TikTok. You should download it. It's a really fun time. You know, TikTok used to be musically.
I don't know if you know this. I do know this and before then it was fine. Was it fine? It was maybe its own thing.
I think mine was new when I was in like high school. Yeah, I think that was its own thing. And there's like Tumblr for like people who like write and different things. Yeah, like the movie and TV show and book like fandoms.
I just think it's so fun. I think people think that people who are super into that and whatever like, they are. But I love it. I think to be excited about things.
That's the thing is you have to have an outlet. You know? I mean, and like the Tumblr kids are like, you're creatives now. So, yeah.
I mean, honestly, there's so much shit going on in the world. It's so nice to have something where you can have some positive. Let people have their things. Don't be a judge.
As long as you're not hurting anybody, go for it. Yeah, do what you want. Do what you want. Do what you want.
It's super fun. Sorry, I'm finding the new thing on my charger here and I'm just like, it has wings. So back to that talking about nerds. I'm sitting across from one currently.
Yes, I'm very big. Why does that have wings? I think it's where you wrap the cord up. Like you would take it.
Never notice that in my life. I haven't either, but it makes it fun clicking or something. You have to tell me to stop doing that while we're recording. I'm going to have to put my arms up until I keep you working.
You know what? Oh, instead of the dancing to keep you working. Well, if I just use a finger, that'll help her. That'll help her.
That'll tell her to just calm the point down. Yeah. You know, I had an old coworker and she was from like the country and, you know, I was working in the city and she was real country. Her name was Amber.
She always talked about it very very sweet. But she was our admin assistant and she used to say, commutates. And I thought it was so funny. I love that a lot.
She says it all the time. And she had gotten off the phone call with somebody and she's like, and I'll tell them he just need to calm his titties. And I thought it was so funny. I nearly peed myself.
So to this day now, all I can hear is her in my head sometimes, you know, commutates. I said, calm your tits a lot. Yeah. Oh, I guess this is a good time to tell you that my pastor told me their night, we were hosting Bertr again, that he was going to announce our podcast in the church bulletin.
I hope they know what they're getting into. I did tell him he said, y'all aren't like explicit or anything. And I was like, I mean, we're not ready to explicit, but it's murder. It's murder.
And we, yeah, I say shit a lot. I know I said we have our shits and dams, but. And clearly in this episode, we're talking about tits and boobs and nips and new news and who has and I mean, we didn't go there. We didn't go there.
I mean, we can't believe you. Listen, if we have to, we can go there. But oh, gosh. Oh, great.
So now the congregation's gonna listen. Yeah. Well, a lot of them do already. But I have to like explain because I go to a Baptist church that's it's an odd Baptist.
It's very progressive. It's very progressive, especially for the area that we're in. And you know, I think I get approached by people who I wouldn't normally think would listen and they'll be like, Oh my gosh, I love your podcast. Like listen every week or like, Oh, what are your favorite episodes I want to listen?
I'm blown away by the random people, like the close people in my life. They don't listen. It's the people who like, you know, I went to college with years ago who listened or once removed. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's amazing to me. You know, my parents, friends, daughter, like, you know, it's just, it's fantastic.
So yeah, welcome. Yeah, Baptist and other religions. Yes, we're open. I mean, say anybody.
Welcome everybody. Yeah. This is not a closed podcast. We're very open about everything.
I'm probably too many things. Driving down the road saying shut the hell up. I know. Okay.
So we are here for murder. I'm ready. I am very ready for murder. This time we are traveling to Kentucky.
Kentucky is an area that I noticed in our podcast. We get a lot of listeners from and we've had several reach out to us from Kentucky. So this one's for you guys. We're going to July 3rd, 2015 in an area called Bardstown, Kentucky.
So Bardstown is kind of in the middle of the state, a little bit more north. Population is under 14,000 people. So really small. It's an idyllic town and it's got a beautiful main street.
And in 2012, destinations, marketing association named it one of the best small towns in America. And this was on their best of the roads competition. So yeah, it's quite the complement and makes you think, I don't know, when I'm picturing it in my head, I just think like, kind of older brick buildings, like beautiful flowers. And it just feels charming to me.
Why not have a feeling you're going to tell me a story that's going to crush that? Maybe. So this town really saw very little crime. Like it was a really safe place, great place to raise a family.
And that's actually what Crystal Maria Rogers was doing. She was the mother of five children she'd been born and raised in Bardstown. And she was currently living with her boyfriend, Brooks Huck, and her five children, which included the youngest, who was two years old. This was she and Brooks' child together.
So the other four were from previous relationships. Okay. So on the night of July 2nd, the day before, Brooks, Crystal and their family were at home settling in for the night. Brooks was tired and as he was getting ready to go to bed, he noticed that Crystal was playing games on her cell phone.
Exhausted, he went to sleep and the next morning when he woke up, Crystal wasn't there, which was odd. He looked outside and found that her car wasn't in the driveway. So he's like, well, maybe she went somewhere. This is strange.
Okay. Well, whatever. Maybe grocery store. Who knows.
During that day, her kids and other family members tried repeatedly to call her and never got an answer, which was very much unlike her. She always called back and her mother, Sherry Ballard, became very worried. And after two days of not hearing from her, her mom went to the police and filed a missing persons report. Crystal's 2007 Chevy was found at mile marker 14 off the bluegrass Parkway.
Sounds fun. Not the car, but the bluegrass Parkway does. Yeah, does. The car had a flat tire and was parked by the side of the road.
Inside the car was Crystal's purse, her cell phone and the keys, which were still in the ignition. Weird. Right? Crystal was nowhere to be seen.
Like, nowhere to be found. I don't like it. I don't need her. So volunteers started searching the area, the head vigils, hoping for Crystal's safe return.
You know, what is going on? And so many things go through your head. Like, did she plan to run away? You know, was this because some people do that?
Was she a person of circumstance? You know, something happened. She had a flat tire and somebody said, oh, I can help you. And then they hurt her.
You know, you think about these kinds of things. So there was a six figure monetary reward for her safe return. Yeah. So like I said, theory started to run rampant.
Oh, sure. And police began to look closer at their number one suspect. Like, who would you look at first? Always husband.
Always husband. Or in this case, the one who turned out exactly. He denied any involvement. But again, he was the last person to see her, which made it a little, like, okay, they had to examine that.
They have to look at him closer. I mean, they have to do. Exactly. It's just natural.
So something to note, several days before Crystal went missing, she was getting ready to start a new job. And she was talking with her younger sister and telling her sister that she was actually going to leave Brooks. Oh, yeah. And there was never any domestic violence or anything like that, but that she was just unhappy.
She kind of wanted a fresh start. So her sister stated that this was going to be the plan. But really, there were no clear leads and nothing that really focused on Brooks. But so the plan was going to be that she was going to like fake a disappearance or well, know that she was just going to move out of their home.
Oh, okay, that she was going to leave right right not leave like this, like correct. Correct. Yes. So the family pleaded with the public on TV, you know, please bring her home.
And the family tried very hard to keep the hope alive. Crystal's mom and the rest of the family suspected Brooks, asked the police for a while. But again, there was just nothing concrete to be able to charge him with anything. And he, the whole time is like, no, I'm innocent, you know, so her parents diligently searched for her.
And her father actually decided, you know what, I'm not going to wait on the police to investigate this. I'm going to do something to digging myself. So her father started to investigate this. Her dad's name was Tommy.
And he never gave up hope. He's like, you know, I'm if I have to go piece by piece by piece of evidence, I'm going to find what happened to my daughter. So he had collected a box that he kept in their house that he never showed to the police of evidence that he had gotten through his own investigation. I wonder why he didn't show to the police though.
I think that there was concern about what they would do with it. Like, you know, so maybe he wanted to wait until it was like the right time kind of thing. I don't know. But I will tell you that 16 months later, November of 2016, Tommy, her dad was out on the family property with his 12 year old grandson hunting.
When 12 year old grandson went back to get something and Tommy was shot and killed. What? Yeah. Wait, what?
Wait. Yeah. Wait. Yes.
Wait. Yes. I'm going to do some kind of defensive stance. Just like really stressed out now.
He was shot with a single gunshot wound to the chest, which first off, you think, okay, he's alone in the woods. He killed himself. Maybe the pressure got to him. However, his gun had never been fired.
And if you're hunting, that's a long gun usually shot gun and like that angle just does not work. No, it does not. I'm trying to make it work and it doesn't work. She's trying to do this with her hands and it is not it's not.
No, I mean, maybe if you like stood the gun up in a like between two rocks and like jump over people with a shotgun either feet, right? Yeah, but it's usually like a head head injury. Exactly. It's not usually a chest because it's very difficult to do.
So very quickly, police ruled out. Okay, it wasn't his gun. It was not suicide. It wasn't the grandson, obviously.
It's felt targeted. I mean, yeah. Sherry felt that her daughter's disappearance and her husband's death were connected and were not accidents. Sherry.
She felt they were related. So the morning that Sherry filed that missing person report, she happened to see Brooks in the police parking lot. Okay, so she stopped him and she came up to him. So we're going back a year here.
She stops him and she comes out back and she says to you know, anything about where Crystal might be, you know, because she felt like Crystal would just never leave her kids. Right. You know, she loved those kids. She was attached to them.
And he said no, but he did indicate that the two had had a fight the night prior. And he stated that the fight was that Crystal felt that he treated their two year old son that they had together better than her four children and differently. And he acknowledged like, yeah, I probably did. So going back to the dad in the weeks leading up to the dad's death, he was being followed, actively followed.
And the police was telling the dad was being followed. The dad was being followed. And remember, her father was on the hunt for any kind of evidence to get. We have a weird box situation going on.
Weird box situation. And it felt like he was on the cusp of unraveling something. Okay. Now the police told him, if you're being followed, you need to really take precautions.
You need to be really careful. Be careful what you say in the media, like really heed the warning. But you know, he was just not about to give up. And then ultimately, he was shot and killed.
Now something to note here, her boyfriend Brooks, he had a brother named Nick, who was on the police force. When Brooks went in to take the polygraph in the middle of it, Nick calls and advise his Brooks not to speak with them. Well, I like it. That doesn't feel good.
Nick was ultimately fired from the police department. Now the FBI got involved in this case in 2020. So this is five years later. The FBI suddenly gets involved.
And they were wondering if this case was actually connected with several other murders that happened in Bardstown. Now remember, I told you that Bardstown was a really safe area. Yeah, what happened to like a best small town here? We've got like murder capital of Kentucky.
I know. And if you are curious about some of the other murders, I cover one of the episodes in an upcoming Patreon. So if you want to be a member, you can hear that episode as well. Anyway, just a quick little plug.
So FBI gets involved and they start taking a closer look at Brooks. They even provide a warrant to search a never looked at storage unit that was held by Crystal. Why did they never look at the storage unit? I have literally no idea.
Maybe they thought, well, it was hers. You know, it could just be like pictures of her kids, like maybe there's really nothing in it. I think so too. If anything, God, you don't know there could be a body in there.
You don't know what like who knows some kind of edit. But like if she was married or she wasn't married to this guy, but like if she had a kid together, I'm sure you knew where her storage locker key was. Right. Right.
That's pretty early in the relationship. There's my story. You have a kid with somebody who should be like, Hey, here's my storage locker. I didn't do that, darn bummer.
I had the kid that never storage. Darn it. Darn it. We missed out on something.
Yeah. Could have been so beautiful. So FBI started looking through the storage unit and they came out with a giant box of what they had labeled evidence. What was in it, no one really knows.
But the day that the FBI got involved, which was in July of 2020, human remains were discovered by kayakers who were at this point where they would put their kayaks into the water. And quickly, they took the human remains and they sent them to the FBI lab in Louisville to or Louisville, Louisville, Louisville, there you go, to have them analyzed initially off the cuff, the information coming back out was that this was the body of a female, a female between the ages of 24 and 82. That's a joke. Yeah.
I feel like they were looking at my bones. I'd be like anywhere between one hundred and one hundred and one hundred and one hundred and one hundred and one hundred and two. Yeah, that's probably closer to 82. Yeah.
And it comes back. It's like, Oh, she's 24. That is a giant leap. That's your grandma or, you know, your club goer.
Like, I mean, that's in anything in between. Like what the heck? Why such a big range, I wonder. I don't know.
That's why you would think like dental would be able to like narrow that. I don't know what kind of remains they found, you know, and I can't say I'm a DNA expert, even though I pretend to be. I'm definitely not. I'm not.
So that being said, they had to wait a little bit longer to determine who exactly this individual was, but a lot of people were thinking, Oh my gosh, this is crystal they found her. He's poor kayakers. They were just trying to, you know, paddle and just get in the water. Like water.
Dead body. See, see, this is why I don't kayak. This is why I don't run. Yep.
This is why I really don't exercise. Dead bodies involved. I can't do it. I now, Jim, sure.
Yeah. Outdoor hikes. I try and stay away from me. Just stay out of the woods.
The woods. I think we've said this a lot in the podcast, you know, but don't go in the woods, people. Like at least, I mean, especially alone, go with group. If you insist on going into the woods.
I don't know. Thank you. So by November of 2020, so we're talking about about four months later, DNA testing revealed that the remains were not those of crystal. What the hell are they?
And as of August of 2021, in my research, there has never been any kind of declaration or statement as to who those remains belong to. It's some 24 to 82 year old, I guess. I exactly. So you, me, my grandma, who would know?
I actually think my grandma's 85, so she's out. I'm seven years old. And she's alive. So no, I mean, she is mine.
So yeah, so and so are we. Yeah. Clearly. I mean, we're not going to.
Yeah, that's an excellent episode. So yeah, they have no idea, but it's not crystal. So the real question is what happened to crystal? Well, Crystal's mother was fighting really hard to have like some visitation and be able to see her grandchild, the child that she had with Brooks, who was two at the time.
And in February of 2021, so this February, she actually lost that battle when a judge decided that it was too traumatic for the child since Sherry and her family really had a lot of negative feelings towards Brooks. I mean, they thought that he did something sinister. So the judge was like, no, you're, you're not able to see him, which is really cool. Yeah, like them and for the kid.
I mean, exactly. But I will tell you, there was something that happened in just recently that involved Brooks, his brother Nick, and their mother's property or grandmother's property. I'm not really sure they had served as search for it, to search that area. And I believe they came out of the house with another box of evidence.
So there are things moving in this case. And listen, I am not going to say anybody is guilty of anything. There's nobody we don't really know, but it is pretty fishy. It is odd.
And it seems like the FBI and the police are kind of leaning a certain direction. But I mean, everybody gets the benefit of it out. So who knows? So if you all are really interested in hearing a little bit more on, not necessarily this case, but something that could be involved, listen to our Patreon episode that involves the murder of a Bardstown police officer.
Oh, not fun. But you know what I mean. So for $5 a month to become a member like just at our basic, you can listen to it. So just throw it out.
All right. Well, that's the end of my story from Kentucky. This is an interesting one. That one was crazy.
I was never going to lose a resolution there. And there's not. But I feel like one is coming soon. You know, we're just sort of waiting for that.
Yeah. So let me give a shout out. I'm going to shout out. And I love this broken arrow, Oklahoma.
Oh, beautiful. Yeah. Oklahoma's beautiful country. It really is love it.
Yeah. Haley, how can they get ahold of us? Should they wish to? If you just feel so inclined, you may send us an email at amount in a series at Appalachian at gmail.com.
You can find us on Facebook at mountain mysteries, tales from Appalachia. Find us on Instagram at mountain mysteries dot Appalachia and check us out on patreon at patreon.com slash mountain mysteries. That's right. It's good to be a mouthful.
I know. I feel like we're adding more and more. I know. I'm like a check out Holly at her TikTok.
No, we're going to become TikTok famous. Stay away. That's our next next. I don't even know how to use the TikTok.
Listen, I'll teach you. Oh, God. All right. Well, that's maybe next week we'll hear the update about my TikTok status.
Yes. All right. Have a good week, you guys. Bye.