Kelly Wilson

All witnesses, suspects, and purses of interest are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we're going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to this week's episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to go ahead and get in to right now in true crime. So Courtney Clenney, who was the only Fans model who was accused of stabbing her boyfriend Christian Mamboosela inside a Miami apartment in twenty twenty two, has officially pled guilty to manslaughter. So she has been sentenced to six years in prison and she will also have to serve five years of probation as part of her sentence. Now, Courtney has already been in prison, so I did hear that she could be out in a little over two years, which is truly insane for taking the life of somebody else. She will not be allowed to benefit in any way, shape or form after she gets out off of the murder. She's not going to be allowed to do a tell all or her side of the story anything like that for profit, So at least that is a good thing. And she is going to also have to undergo a mental health evaluation and treatment as well as substance abuse of valuation and treatment. So that is kind of the update there. I was fully expecting this to go to trial. She was charged with second degree murder, and now she has officially taken the police. So that is kind of where things stand right now. If there is anything more to come out, I will be sure to let you know. Last week, the attorney for Christian's family released a statement in response to the deal going forward, and it said, in part, pleading guilty and accepting full responsibility will begin the process of bringing closure to a very tragic life changing of for the Ambuselli family. It's really sad and tragic all the way around. But that is the update on that one as of right now. And in Elec Murdon News, the judge has officially dismissed his civil lawsuit against former Clerk of Court Becky Hill. He was in the process of suing Becky Hill for all of her misconduct during his murder trial, and he was basically claiming that he had financial losses due to her tampering with the jury. So the reason it was dismissed was because he failed to show that her alleged jury tampering actually did cause financial losses that he had claimed in his suit. So he spent allegedly six hundred thousand dollars on his murder defense, which the judge said he would have spent regardless if Becky Hill had tampered with the jury allegedly, so that is the reason that it was dismissed. Eleck said that he liquidated his retirement fund to pay for his legal defense in the trial, which very well could be the case, but the judge understood that no matter if she had allegedly tampered with the jury or not, he was still going to have to pay for his legal defense. That is just how it works. So that reasoning wasn't enough to go through with the lawsuits. So it is officially dismissed. And that is probably for a little while at least, the last we are going to hear of the Becky Hill of it all. Now there is going to be a new Murdau trial, and I am going to be keeping you up to date as all of that is approaching and playing out because it is going to be another journey for sure. Okay, last thing I want to update on is Luigi BIANNGEONI is expected to plead guilty on Friday, meaning today if you're listening to this, in Manhattan Federal Court, because he's facing charges of stalking which resulted in the death of the health insurance executive Brian Thompson in twenty twenty four. So that is for the stalking charge. He is set to go to court in September on the actual murder charge of killing Brian Thompson. So I guess everything is going to play out in court tomorrow, and I will be sure to keep you guys updated on Right Now in True Crime next week because I don't really know what direction this is going. I assume it's just the stalking charges, but I will be sure to keep you guys updated as things start to come out. So we are going to call that good for right now in True Crime right now, and we are going to go ahead and get into this week's episode. Alrighty guys, we are jumping in to a brand new episode this week. I'm going to be telling you about the nineteen ninety two disappearance of seventeen year old Kelly Wilson out of Gilmer, Texas. There is a whole podcast on Kelly's disappearance called Deviltown and they do a multiple part episode deep dive on Kelly's disappearance, and I highly recommend that you guys give it a listen. I'm going to go ahead and link it below in the show notes so you can easily access it. Kelly's disappearance was in the height of the Satanic panic and many believed her disappearance was related to something Satanic cult related. We're going to get into all of that as the episode goes. Unfortunately, the case was very much overshadowed by this, and a lot of people had tunnel vision and believed that it was Satanic cult related. There was even an indictment made in the case, and one of the people indicted in relation was none other than the lead investigator that was working on her case. So this one has a lot of to turns throughout and still to this day, like I said, remains unsolved. Let's go ahead and get into Kelly's story now. Kelly Day Wilson was born on May eighteenth of nineteen seventy four to her parents Robbie Wilson and her mother, Kathy Carlson. She was born in Nakadish, Louisiana. Her parents were divorced when Kelly was younger, and Kelly had recently moved to Gilmour with her mother and stepfather. Kelly was seventeen years old and went to Gilmour High School. Kelly is described by her family as being very, very energetic and involved in so many different things at school, from sports to cheer. Kelly had a boyfriend who was named Chris Dtton at the time of her disappearance, and we are going to be talking about him in this episode. Kelly was a normal kid in the last years of high school and very much looking forward to her future. She had gotten a job as a clerk at a video store called Northeast Texas Video that was located at one hundred Buffalo Street in Gilmour. So Kelly's story takes us to January fifth of nineteen ninety two. Kelly was working the night shift at the video store. Kelly was last seen around eight thirty pm by the manager slash owner of the store, a man named Joe Henry. Kelly had plans to drive to the bank that was just around the corner and drop off the stor's receipts from that day into the night deposit drive through window box. According to a newspaper report at the time, bank surveillance footage showed Kelly's nineteen eighty five Dodge Charger in the drive through, but she never made it to her next destination. According to Joe, the store manager, he last saw Kelly standing at her car before he drove off to his destination. Kelly had planned after running her errands that she was going to go to a friend's house to spend the night, but she never arrived. Once her family found out the next morning that Kelly didn't show at her friend's house, her stepdad drove to the video store in search of Kelly, and there he found her car still in the parking lot of the video store. He found the car unlocked with the left rear tire slashed. Kelly's purse and Oliver belongings were inside of the car, but her keys were missing, and so was Kelly. After that, Kelly was reported missing by her family and the investigation into her disappearance began. The lead officer on Kelly's case was a man named James yorke Brown. He was a Gilmer police sergeant and he devoted a lot of his job and his life to try to find Kelly. He would spend a lot of his off time investigating leads and even went as far as to put up a billboard on a maid Your Highway in Gilmer to try and help draw attention to Kelly's case. From the outside looking in, it seemed that he was the perfect man for the job, and it really did seem like he cared a lot about finding Kelly and making sure whoever took her was brought to justice. So with that the investigation began. The video stores receipts had in fact been dropped off at the bank only minutes after Kelly was last seen, and like I said, they did have surveillance footage of a car matching Kelly's dropped something off in the deposit box, but the footage was super grainy, so they were not able to confirm that it was actually Kelly driving the car. The footage was also very unclear as to if there was a passenger in the car. It has never been confirmed that Kelly was the one driving that night who actually dropped off the deposits. The first solid lead that police scot was April of nineteen ninety two, the investigation turned to seventeen year old Michael Bibbi, who went to high school with Kelly and is described as an acquaintance of hers. It was discovered that Michael was the one that slashed the tires on Kelly's car. Now, once he was approached with this information, he did admit to doing it, but he claims that it wasn't malicious or targeted and was just a random act of vandalism. He denied knowing anything about Kelly or her disappearance or whereabouts, and Kelly's car hadn't been the first car that had the tire slashed. A week before Kelly went missing, another employee of the video store also had their tire slashed. Michael was arrested and was convicted of a misdemeanor of criminal mischief and spent ninety days in jail and was ordered to pay a five hundred dollars fine. Despite this break in the CA case, they didn't have any evidence to actually tie him to Kelly's missing person's case or anything that suggested that he knew anything more about Kelly and her whereabouts. Naturally, they had to go to the people closest to Kelly, and they had to look at her boyfriend. Now, like I said, he was a guy named Chris Denton. So Chris was well known for having a temper, and like any young couple boyfriend and girlfriend in a relationship, they would often disagree and they would argue, and allegedly the night before her disappearance, they were seen having an argument. Chris himself really didn't have much of an alibi for where he was that evening, but his cousin would then come forward and say that they were together riding around cruising in Gilmer in his pickup truck that night. They both, though, had a really hard time keeping their store straight, and they both did fail polygraph tests. Now, you guys know how I feel about the polygraph tests, and I don't put a lot of weight on a failed polygraph versus a pass polygraph. I don't think in the grand scheme of things, it really matters. But if you look up the facts of this case, that is something that is brought up about Chris and his cousin, So I did want to include it here. About a month after Kelly went missing, Chris also sold his car and he did so by driving it to Louisiana and selling it to somebody that took it across the border to Mexico. So obviously law enforcement wanted to get their hands on this car. They thought that this was a little bit suspicious, and they did everything they could to try to track the car down. Inside of the car, they did find some hair and they also noticed that one of the mats from inside of the car was missing. Later in nineteen ninety two, Chris also so faced some other charges because he was involved in an incident where somebody was stabbed. So Chris Denton and his cousin were looked at as two of the main suspects in this case by James yorke Brown, and James was trying to do everything he could to try and build his case against them. But in the midst of him trying to build this case against them, this is where we enter the satanic panic of it all. Now, this next part of the story is very convoluted, and honestly, it was a little bit hard for me to follow and figure out how it all connected to Kelly. But I'm going to do my best to try and explain it. Because this is a huge part of this case. If you look up this case, you see everything I'm about to talk about and all of the crazy, convoluted, hot mess of it all. And I really do believe that everything we're about to talk about out very much distracted from the actual case of Kelly being missing and what happened to her. I do want to credit a Reddit post I found on the Unresolved Mysteries thread that goes into detail about the possible connection between a local Gilmer family and Kelly Wilson. This post was the one I found that for me, was the easiest to follow, and I thought they did a really good job explaining it. So I'm going to be reading it as it was posted on Reddit, because honestly, trying to look at everything that is presented here and try to decipher all of it is a lot. There is a lot of family members, there is a lot of key players here, and it just gets very confusing and convoluted. I'm going to do my best to try and explain it to you guys. So everything kind of comes down to a family who was local to Gilmer. They were the Kerr family. So we're going to to take it back a couple of years before Kelly's murder to nineteen ninety, a man named Wendell Kerr told his wife Loretta that he wanted to get a divorce. Now, Wendell was one of six adult children of a man named Eugene Kerr who goes by Jene and Geneva Kerr. So Jene and Geneva had the following children, Wendell who I just mentioned, Danny, Oscar Kloy, Ronnie, Marie, and Donna. So those were the six Herr children. Now, jene and Geneva had a complicated relationship. They married in the nineteen fifties, but they were married a very short time and they were divorced by the sixties. Geneva then married three different men, all of who died before she remarried Eugene. So Eugene gene was her fourth marriage. So she was married to Jean twice and three other men in the midst of all of that. So, according to their children, Marie and Donna, Jean and Geneva abuse their children almost daily. Kloy Kerr's first wife, Marie and Donna's sister in law confirmed their claims of sexual abuse and spoke of witnessing daily assaults. Danny was said to be Geneva's favorite and the one that she would assault the most. Chloy's first wife, in addition to seeing the abuse of the Kerr sisters, was also a witness to Geneva's interest in Satanic practices, including daily readings from the Satanic Bible and an interest in both animal and human sacrifices. Danny Kerr is seen as the quote unquote tougher mentality than his brother Wendell or Cloyd. He was married in Mexico to a woman, but did not make contact with her often, and then he had a common law wife named Connie Sue Martin, who was younger. She was twenty seven. Now, this common law marriage wasn't one that was a choice. In nineteen eighty four, a seventeen year old Connie had met Wendell while she lived in Arkansas and worked for them as a live in babysitter. After the third day, Wendell had sexually assaulted Connie. She was then taken to Texas with the couple, where she was traded off like cattle to Danny Kerr. She then had six children. She reported she didn't know if all of the children belonged to Danny as she had been sexually intimate with all of the curs. Connie also said that during one of her pregnancies, Danny had abused her and and basically aborted the eight month old fetus that she was pregnant with and had used it as a sacrifice. I know this is dark. I know this is terrible. In exchange for law enforcements help escaping the Kerr family, Connie offered to tell investigators everything. It is claimed that Connie was kept as a slave to the family for ten years. She couldn't drive a car, she was constantly threatened by Geneva and Danny, and her only form of identification was her birth certificate, which was kept by Danny in his wallet. According to her, her role was simply as a breeder. So in nineteen ninety, when Wendell asked his wife Loretta for a divorce, Loretta suspected that she was being brushed to the side for a younger woman, and then accused Wendell of abusing their children. Later, he was convicted of child molestation and put on probation. A state child welfare worker assigned to the case later concluded that other members of the Kerr clan were sexually abusing their children, and over the next several years, more than a dozen children were taken into protective custody, according to court documents. The social workers also concluded that the curs wasn't just a case of child abuse, but also involved in satanic practices. A social worker said in an affidavit that in October of nineteen ninety two, two of the children took us to show us where the devil people meet to sexually abuse and kill the babies. That is a quote. On January fourth of nineteen ninety four, Connie did a thirty page interview in the Harrison County Jail in Marshall, Texas, in which she described in gruesome detail the torture that Kelly Wilson would receive for approximately nine days before ending in a ritual satanic sacrifice and cannibalism. She described Geneva as the leader and said that Wendell Danny Eugene, herself, two of her children, Wandakerr, and Sergeant James Yorke Brown were all present during these events. Connie Martin and Wandakerr both had stated in interviews that Kelly Wilson was a quote birthday present for Geneva Kerr. So that is kind of how Kelly Wilson's name came into this. It was brought into this by members of the Kerr family. And that is how this case took a major turn. It became something that truly is so insane you cannot make the story up if you tried. So. In January of nineteen ninety four, a grand jury handed down indictments against eight individuals for the abduction and murder of Kelly Wilson. So the defendants were as follows, Eugene and Ja Wendell and his wife Wanda, Wendell's brother Danny, and two family friends, a former Gilmer police officer named Roger Holman and his common law wife Tammy Joe Smith. And the eighth person, like I said, was Sergeant James Yorke Brown. So basically the story went that many of these people, many of whom were in the Kerr family, were all involved in this satanic cult and they allegedly abducted Kelly and held her captive for days and proceeded to torture her and then killed her in a ritualistic type of way and then disposed of her remains. Now, all of this stemmed from basic eyewitness testimony of Wanda Kerr and Danny's wife, Connie Martin. They had both confessed their involvement in this satanic cult and also in Kelly's abduction and murder. Now, Wanda would later recant her confession and say that that was not true and that she was not in any way, shape or form involved. But the question that I had was how in the heck did Sergeant James yorke Brown enter the story. So, one of the individuals that was involved with this family said during different interviews that he saw a man in a blue uniform at the scene of Kelly's murder, and then there were two separate people that basically picked him out of a lineup. So they were presented with this lineup of different men, and they both picked Sergeant James yorke Brown out of this lineup. Now, let's go back for a minute to Michael Bibbie, who was the one who admittedly slashed Kelly's tire. Interestingly enough, Wendell Kerr had actually lived with Michael and his family for a brief period of time prior to all of this. Now, Connie would later go on to testify that on the night of Kelly's abduction, that her family had received a phone call telling them to drive into Gilmour immediately, And basically this was implying that Michael had slashed the tire of Kelly's car in order to delay her departure to leave the video store and then her abductor's AKA the Curs would come in and swoop her up. Now, Connie Martin, who was one of the people who basically blew the lid off of everything and was given law enforcement all of this information did change her story quite a bit, and at one point in time, she led investigators to an area on the Kerr property where she said Kelly's remains were and it ended up just being a dead end. The only thing they found there were bones that belonged to a peg. So now we have the lead investigator on Kelly's case being implicated as being involved. There is just so much here, so many wild turn of events, and I really don't even know how we got here because the Kerr family cannot keep their story straight. And while I'm sure there is some truth behind what they're saying, in some way, shape or form, two people just randomly identified James yorke Brown from a photo lineup as being a man in a blue uniform, and that was enough for them to basically say that they were going to indict him. And the town of Gilmer was very split on if they thought he was involved or not. There were, of course, some people that very much did believe that he was guilty and in his involvement, and then there were people who truly thought he was innocent and that he was being brought into this for no reason at all, because there was no other evidence other than what the Kerr family said that implicated him whatsoever. There was nothing that tied him to Kelly's disappearance. So the police chief for Gilmer, who was named al McAllister, did very much stand by James yorke Brown and did not believe that he was involved in any way with Kelly's disappearance. Now, Kelly's mom and stepfather did believe that the Satanic ritual aspect of things seemed to be plausible and believed that the right people had been indicted. Kelly's dad and stepmother, who at the time were living in Louisiana, did not necessarily believe that they had the right people, and James York Brown, of course was trying to do everything he could to prove that this story wasn't true and that he wasn't involved. He conducted different interviews, and he also poked a hole in the case when he was able to uncover evidence that it was impossible for Wendell Kerr to have participated in the abduction and murder of Kelly in January of nineteen ninety two. So when Kelly was abducted, Wendell was working as a truck driver, and there were credit card receipts that showed and proved that he was on the other side of the country in New York on January fifth of nineteen ninety two when Kelly disappeared. So this one hundred percent pokesholes in the theory that the Kerr family was involved in the abduction of Kelly Wilson. So James got all of this evidence, he presented all of it, and was basically told that he needed to mind his own business and keep his nose out of the investigation. Which, honestly, if someone's accusing me of doing something I didn't do, I'm sure as hell going to gather the evidence and then present it because that's literally his livelihood. So the Texas Attorney General ended up getting the case and it pretty much instantly fell upon because there was no actual tactile evidence that James York Brown and the Kerr family had abducted and murdered Kelly Wilson or that this had anything to do with the Satanic cult type of sacrifice. So only two months after the murder indictments were handed down, the Texas Attorney General's office dismissed all charges against the eight defendants in Kelly's case. And because there were all of these claims, there were a lot of different child abuse charges that were brought against the Kerr family. All of those would also be dismissed as well. Now I don't know what to think about all of this as a whole. I don't know the validity of any of these claims that were made by these different people associated with the Kerr family. I do think that this family obviously had a lot of issues and there was a lot going on behind the scenes, and there probably is some truth behind everything that was said as far as the different abuse claims, and there's of course like incestual claims. I don't know what's going on. All I do know is James Yorick Brown was not involved in any way, shape or form with the Kerr family or with the disappearance of Kelly Wilson. And I truly do believe that with my heart and soul. I think because he was so heavily involved with this case and he was actively investigating it, he unknowingly got brought in and accused of doing something that he had nothing to do with, and the claims by the Kerr family and the indictments being handed down obviously took a serious toll on him, as it would with anybody. He would later have a stroke and come away from that having a permanent limp that would affect him his whole life. And he had also gotten married shortly before the indictments were handed down, and unfortunately, his marriage couldn't withstand all of the horrific rumors and he ended up up divorcing his wife. And unfortunately, in all of this there was such a distraction from what actually happened to Kelly Wilson, because at that point they hadn't found any evidence that she actually had been murdered, and at this point she was still a missing person. And then this whole cloud of suspicion came over James Yorick Brown and the Kerr family, and it just made everything so much more difficult for them to go back and investigate Kelly's disappearance. And on top of that, on October thirty first of nineteen ninety four, six boxes of police records and evidence from Kelly's investigation mysteriously disappeared from the Gilmour Police Department. I don't know how something like that happens, but it happened in this case. Now we're going to go back to talking about Chris and his cousin, because all of that was just a huge distraction from the actual case. So Chris's cousin would eventually go to trial for some perjury charges because he lied in front of a grand jury in nineteen ninety three. So he went to trial in nineteen ninety five and he was convicted and received a sentence of three years and a five thousand dollars fine. He was accused of lying about his whereabouts the night of Kelly's disappearance, and then he had a female friend of his also live to help fabricate his alibi. He had a lot of people involved in the fabrication of this alibi. He lied about when he left his job, and there was a lot of inconsistencies in his story, inconsistencies that they were able to prove, and they were able to prove that he did in fact lie about his whereabouts. They were hopeful that maybe the fact that he was facing jail time and finds that he would implicate his cousin, Chris Dunton and tell law enforcement what actually happened, But that never happened. In two thousand and four, Chris passed away four cancer and he was never brought up at any charges in relation to Kelly's disappearance. Now, also very interesting, in two thousand and four, Joe Henry, who was the individual who owned and managed the video store that Kelly worked at and was the last person to see her, was arrested after being found with child sexual abuse material. Now, there is no indication that Joe Henry was involved in any way or had anything to do with Kelly's disappearance. He was cleared pretty quickly by law enforcement. But this is just another example of how people that the town of Gilmer made really bad choices and got caught. So unfortunately, that is kind of where Kelly's case stands today. There hasn't been any new movement on her case. And of course, anytime you look up this case, you see the satanic panic type of information and you see all the reporting delves deep to the Kurr family and all of their alleged misconduct and involvement. So going back to the Kurr family, I don't know if what all has been reported and their account of what happened is true. I do think that there probably was some generational abuse going on there, but I also think there was a lot of fabrication and things that might have been inflated, a little bit twisted and convoluted as far as it coming to different Satanic ritualistic things, because I do think that if there was any involvement with this family and Kelly Wilson, it would have been uncovered in their investigation. They never found any evidence of any type of Satanic ritualistic type of killings or anything when it came to the Kurr family. But unfortunately, them entering the picture and this whole story blowing up into what it was did take away from the actual story of Kelly being abducted. So to this day, remains have never been found of Kelly. I did see some different articles that state that it is believed by law enforcement that she is no longer alive, and that is kind of where things stand today. There is an age progress photo of Kelly and I will be sure to put that out on my social media pages if you were in the area of the video store in Gilmer, Texas in January of nineteen ninety two. Kelly was last seen wearing cut off blue jeans, a purple rugby shirt with red, gold and white insignia, and brown loafers. She was wearing a gold dome ring, gold emerald ring, gold diamond inset, Mexican eagle coin ring, a gold pinky ring, a gold chain bracelet, a gold watch, and triangle earrings. She had blonde hair and a retainer on her lower teeth. I think this whole story is just so trapped, not only because Kelly disappeared into the night and hasn't been seen or heard from since, but we also had the wrongful indictment of Sergeant James Yorick Brown, who, like I said, I truly believe is innocent in all of this, and I think them pointing the finger at him was distracting from something more. And I really don't know what it is. I think there's something more going on here, and I think there's way more involved than we even know. And I think that there are people out there that know exactly what happened to Kelly. And once the Kerr family thing came out and a couple of people picked James Yorick Brown out of a lineup, I think that the people that really were involved in this thought that it was a great distraction and they just went along with it rather than getting the actual truth of the story about what happened. So I know that that was a lot. There was a lot of moving pieces, and the Kerr family thing was really hard to follow and super intense, and I hated having to go into the detail as I went into, but I thought it was super important in telling this story. So I do want to thank you guys for taking a little bit of time to listen to Kelly's story, because her story is so important and it is still unsolved, and as always I say, the more eyes and ears we can get on her case, the more likely we could have it solved. So take a minute to look at the photos of Kelly. Look at the age progress photo of Kelly. I'm going to be posting, and if you lived in Gilmour in nineteen ninety two, you could hold a piece to the puzzle. I hope you guys have a great weekend coming up. I will see you Sunday for a brand new summer series, The List Family Murders. We are slowly but surely winding down on that series, so I will see you guys then. I hope you have a great weekend and stay safe. Bye. The Thing