Well over a hundred officials from the FBI, IRS, KY state police and Texas Game Warden all coming together in Bardstown right now probably concerns more than just the cold case murder of one blue collar citizen, as much as her family deserves closure. I almost wonder if these departments are milking for some easy PR, like oh hey despite national dialogues critiquing our general conduct we are not letting this unsolved crime in the heartland be forgotten, to say nothing of the state’s hundreds of other unsolved murders or thousands more across the country. We won’t produce anything but look at us try!
If those remains were indeed Crystal Rogers, you’d think local police would be tripping over themselves to confirm at least that much publicly. If it’s not actually her, that would mean them acknowledging their own missing persons cases are more numerous than they’ve let on. Meaning more failure. Either it’s not her, or local police are implicated. Maybe even both. And maybe these diverse agencies are playing their cards close to the chest because they have no plan to share, and it really is all just huff and puff to look like heroes for the camera without actually doing anything. 10 bucks says they just hit Brooks Houck with some silly credit card fraud charge to validate all the attention-whoring by law enforcement. Sorry folks they just can’t catch the real killer or else Bardstown PD will have to find someone else to move their pills. They can release the identity without yet saying who may be charged or how the act was committed, without compromising any investigation. It feels like they are stalling to deflect, to spin-doctor. For what recent histories may permit us to surmise, this might all well be not some issue regarding cold cases aplenty, but an issue of the regional fiefdom failing to pay proper fealty to the home office.
The families of Crystal Rogers, Tommy Ballard, Kathy and Samantha Netherland and Jason Ellis deserve a justice which authorities cannot or will not provide, but so too does the family of the young black man stabbed to death earlier this very year by the son of a current Bardstown cop.
So too does the family of the Newton boy who was pressured into being an informant and abandoned by the police only to later be found dead in a field. They are poor so Tegna producers, those makers of podcast snuff, could not give a shit. And the Cahoe family whose son was found hanging high in a barn with no ladder in sight, his twin brother shot that same day. Local news affiliates strangely never include other names among the unsolved murders. If you’re dirt-poor or from a minority group, good luck with everything. Even nationally, the plenitude of prime time, true crime docu-dramas only rarely dig into unsolved murders of the poor or minorities, explicitly because tiny badges can only cover so much dirty laundry. I can think of half a dozen people who died while in police custody in Bardstown since the mid-oughts, their names never to appear on a national-level platform and certainly never alongside the names of those whose unsolved murders may not be so bluntly due to police action.
Insinuation which I believe 23,000% being that local cops are profiting off the drug trade, other cops and judges are covering for them, with certain local slum-lords providing space for manufacture/storage/distribution and laborers like 5 of my cousins with priors for selling narcotics. Police nationwide slide with the supremacist bigotry because their open militarization affords them feudal-levels of control over their respective territories, bribes flying everywhere with lucrative monies from unethical federal funding, immoral civil asset forfeiture, and illegal drug/sex trafficking. What if precincts nationwide sit on thousands upon thousands of untested rape kits because the cops or their fishing buds are culpable of the bulk? What if the number one reason for a murder to go unsolved anywhere in the country is because police have direct access to means for evading arrest?
At an industry awards function last year, the ABC affiliate reporter who narrated much of the Bardstown pod referenced KY having 500+ unsolved murders. News media has access to real stats, edited for coverage as their function by and large is to stenograph cover stories for authoritarians. Around a baker’s dozen years back, Louisville city and Jefferson County governments were merging, and in the process it came up that the city had a backlog of over 70,000 unserved warrants, some going back 30 years. Their response was to promptly purge the system. Many of those could have been for bullshit traffic violations, but many could also concern someone’s dead sibling. This somehow magically avoided making national headlines, tens of thousands of warrants erased. Out of sight, out of mind indeed. As competitive as they generally play themselves out to be, I’ll be damned if any local network affiliate or Louisville’s big paper have kept any mention on their respective online archives. News media strives to block the public from learning how incompetent, how incriminated cops are.
Publicly addressing these points, writing about them in any professional capacity without the sanctioned bias of official narratives gets one branded un-American, a Russian troll or worse, as though doing so breaches an intimacy otherwise reserved exclusively for one’s bartender.
I had to leave Bardstown several years back, being unable to go day or night without police harassment. Uniformed Bardstown cops even vandalized my car on 3 separate occasions. The first I caught McKenzie Mattingly in the act, about a week before he was made interim PD chief. The second and third times were caught on camera by the church whose rectory I was renting rooms from at the time, filmed right in their parking lot, but the priest was so scared shitless he’d do nothing about it but get himself relocated to a different county. It was actually a bishop studying the Christian Inquisition who coined the phrase “power corrupts”, but despite having the oldest proto-Cathedral outside the original 13 colonies a substantial number of Bardstonians still insist all badges are by default infallible. Power, defined by money or authority or anything else, doesn’t just corrupt some of the time, or only for certain people who happen to hold different sociopolitical convictions than you or your chosen icons, its nature itself is corrupting.
Does a corrupt local government really want justice in the many unsolved murder cases? The previous mayor wanted relevant signs removed even from private property. Mayor Royalty (yes, haha) was such the crook he was shown the door. So why has his replacement been reading from the same libretto? As far as I can tell I was the one and only voice bothered by the tidbit omitted by professional journalists reporting on that Barton distillery collapse aways back, because tourist dollars matter more than justice in Bardstown. As above, so below in that profits outrank life and livelihoods nationwide continuously throughout one administration to the incestuous next.
And media shielding the shields grows something much worse than a lil weed. For outsiders to understand the level of disservice committed by paid media upon the denizens of Bardstown in these matters, from the local paper to regional network news affiliates to bigger platforms like those of Paula Zahn, Nancy Grace and the Discovery channel, consider one thing. How so very few of the surviving friends and family of all the big names associated with any of these big unsolved murder cases, refuse to evermore speak with any “investigative” reporter anywhere, from the mass of Crystal Rogers’ family to the elder Netherland daughter. They’ve begrudgingly learned from experience not to trust representatives of a for-profit establishment possessing an ongoing, mutually-beneficial working relationship with law enforcement. Nobody talks to neighbors and coworkers, the noxious podcast even belittling community concerns. They are traffickers themselves, of a legal form of snuff porn.
Sherry Ballard, mother of Crystal Rogers and wife of Tommy Ballard, is a *warrior* for enduring. I’ve also lost 2 members of my immediate family brutally and tragically but I could never match her pure strength. And between her surviving, between her interviews and organized search parties and advocating, she uses that momentum to focus the good will of everyone around her to help out the town in ways the city council only dreams about. Raising emergency funds to keep families from going homeless or losing their utilities. Literally and physically Christmas caroling, delivering surprise groceries to houses in need. I love her for all that she does, but why is she having to do any of it, when she is a victim. Paid media doesn’t really show these sides of her character, borne after her personal apocalypse, as though they prefer to keep open the possibility that Sherry’s merely another small town farm wife. Horrific losses, sure, but understandably troubled if ever she insinuates something approaching a coverup. As if her only capability left was hysterics.
I’ve no earthly idea who specifically killed each of these people, but I can fathom who specifically profited from the circumstances, who had arrangements protected by the removal of witnesses and potential threats. Because local and state authorities are hip-deep, law enforcement and legislators, then if justice won’t happen from the federal level, it is up to those of us who must exist alongside these egocentric motherfuckers who have sold their communities short for the sake of personal gains. It was always down to ourselves. I have not solved anything, I am not seeking fame or fortune. I’ll never again sit through an interview with anyone. But I am exposing choice caverns very purposefully neglected by the people tasked with informing us, and keeping us safe. And now is the time for the guilty parties to themselves know fear, and dread.