Leigh Occhi

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail. Please listen with discretion. 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. I am a tad bit under the weather to start the new year, but I did want to highlight a missing person's case on right now in true crime, and then we're going to get into the episode. So I unfortunately come to you today to share about a missing person that is a good friend of mine's family member, my friend Jen. Those of you that listen to my podcast have probably heard me talk about Jen. She does some really amazing work in the true crime space. She is a victim advocate. She has several podcast projects, she has the Reignited Project, she has a nonprofit to help victims and their families. She does it all, and one of her family members is missing, and I really wanted to take a few minutes and highlight that missing person, because the more eyes and ears we get on Linda's story, the better. Linda Kathleen Brown is missing from Chicago, Illinois, in the Bronsville area. She is fifty three years old. She was born September fourth of nineteen seventy two. She is five seven around one hundred and twenty pounds, has brown hair and brown eyes. Linda was last seen on January third in her Bronzeville neighborhood. They believe that she was headed to. The Wicker Park area for her scheduled acupuncture appointment. She never made it to her appointment and hasn't been seen or heard from since. She was driving a twenty twenty one blue Honda Civic with the license plate number c X five seven four seven zero. I do believe that her car was found, but Linda is still missing, and it's imperative that we get her face and her name out there because anybody could stumble upon something or remember something from that day, January third, that they don't even think is significant, but it could change the course of the investigation. If you do have any information about Linda Brown's disappearance, her current location, anything, you are encouraged to please contact Area one Detectives at three one two seven, four seven eight, three eight zero and reference case number JK one zero. Two nine five seven. I will continue to share Linda's missing person's fire on my Instagram and Facebook pages. Please follow me there and please do me a big favorite and hit that share button and share it to your stories as well, because the more people that we can reach, the better, especially if you're in the Chicago, Illinois area. We are going to go ahead and get into today's episode. And I think I speak for everybody when I say we are sending thoughts and prayers to Linda and her family, and I really really hope I can tell you guys that she is safe and sound soon. Alrighty guys, today we are jumping into a brand new unsolved case. So today we are getting into the unsolved disappearance of Lee Ochi, who disappeared from Tupelo, Mississippi, in nineteen ninety two. Lee was only thirteen years old when she went missing. Her case very much piqued my interest. I first saw it on Facebook and I did cover it for one of my social media posts for my Unsolved Sunday Spotlight. But I decided I wanted to. Dig into it a little further and put out a full episode. Now, I will say this is one that has a lot of online speculation, just speculation in general about who is responsible for Lee's abduction and possible alleged murder. But I'll be honest, after researching this one and going through it, I don't really even know what I think about it. So I am going to talk about. Some of the theories that are out there, just brushing over them because they're important to the. Case, and I feel like each theory has. Its own aspects that we all need to explore if we're going to be looking into Lee's case. But there's something too that makes me wonder if there's a reason this case hasn't been solved yet, and it's because we're looking in the entirely wrong direction and everyone is so focused on one particular person or a couple of people, and that might not be the right direction, and that's why Lee's case has not been solved. So food for thought. Of course, it could be one of the theories we're going to talk about. That's very possible as well, But if we're going to explore it, we need to kind of look at all angles. So that is what we're going to do today. So let's go ahead and get into Lee's case. Lee Marine Ochi was born in Hawaii on August twenty first of nineteen seventy nine to her parents, Donald Ochi and Vicki Felton. Donald and Vicki were both in the US Army and they had met while stationed in California. They married in nineteen seventy seven, and then Lee was born two years after that, in nineteen seventy nine. But in April of nineteen eighty one, Donald and Vicki separated and Donald was transferred to Germany, while Vicki and Lee moved to Tubelow, Mississippi. Lee would keep in touch with her dad and even once went to Germany to stay with him for a few months. Lee and her mom, like I said, lived in tu Below, Mississippi, at a house located at one oh five Honey Locust Drive. In nineteen ninety two, Vicky had recently separated from her second husband, who was named Barney Yarborough, so at this point in time it was just Vicky and Lee living at the home. Donald was back from Germany and living in Virginia. Lee was eagerly awaiting the start of the new school year, where she was going into the eighth grade. She had just turned thirteen years old a few days before and had time and time again asked her mom if she could stay home alone. Vicki had never agreed to let her stay home alone before. Of course, all the different thoughts run through your head about the worst things that can happen when you're a parent and you leave your child alone for the first time, but Vicky finally agreed to let Lee stay home alone on Thursday, August twenty seventh, so Lee was off from school for summer and Vicky had to go to work. Vicky was, of course nervous about Lee staying home alone. Hurricane Andrew was rapidly approaching, and although it had been downgraded to a tropical storm, it wasn't supposed to directly hit tu below. They were still expecting some rain and some wind as it passed through, so that. Day was pretty cut and dry. Lee was going to be by herself most of the morning, and then at some point her grandmother was going to be coming by to pick her up for her middle school open house. So Lee would go to her open house with her grandmother and then after Vicky got off work, Lee and her mom discussed getting taco bell for dinner and chatting about the middle school open house. So that morning was a very normal morning. Vicki went out to get the morning paper around seven am. Then they ate breakfast together and discussed the plans for the day. Vicky left for her job between seven thirty five and seven forty five. She arrived at work around seven fifty am. Shortly after getting there, Vicky got the storm was in fact getting ready to pass through, so she called the hose around eight thirty am. To give lea heads up about what to do. In case there was an emergency and just kind of ease her fears if she was having any fears about the weather. She called her twice with no answer. Now she was worried because she knew that Lee was home and should have been able to answer the phone. When Lee didn't answer, Vicky went ahead and left work and drove one and a half miles from her job back to the house to check on her daughter. When she got there, Vicky said she found the garage door was open and the light was on. Now, this light apparently was a motion activated light, so it was apparent that the door to the garage. Had recently been opened. Also very important to note that the garage door had been closed when Vicky left for work at seven thirty five. The front door was closed, but also noted to be unlocked. Also something that immediately worried Vicky was she saw blood smeared on the inside of the wall, and she started calling out for Lee and going into all of the rooms at the house checking them looking for Lee. She said she then went into Lee's bedroom and found Lee's favorite blanket crumpled up on the floor and immediately knew something was wrong and called nine to one one. Around nine am, law enforcement came to the scene to start their investigation because Lee was not at the house, so where was she. Upon further inspection of the home, they found more blood. They found pools of blood in her bedroom. They found blood smeared in the hallway, in her bathroom, and on her bedroom door. One of the bathroom counters had a pink haze on it, which led investigators to believe that whoever did this attempted to clean up the blood, taking a wet rag and wiping the blood away. There was also some of Lee's hair stuck in some blood that was on a door frame. This led investigators to believe that Lee's head had been injured somewhere in whatever struggle took place in that house. So although investigators believed whoever was involved in this had attempted to clean up, they found nothing at the scene to indicate this, such as a bloody rag or a bloody towel or anything like that. So whatever this person used to clean up was not at the scene. Vicki said some of Lee's clothing items were missing, as well as her glasses and shoes. Now, detectives did find a bloody nightgown in a clothes hamper, and investigators obviously knew that something bad had happened to Lee, and it was obvious that she was injured in that house and then she was taken out of the house. They were also very much trying to pin down anyone who had seen Lee the evening before, because let me just preface all of this, This story that we're being told right now, the story that I just told you is from Vicky's perspective. This is what Vicky said happened. So investigators, of course, are trying to make sure that this story is accurate and basically trying to talk to anybody that might have had eyes on Lee the night before or that morning possibly. So, there was a neighbor that said Lee had arrived at his doorstep around eight pm the night before and Lee asked if she could wait inside until her mom got home because she was locked. Out of the house. Then around eight forty five pm, Lee went to another neighbor's home and said that she was locked out, and fifteen minutes later she was looking out the window and saw that her mom was home, and then left and went home, and that was the last time anybody besides Vicky saw Lee. Investigators started their search. They obviously had a missing child. They thought that she could possibly be injured, so they were trying to do everything they could to find her. Canines were brought in, but they were unfortunately unable to track her scent. They theorized that Lee's blood had likely. Dropped onto the nightgown, so her injury was likely above the neck area, but they didn't really have a ton to go on other than that. They weren't even positive that the blood found in the house was in fact Lee's, but they were pretty certain since it was identified as type O blood, which was Lee's blood type. So with very little to go on, the investigation was pretty much at a standstill until September fourth in nineteen ninety two, when a McDonald's worker in Boonville reported to law enforcement that they saw a girl that was in a car that kind of resembled Lee and they were in the drive through. So this tip was called. In and it was eventually determined that this was not Lee, it was just somebody that like her. And then on September ninth, a package arrived at Vicky's home that contained Lee's glasses and it was postmarked from none other than Boonville. It had six stamps on it, which was pretty much double the postage that it would need to make it from Boonville to Tupelow, which is interesting. Booneville was about thirty miles away from where Vicky and Lee lived, so it was quite a ways. So this package was addressed to b. Yarboro, which was the first initial of Vicky's ex husband, Barney Yarbro, and the street name was also misspelled as well. It was spelled h n Y instead of Honey. Interesting now, they tested the envelope for DNA, but it was determined that whoever sealed it and put the stamps on it did so with water and not saliva. Now, this whole thing, to me is so interesting. The glasses being mailed to Vicky's home address, the address where allegedly Lee was abducted from, addressed to Vicky's ex husband who she was separated from. It's all just very interesting. I feel like there's so much complexity here. And this is why I say, I don't know what to think about this case, because there is this kind of stuff that happened, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It doesn't make any sense to me, to be quite honest with you, and I don't know what to think about it. And investigators very much were of the same mindset. They didn't really know what to think about it. They didn't know what to make of the glasses being sent to VICKI, and they thought that it made no sense and was a distraction. There was no ransom note with it, so it being mailed there didn't really make any sense to anybody. Two below, police Chief. Bart Aguire stated, quote, there was no ransom letter or anything like that that came with the glasses. It was just those glasses. You would think if it was an actual kidnapping, you would have expected a little more to come along with that end quote, so very much in agrants with that. It just doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Was it a distraction? Was it somebody genuinely just kind of poking out the bear and decided that they were going to send these glasses to Vicky? I don't really know. So where do we go from here? Where does the investigation go from here? So there were some reports that Barney could have potentially been abusive towards Lee during the time that he was married to Vicky. He was questioned, ruled out as a suspect. He passed a polygraph test and also provided a rock solid alibi, so he was pretty much eliminated from the start. Vicky, of course, was also questioned and was administered three separate examinations, one with local law enforcement and two with the FBI. Independent examiners stated that she showed deception on all of them. I personally, as you guys know, don't put a lot of weight into polygraph tests and their results because it's been proven that they aren't super reliable. They're not even allowed in court for this very reason. But like I said earlier, this is a very interesting aspect because everything that we have been told about this case is what Vicky is saying is the truth. That is what Vicky told police. Donald, Lee's dad, also passed the polygraph tests and was ruled out pretty much immediately as a suspect. Upon everything happening, Donald took leave from the army to come to Mississippi to help. Search for his daughter. Unfortunately, nothing came of that. There was a two thousand dollars award offered, and Vicky hired a private investigator and ran in the local newspaper hoping to get the word out and get some leads about where Lee could be. It really seems that in the initial part of the investigation that Vicky was very much holding on to hope that Lee was still alive. In July of nineteen ninety three, a skull was found in a field in Monroe County and it was told to the family that this goal was positively identified as Lee's, and they said that they were able to identify it using dental records. Now, of course, the family was devastated as this was not the ending that they wanted. However, it later came out and it was said that this was a mistake and this was in fact not Lee. They worked very hard to identify the skull and they eventually did identify it as belonging to a girl named Pollyanna Sue Keith, who was twenty seven years old and had gone missing in March of nineteen ninety three. I don't know how such a horrible mistake like that happens. I think gets terrible. I think that is such a major ball drop, But it happened. It's part of the story, so it's important to talk about it. Something like that should never happen. So in the midst of everything going on with the investigation, Donald was very much questioning some of Vicky's behavior. He said, initially, when Vicky had contacted him, she kind of sort of downplayed the situation. He didn't even realize that there was blood found in the house initially because she didn't tell him. Initially, he almost thought that maybe Lee had run away because of the way that she had kind of shared. The story with him. In an interview with true crime blogger Anthony Wayne, he said, quote the day after it happened, all she said was Lee was missing. A couple of days later, she called with the details of the blood and everything else. End quote. Now, I do have to say Vicky has never been charged in connection with her daughter appearance. And as for the failed polygraph test, she says she really doesn't have any explanation for it other than she was dealing with the trauma of losing her daughter and being questioned essentially as a suspect in her daughter's death. So that is the reason that the results came up the way that they did. And she is not entirely wrong, because, as we know, none of us know how we would react in a situation like what Vicky was going through. If we are taking her story for face value, her daughter was taken from her home, She's obviously traumatized, she's being questioned by the police, she's being questioned by the FBI. I would probably react some type of way too on a polygraph examination. So I'm not saying one way or the other if I believe her or not. But I think we have to be fair and say that there is a potential that maybe she came up as being deceptive because she was going through this immense amount of trauma and on the other hand, that might not be true. I'm not saying one way or the other, but just exploring all options here. Donald, on the other hand, isn't entirely convinced that Vicky doesn't know more than she's letting on. In the interview he did with crime blogger Anthony Wayne, he explained that Vicky was a trained interrogator for the US Army. He said, quote, I had my concerns about the way law enforcement handled Lee's case, and he basically says that he doesn't think that they had dealt with somebody with Vicky's intelligence before. And he went on to say that she was a trained interrogator. She knew how to act regarding questioning, which again I think is a very interesting layer to this case because he obviously knows the type of training she has. He was in the Army with her, that's where they met. They were married for several years. It makes sense that he is kind of questioning everything about everything that is going on in this case because he knows the woman he was married to, and he knows her level of intelligence. So I find that whole thing very very interesting. But Donald doesn't believe that this was a random attack. He doesn't believe that somebody random could have come across Lee that day that she was left home alone for the first time and committed a possible murder and took Lee and made an attempt to clean up the scene in such a short period of time. Don also said that the people of Tupelo told him you need to look at her mom, which again interesting. Vicky very much denies having anything to do with her daughter's disappearance, but she has offered her own theory about what happened. She believes a man named Oscar Kerns who goes by the name Mike. He was a Sunday school teacher at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church where they attended church, and he was also a part of the stables where Lee would go to ride horses. Vicky believes that he was the one responsible for whatever happened to her. She believed, since there was no sign of forced entry, that Lee must have known whoever took her, meaning she opened the door willingly for this person. And this guy, Mike, is somebody that she knew, she was familiar with, and would have opened the door for. So who is Mike Kerns? Like I said, he had connection to them through the church that they went to and also the horse stables where Lee would often go to ride horses. But in May of. Nineteen ninety three, which was nine months after Lee went missing, Mike abducted a fifteen year old girl who he met at church. He basically made up this ruse that he was going to drive her to school and instead took her to Memphis, Tennessee, and sexually assaulted her, and then he dropped her off at school. She contacted police, and he did later plead guilty to rape and was sentenced to twenty four years, but unfortunately, he served less than four and was released in October of nineteen ninety seven. So shortly after his release, he kidnapped a married couple and sexually assaulted the wife, and for this he was sent back to prison and was scheduled for release in twenty nineteen. In regards to Lee's disappearance, he refused to answer any questions or be interviewed or take a polygraph test, and Vicki said he very much started to act strangely towards her after Lee's disappearance. He would avoid eye contact with her, but would also randomly stop by the house, which was something that he never did before. And this guy is interesting. He obviously is heinous. He has the capability of kidnapping and actual assaulting people. He's obviously not a good guy in my opinion, Allegedly, I don't think he's a good guy because of these things. This is not normal good behavior, and I think that he is a pretty credible suspect. That is just my opinion. Now, Unfortunately, we will likely never know if Mike Kerns was involved or not, because he died in May of two thousand and one at the age of sixty three, so any secrets that he had he took to his grape with him. Now, over the years, there have been some people who have come forward just with a little bit of information in regards to Lee's life and things that were going on with her prior to her disappearance. There were some classmates that reported Lee having some bruises on her and she would always give the excuse of it being from horseback riding. She fell off a horse or she got kicked by a horse, and and since Lee did love to horseback ride, that was one of her favorite things to do, everyone just kind of shrugged it off. But now some people do believe that there might have been some abuse going on inside of the home, but of course that has never been proven. And the bruises that Lee had very likely could have been from riding horses. She was outdoors a lot, she was always on horses. These bruises do kind of make sense, so that very much could be the case. We do not know if she was abused or not. Now. There was also another classmate that came forward with an account of one day being with Lee and Lee was eating berries in the schoolyard, I think berries from a tree that was there, and this classmate warned Lee that the berries could be poisonous, and Lee basically commented that she didn't care and may have wanted to die, which is pretty alarming for a young girl to say something like this. So this class I guess, reported it to a school counselor, and Lee went and talked to this counselor and she said she was fine and she was just joking with her comment. There was, also, like I said, rumors that Barney was abusive towards Lee. However, there's nothing really to substantiate these claims. We don't know if this was true or not. Vicki says she didn't ever get the impression that there was anything going on there in. Regards to abuse. She didn't get the impression that Lee was ever scared of Barney or anything like that. Despite all of the rumors, all the small town rumors circulating this case, Donald never gave up trying to find out what happened to his daughter. He does believe that she's no longer alive and was in fact killed that day. Investigators announced in August of nineteen ninety seven that they had a suspect in the case, but declined to name them publicly. On October fourteenth of twenty twenty four, Lee County Chancellor Steven Bailey signed a two page order declaring Lee Ochie dead now. This request was made by Lee's parents. In January of two thousand and five, there was a search at the home where Lee went missing, and for whatever reason, investigators thought that Lee's remains were possibly on the property somewhere, but nothing, as we know right now twenty twenty six came of that search. It's almost been a whole year. They searched the property as well as the creek next to the house, and interestingly enough, the Creek next to the home where Vicky and Lee were living was actually being renovated at the time that Lee went missing, So their belief was that somebody had possibly disposed of her body and in the renovation, something with the renovation kind of covered it up, kind of, and that's why they went back to I'm going to link that article below that talks about the search. So in twenty seventeen, there was a podcast that was launched and it is called Open the Case of Leochi and it's. Done by The Daily Journal. So they go in to long. Form investigative podcasts, they go in to the disappearance of Leochi. So for this podcast, they did an. Interview with a woman who owned a garden center in the area, and she revealed that she saw something strange the morning that Lee went missing. She said that she had been driving by Honey Locust Drive and she saw a male and a female walking alongside the road in the torrential downpour rain from the Hurricane Andrew storm that was coming through, and she said as she got closer to them, the man pulled up the hood that he had and wrapped his arm around the female shoulders, basically like pulling her closer in to him, and the female looked up and did not appear to be injured. But this woman got the sense that whoever this female was with this man was frightened. She wanted to offer them a ride, but decided against it because she felt that there was something off with the situation and obviously didn't want to involve herself in whatever was going on. So she looked at them in the rear view mirror as she drove off, and then they. Were kind of just gone. Once this woman heard about Lee's disappearance, she called the non emergency police line and was told that somebody was going to contact her about the situation, but nobody ever did, which is very interesting. You obviously have a missing child, a thirteen year old girl, and they never circled back to this person that said that they might have seen something in the area that day. Very interesting, nonetheless, So she said that the man was shorter in stature, he had a thick build, he had gray hair and a scuffy beard, and he was wearing an army green type of jacket. Again very interesting. Now, she did eventually get to speak with investigators and give her account on what happened. But it wasn't until September of twenty sixteen that this happened. And this is terrible. I do not doubt her story. I one thousand percent believe her story, but just think what would have actually happened if investigators had called her back and taken her testimony within the next day versus. Two thy and sixteen. Somebody dropped the ball here, and it potentially could have led to the investigation being at a standstill that it is today, still in twenty twenty six It's terrible. It never should have happened. Who knows how many other tips that potentially could have come in that they didn't follow up on. If we know about this one, there very well could be others, and that is just insane to me when we're dealing with the abduction and possible murder of a thirteen year old girl. So that is pretty much where the case stands today. There is nothing new out there as far as who might be involved, any other potential suspects, any other potential leads. That is where the case stands today. Lee was officially, like I said, declared deceased. She is still technically missing. However, she could still be out there there is an age progress photo of her. I'll be sharing that on social media. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Lee Ochi or details about her disappearance is asked to call the Tupelo Police Department or Crime Stoppers of Northeast Mississippi at one eight hundred seven seven three tips. That's one eight hundred seven seven three eight four seven seven. There's obviously somebody out there that knows something about what happened to Lee that day, and advancements are happening in DNA technology every single day. People are changing and shifting their loyalties every single day. If somebody knows about what happened to Lee but has been keeping a secret for all of these years to protect somebody else, loyalties are shifting. Things are shifting, and I hope that twenty twenty six is the year that we get answers as to what happened to Lee, because regardless of how you feel about her family unit, or your opinions and speculations about who may or may not be involved, her family. As a whole needs answers. I really really sympathize with Donald because he has never given up trying to figure out what happened to his daughter, and I can't imagine being put into that position where you really have no other choice but to keep fighting and keep looking and just taking it day by day without answers has to be so so hard on him. So I hope that for his sake that we do get answers. And I do think that is a tough one because there is so much speculation and rumors about who was involved. But still after spending a couple of weeks on this case and researching it and going back through everything, I personally do not know what to think. And this is one of those ones that just leaves me scratching my head and leaves me with way more questions than answers, and I think that's probably a big part of the reason that this case is still unsolved today. So thank you guys so much for listening to Lee's story. This is an important one to get out there and to talk about because it has been a long time. Nineteen ninety two was a long time ago when we went missing, and we still don't know any more today than we knew back on that day in nineteen ninety two. I hope you guys have a great weekend. Ahead and I will see you next week. I think next week I'm going to be doing a update on some of the cases I've covered that have had some movement. Some are in the process of being a judiciar. I want to talk about those, So we're gonna do just kind of an update episode because I haven't really done a formatted update episode on the cases I've covered. There are quite a few that have had movement, and I want to be sure to highlight all of that. So I think that's what we're doing next week. So I will see you guys next week for that, and I hope you stay safe and have a great weekend. Bye.