Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Joseph Kinville III

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

When 16-year-old Joseph Kinville III is brutally stabbed to death in a field in his neighborhood in Arcadia, Florida, law enforcement is stumped from the start and his mother is devastated. The mystery only deepens when the teen's estranged father is murdered a few weeks later, hundreds of miles away in Michigan. The identity of Joseph's murderer has remained unknown since his murder in 1999, but evidence from his crime scene may still hold the answers law enforcement needs. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit  https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-joseph-kinville/

Crime junkies, before we jump into the episode, I wanted to give you guys a quick update on Britt. First of all, thank you so much for your outpouring of support. I'm not kidding you. At the time I'm recording this, I think we've gotten something like 33,000 messages, comments, emails, pictures. It's been unreal. We can't thank you enough.

And it's working. All the thoughts, prayers, good vibes. Britt is expected to make a full recovery, which is incredible. It is a miracle. But it is going to take some time still. So, you know, we don't know, again, we're still kind of going day by day. It's looking like Britt might be out for the summer. I'll continue to try and bring you updates here and there, but do know she's doing well.

It all worked. Thank you again for reaching out, for letting her know that you're thinking of her. And as soon as we know more, I'll let you know. Otherwise, we're just going to give her her space and time to heal. And hopefully one day when you turn on your podcast, you're going to hear the, and I'm Britt, very soon. All right, here's your episode. Hi, crime junkies.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And the story I have for you today is one that came to us in kind of an unusual way. Unlike many of the cases that we've covered on this show, no one suggested this case. And that's because it's one of those that many people don't even know about. Or if they did hear the victim's name come across their television screens back in 1999, they may have forgotten. We only found out about this case because Delia came across this case as she was investigating counterclock season four.

Now we just recently released all 15 episodes of that series to binge. And there were some strange similarities between the cases. Now ultimately they ended up not being connected, so it didn't fit into counterclock. But we knew that this story needed to be told because it's a case that I know could totally be solved if the right things fall into place. This is the story of a teenage boy from a migrant worker community in South Florida whose brutal murder has gone unsolved for 23 years. This is the story of Joseph Kenville III.

Around midnight of Monday, March 1, 1999, single mother Kathy Delacruz wakes up from a dead sleep with a feeling of dread. The feeling that something bad had happened, but she didn't know what. She was staying in a friend's trailer in the small town of Arcadia, Florida after coming in town with two of her teenage sons. So maybe it was just the feeling of not being in her home, like not being in her normal bed. It was a feeling that she shook off before going back to sleep. When she woke again at eight, she started packing up her stuff and tried wrangling her

boys to get them back on the road to go home. She hollers for her 14-year-old son Justin and 16-year-old son Joseph to get in the car. Justin comes, but Joseph doesn't. She looks around the trailer, even spans out into the neighborhood, but he's nowhere to be found. Now Kathy immediately thinks that's odd, but she doesn't go into a full-blown panic right away. You see, up until recently, they'd actually spent the last few years living in Arcadia.

Joseph's oldest brothers, who were 18 and 20, even stayed there when the family moved to Plant City, so Justin and Joseph still had a lot of friends in Arcadia. And according to Kathy, when the family would make their visits on weekends, she would stay at her friend's trailer near her rental, and the boys would usually spend the night at their friend's houses. So at this point, mom's thinking he overslept, but it still does feel just a smidge off, because always by Monday morning, everyone would be ready to go to make the drive back to Plant City.

So Joseph not showing up on March 1st, when it was time to go, was really at a character. Again, not just because he'd never done that before, but because Kathy knew that he was usually a punctual kid. I mean, coming from a tight-knit Mexican-American family that all contributed to the family's survival, Joseph knew the value of time. According to Kathy, the family ran like a well-oiled machine by the time all of the boys were old enough to work, like they had to be on time to their jobs picking oranges for various citrus growers and working long hours as day laborers for fruit growers in

South Central Florida. So by mid-morning, when Joseph still hasn't shown up, Kathy knows that she needs to do something. And the first thing she does is calls the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office to report him missing, but during that conversation, she happens to mention that she's not sure if he's just overdue or maybe ran away, which of course makes the deputies on the other end of the line suddenly a little less urgent to take a report. Just to be clear, according to Kathy, she didn't have any reason back then to think

that Joseph ran away, but in the moment, the only things that she could think of that made any sense is either that he overslept or like worst case scenario decided, you know, maybe while he was drinking out with his friends that he wasn't going to go home to Plant City. She honestly didn't know she was just reaching for anything at that point. So far that morning, the department hadn't received any other calls about Joseph or any reports of like a terrible accident or a body being found, nothing like that. So the Sheriff's Office is inclined to believe that he ran away and essentially no search gets underway and nothing really happens.

He says their entire conversation was one of those like, thanks for calling, we're going to take a note kind of thing, which only frustrates her, but she doesn't give up after talking to the Sheriff's Office. Justin tells his mom that the last time he saw his brother was around 11 o'clock the previous night, and they were both at a friend's house in town about two miles from their old neighborhood. Justin says that he heard Joseph talking about how he had plans to go over to one of his ex-girlfriend's houses and then go to a house party.

Justin goes on to tell his mom that a group of people he saw later in the night told him that Joseph had made it to that house party, but apparently he had gotten into a confrontation with some guys there, but they all said that he had left on foot before anything got too rowdy or a real fight broke out. Worried sick, Cathy starts calling around to smug Joseph's friends and other families in Arcadia that she thinks he might have stayed the night with on Sunday night, but no one she spoke with that morning could account for Joseph after 11 o'clock on Sunday night. And while she's making these calls, Cathy has no idea that just a mile and a half away

from where she is sitting, someone is about to find her son. A guy named Willie March was walking in a grassy field by the auto dealership where he worked to take a bathroom break, but out in the field he spotted something. It was a young man laying in the grass, hand sticking straight up into the air. And there was no wondering if he was asleep or even unconscious. It was clear to Willie right away that this boy was dead. Willie rushed back into the office and had someone call 911. In minutes after he made that call, DeSoto County Sheriff's Office deputies and detectives

arrived on scene. Because we don't have access to the actual police reports from investigators about every move the detectives made after getting there. It's hard to know specifics, but what I can tell you is that law enforcement officers start taking notes of what they're seeing and they call for a medical examiner to come from Sarasota, which is about an hour west of Arcadia. According to the Sheriff's Office, no ID or wallet is found on the young man. So they have no idea who he is at first and they definitely haven't made a connection

to the call that they got earlier from Joseph's mom. Now the investigative documents that we do have access to explain that when police find the body, they estimate the victim to be about 16 years old. He's fully clothed and is still wearing several pieces of jewelry. And what's apparent to investigators right off the bat is that the teen suffered serious blood loss in his chest and abdomen. Just looking at him from a few feet away, they can see a clear cut through the front fabric of his sweatshirt near his stomach.

And to them, that's where it looks like all the blood came from. Most of his white sweatshirt is soaked with blood and there are blood stains all the way down the waistline of his jeans with small drips almost down to his ankles. They also find smears of blood on his pant legs and near the hand and wrist areas of his right sleeve. What's interesting though is that they note in their reports that there's no blood on the back of the victim's clothing. And the fact that so much blood had dripped down onto his waist and the front of his jeans

meant that more than likely he was attacked from the front and then at some point he'd gone down and laid on his back. But it seems like they don't think that the attack took place all right there. Because in an article by Patricia Walsh for the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the authorities said quote, we haven't found the weapon. We haven't determined the exact killing location end quote. And it's a pretty big area I actually have a map of it on our blog post or you can look at it right now in the Crime Genki app if you're listening there.

Basically this is a pretty open area next to a busy highway highway 17. And this highway is basically a pipeline through the area and all along in our local businesses, car dealerships, auto shops, motels like citrus warehouses, as well as a bunch of houses and trailer park communities in between. Now on the map again it looks just like trees like almost like an open field that you wouldn't think would be traffic like oh I understand why nobody came across that body. But even though this kind of looks like an empty field, apparently it was actually pretty well trafficked as well because workers at the auto dealership where Willie March was

employed confirmed that the field was often used as a cut through by pedestrians or people even like hanging out late at night just partying in the field. Police actually found some beer bottles and stuff that backed that theory up so police are theorizing that if people who live nearby were in the field the previous night partying there's a good chance that someone might have seen something important. Now the victim is removed shortly after the associate Emmy arrived and he's transported for an autopsy and here's what's super wild. According to the Emmy investigators report in an attempt to identify the victim.

The Soto County Sheriff's deputies take a Polaroid photo of the body before it's moved and they go out into the community showing it to people to try and get folks to help identify the dead teen like they actually go around showing people a picture of this dead teenager to try and ID him which I had never heard of done before but surprisingly it works. A group of teenage girls from Arcadia see the picture and they tell detectives that they believe the body in the photo is 16 year old Joseph Kenville and one of those girls that they're actually talking to is Joseph's recent ex-girlfriend Melinda like what are

the odds. So by two o'clock deputies go over to Kathy Delacruz's neighborhood and instead of Joseph walking in the door Kathy gets a knock from authorities with the worst possible news. They had found her son and it was heartbreaking hearing Kathy recount this moment to Delia because she said that she just screamed and she always thinks in that moment in that moment that his life was taken away was he thinking about her was he crying for his mother Kathy's response and the emotions even all these years later are just such a vivid reminder that moments like that when people learn that their child is dead never gets easier for families

of crimes like this and their pain never goes away I mean all the emotions just stay so close to the surface for moms like Kathy and it's such a good reminder for all of us I mean as I record this episode for those of you listening on the other end now there is a real mom on the other end of this story who lost her son and that pain is as real for her today as it was 23 years ago and she's kind enough to let us tell her story and her son's story so we owe them the respect of knowing it's more than a story it's their life that we're being allowed to look at and examine so back in 1999 Kathy is so distraught and confused I mean this is the last thing in the world she could have imagined happening

on what was supposed to be such a normal Monday morning and her pain was only about to get worse as police and the family learn what actually happened to Joseph in the last moments of his life at 1030 in the morning on Tuesday March 2nd this is the day after Joseph was found the Emmy in Sarasota conducts his autopsy now we were able to get a copy of the doctor's seven page report and the details are truly horrific to read but what's in those pages is really important in order to understand the case so I'm going to try and summarize it as much as possible for you it looks like Joseph was stabbed once in the front of his chest with some sort of small object whatever it was left a roughly two centimeter wide

slit through the front of his sweatshirt and in his chest and the reason I say some sort of sharp object is because the report doesn't specifically say whether the wound was caused by like a pocket knife versus a hunting knife for example all it says is that the injury was made by a small object that had sharp edges on both sides so this is also important to know it's not like a serrated kitchen knife kind of thing and also of note remember I said there was no weapon found at the scene so I don't think anyone really knows what exactly was used to kill Joseph now what the Emmy could say for sure was that when the blade made contact with Joseph's body it entered about four and a half inches above

his belly button and went straight into his heart whoever was wielding this weapon made a perfect stabbing motion going front to back slightly upward and the blade went right between two of his ribs with that one jab the killer didn't have to like move the blade sideways or anything they basically just shoved the weapon into Joseph's chest aimed at his heart and pierced it after that Joseph bled out for several minutes and based on the Emmys finding it's clear that once Joseph went down on his back face up he died like that because the doctor noted in his report that liver mortis showed the amount of blood that was still left in Joseph's body had settled and pooled in his back so there wasn't any

indication that he was moving after dying now a few other details from the autopsy that I find really interesting are that the Emmy didn't find any signs of defensive wounds on Joseph's hands or arms or really anywhere on his body so to jump out of the report real quick like an investigator's minds that means one of two things likely occurred one that whoever stabbed Joseph got to him quick and he likely didn't see it coming or two Joseph could have had his hands restrained in a way that made him unable to fight back and even get cut superficially but since the autopsy report said that there were no defensive wounds and they don't make any note of anything like restraint marks then it's almost like they

would have had to subdue him without him putting up much of a fight which I don't even really understand how that would be possible and even though there aren't cuts like one of my first thoughts was potentially you know can we get DNA from his fingernails like even if it wasn't a big fight that he was like cut up and maybe he scratched his killer but the Emmy notes in his report that he didn't think the clippings that he took would even be worth a lot because unfortunately Joseph kept his nails extremely short like bitten almost down to the quick now the other thing in the report that might be just as important as potential fingernail clippings is what the doctors find in Joseph's blood work his

toxicology screen showed that he had a blood alcohol content of 0.14 which is fairly high I mean the legal limit in Florida like most places is 0.08 and according to the University of Rochester Medical Center a BAC of 0.14 means that you're pretty drunk and would definitely have trouble walking which you know maybe this is how they subdued him maybe he wasn't able to walk and move like he normally would have if he wasn't drunk but the thing is if you're a person who consumes alcohol at like a high level all the time that you actually might have more control of yourself and what we know from interviewing his family and his ex-girlfriend Joseph did like to go out and drink with his friends and his brothers when

they visited Arcadia even though he was underage so I'm not sure how impaired that he would have been with a BAC of 0.14 I mean he was five seven hundred and forty five pounds I tend to think he could still be pretty impaired I just don't know from looking at this report decades after the incident now his drug screen also showed that he had small traces of cannabis in his blood and urine which confirmed that he had consumed that kind of drug sometime before his death we just don't know when exactly his stomach and bladder contents though showed only yellowish fluid meaning there was no undigested or partially digested foods so again that kind of matches up with the scenario that he'd been out drinking for

a while on Sunday night and if he wasn't eating food at the same time that didn't do his body any favors in terms of processing the alcohol that he was taking in now the last thing that's worth noting in this report is time of death all the medical examiner could say as far as time of death was that Joseph died sometime between seven o'clock at night on Sunday February 28th and seven in the morning on Sunday March 1st now obviously we know that Justin saw him alive around eleven o'clock on Sunday night so the investigative window is actually a little smaller and this is where the details of Joseph's whereabouts or timeline get kind of fuzzy and that's because there isn't much research material or official

documents available that can fill in the gaps now we know from what Justin had told Kathy earlier that Joseph had made plans to go hang out at a friend's house with his brother and then he was going to stop at his ex-girlfriend Melinda's house too now the couple had broken up like two weeks earlier but Kathy says that Joseph was still very much in love with Melinda and he wanted to get back together with her so Joseph left their friend's house to head over to his ex's Melinda's and then a few hours later people at a house party a few miles up highway 17 saw him hanging out and drinking and then we know he got into some kind of fight and at the center of it according to Kathy who admits that her memory has faded

all these years later but she recall that the fight was because Melinda was seeing another guy who was there at the party and that guy confronted Joseph but what's really interesting is that when we interviewed Joseph's ex-girlfriend Melinda she actually had a very different story to tell Melinda told us that she was not at the house party Justin referred to and she says that her new boyfriend at the time wasn't either she says there was no fight or confrontation between her new man and Joseph she says that she and her new boyfriend stayed together somewhere else that night and at no point did he leave her site long enough to even come in contact with Joseph but back in 1999 investigators keep hearing Justin's version

of the story from a lot of people who attended the party and so they decided to question Melinda and her new boyfriend a little harder according to documents we uncovered that summarize her statements she told investigators that Joseph did stop by her house on Sunday night and asked her to get back together with him she told him no and she said Joseph's reaction was quote if I get a gun will you shoot me end quote apparently Joseph had taken their break up pretty hard I mean to the point where he was allegedly making these kinds of statements regarding self harm I mean one witness from the house party tells police that they overheard Joseph say quote I ought to be dead end quote no I don't know if Joseph really meant any

of those words because let's be honest when you are a teenager and you are drunk and heartbroken everything feels like the end of the world but even if these expressions that Joseph might have been considering self harm are true I still don't see how it's even possible that he could have caused his own death I mean we've gone over this there was no evidence around him in the field that points to that they couldn't find a weapon there's no way that he could have stabbed himself and then gotten rid of the weapon but here's the thing I'm not even sure it matters because when Delia talked to Melinda today she told her something super interesting I actually want you to hear it directly from Melinda I've

never even heard that I would think I remember if he said if I get a gun will you kill me I mean I think I would remember that that's crazy I never said that I don't know where that statement came from but it never came out of my mouth he was would have never killed us so he was not that type of person he had a very high self-esteem let's put it like that he pretty much knew he could have any girl he wanted. So honestly I don't know what to believe when it comes to what exactly happened at the house party Joseph was seen at like Melinda seemed super willing to talk to us she says that she genuinely wants to know even after all these years what happened to Joseph she said

it was hard for her at just 15 years old to deal with the fact that everyone in town assumed she and her new boyfriend had something to do with his murder. Everybody was pointing a finger at me none of his close family turned on me but everybody else did I went to his funeral with his family and I got in the fight right there as I walk in you know who does that and as I'm walking up some girl walks up to me and says I know you had something to do with this and I'm like really and and I know just as well as they did that Joe would rather me there before any you know for any of them so I didn't care I pushed her back and went right in because I mean I know I loved him and I didn't have

nothing to do with it. The Soto County Sheriff's Office investigators also attended Joseph's memorial service in order to scope out who came by and how people behaved but the police's investigation makes little progress and people in Arcadia kind of forget about the case. No one was coming forward with information and within a matter of days it disappeared completely from the local newspapers though for months after the murder Kathy says the rumor mill swirled in town and the narrative that took hold suggested that Joseph was somehow tied up with drugs or drug dealers and that he'd been killed because of that but that

theory makes no sense to Kathy. She said that maybe her son smoked marijuana or drank sometimes but he didn't struggle with hard drugs and he wasn't even associated with people who did. Kathy says Joseph's struggles were with other things during his teen years like navigating finding his identity growing up without a father figure living in a single parent household with three brothers and balancing school with a full-time grueling manual labor job in the citrus industry. I mean at one point things piled up on the teen and by the time he's in the ninth grade

he actually decided to drop out of high school but he was going to re-enter high school in the fall of 1999. He even talked about that with Kathy on the weekend he was killed and while they were talking about it Kathy got a strange feeling. Here's Kathy, he was trying to go back to school and trying to make a better thing out of his life. And on the way down here he was telling me he wanted to go back to school and straighten himself out because he had dropped out of school and he wanted to do better if he wanted

to go back to school and it never happened. Going down here to Arcadia when he told me that it just, but then I felt like something in my chest but I don't know if it was a feeling of happiness to hear that he wanted to do that or know that something was going to happen to him. According to Kathy the first significant development she learns about in the case comes several months after Joseph's murder. By that point she had moved back from Plant City to be more invested in figuring out what happened to her son.

Kathy can't remember the specific date that she learned this but the lead detective on the case tells her that back in March of 1999 deputies found blood at the crime scene that was not the same blood type as Joseph's. Which we all know usually means one thing, the killer bled at the scene. But we couldn't get the DeSoto County investigators working the case today to confirm that. That info about the other blood type at the scene is coming solely from Delia's interview with Kathy. But if there is blood there has to be DNA, right?

If police still have a sample of that blood type they could totally test it. There is no guarantee that it would be a direct match to someone especially if they don't have a profile to compare it to, but there actually could be people to compare it to because there were people who popped up over the years, people who kind of came into the picture of the investigation as police learned more about Joseph's life. You see it turns out that Joseph was actually a witness to a violent crime a few months before he was killed. So Joseph himself didn't have an arrest record or anything, at least not one that we could

find, but he had witnessed a bloody stabbing in Arcadia in his mom's trailer six months before he was killed. According to reports that we dug up from the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office, back in early September of 1998 when Joseph was living in Arcadia he was hanging out outside around his mom's front yard at like seven o'clock at night with this guy from the area that everyone calls Tony. Inside the trailer was Joseph's uncle and another man who was living a transient lifestyle named Edward.

So Tony asked Joseph to go inside and get him a cigarette, which Joseph starts to do, and out of nowhere he hears his uncle start screaming from inside the trailer, and he sees Edward bolt out the front door and take off down the street. As Edward passes Joseph, he mumbles under his breath that he just stabbed someone, and as soon as Edward takes off, Joseph goes into the trailer and finds his uncle still alive but hunched over on the kitchen floor covered in blood, and tossed in the sink is a bloody knife. Joseph calls 911, I mean his uncle was in bad shape, like bad enough that he can't tell

the police anything, so it's Joseph that gives up Edward's name and points them in the direction that he went. So for like 0.2 seconds you could think that maybe this Edward guy had it out for Joseph. But Edward actually took a plea deal in that case, and he was in prison at the time of Joseph's murder in March of 1999, which puts the investigation back at square one, but then something wild happens after Joseph's death. Police get a whole new line of investigation when someone else related to Joseph is also murdered.

I mentioned earlier that Joseph's mom Kathy was a single mother, she raised the boys, fed them, clothed them, everything on her own, without any help from her ex-husband Joseph's father, Joseph Kinville II. To avoid confusion for this part of the story, I'm actually just going to refer to Joseph's dad as Joseph Sr. and Joseph as Joe Jr. Well it turns out that on June 27th of 1999, this is about four months after Joe Jr. is murdered in Arcadia, Joe Sr. his estranged father is also murdered in Saginaw, Michigan. According to court records and police reports that we obtained from the Saginaw Police Department,

Joe Sr.'s story played out like this. Early in the morning around 5 a.m. on Sunday June 27th, 38-year-old Joe Sr. is hanging out this guy Steven's house with a couple of friends, and they've all been like partying even since the night before. Now Joe Sr. reportedly owed a lot of money to a well-known drug dealer who lived across the street from Steven's house, it's a guy who goes by coal. As a way of paying off his drug debts to coal, Joe Sr. traded tools, car parts, radios, things like that.

And that morning, Steven sees Joe Sr. and one of their other friends, this guy Robert, walk over to Cole's house with some stuff in their hands. And it's stuff that they said that they were going to use to barter with. But a few minutes later, Robert returns to Steven's house alone. And Steven asks him, you know, where did Joe go? And Robert tells him that coal shot Joe Sr. in the back of the head a couple of times almost as soon as they got into Cole's backyard. Now, Steven is shocked when he hears this, but instead of calling the police, he walks

over to Cole's house to check things out for himself. And that's when he sees it. He sees Joe Sr.'s dead body face down in the dirt and grass in Cole's backyard. Now, once he's there, he feels trapped. So according to statements he later made to police, Steven helps dispose of Joe Sr.'s body. Meanwhile, Robert, who just witnessed Joe Sr.'s murder, was freaking out. And he called the Saginaw Police Department and tells them that Joe Sr. was murdered

by Cole, whose real name is James Washington III. And this dude is just 17. By the time the case goes to trial in January of 2000, investigators have an airtight case against James Washington, complete with physical and biological evidence from his backyard, and the jury finds him guilty. A judge sentences him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, though that was changed when a new law was passed in Michigan that gave the opportunity of parole back to prisoners if they were minors at the time of the crime.

Though he has taken responsibility for killing Joe Sr., James actually is still in prison today. And we had one of our reporters Nina interview him over the phone, and he claims that the only reason he shot Joe Sr. was because he was frustrated and fearful that the larger organization that he was working for would come for him and his family because he owed money to them. James Washington III is crystal clear in his interview that he never had anything to do with Joe Jr.'s murder.

He allegedly didn't even know Joe Sr. was a father. Unfortunately, you know, I took a man's life, and I ended up killing Joe because I was upset that I was being owed money and wasn't paying, and he was one of the guys that owed me. I didn't even know his son was killed. Did you have anything to do with the death of Joseph III? Do I have anything to do with his son dying? Yes. No, not at all.

Because James says that he never knew Joe Jr. even existed, it's unlikely he had anything to do with Joseph's murder in Florida. But could it have been someone else that he or Joe Sr. was tied up with? I don't know. It could be. But to me, Joe Sr. seemed a little too low level for that kind of retaliation. But here's the thing, because we can't see DeSoto County Sheriff's Office case files, it's hard to know how much they actually explored any potential connection.

And we also don't know how much effort they put into investigating another important lead in Joe Jr.'s case. And that involves a mysterious letter that Kathy received about a year after Joseph's murder. According to Kathy, one day out of the blue in late 2000, she goes to check her mail at her trailer in Arcadia, and she finds an envelope addressed to her from a sender that she doesn't recognize. Now, by that point, she'd actually moved back to Arcadia full time, and she wasn't

renting her old trailer anymore, but she did keep the old address. Kathy said that the letter came from someone in prison. She knew because the return address was from a correctional facility. Now, right away, she got a sinking feeling in her gut, so she gave the letter to her daughter-in-law to read, and it was very disturbing. The letter detailed everything that happened to her son. What happened? Where it happened?

How it happened? And listen, I know we have come across a number of hoaxes like this in other cases. But I can't write this one totally off. I mean, the prisoner sent it to her home address in Arcadia, which means that they had to at least have known her in 1999 or known the family well enough to know where they lived. According to Kathy, the contents of the letter suggested that multiple people were present when Joseph was stabbed in the field. It suggested that a group of guys jumped him or chased him.

The only problem is, we don't know anything more than that. Kathy said that after her daughter-in-law read the letter and gave Kathy the highlights, her daughter-in-law handed it over to DeSoto County Sheriff's Office, and where it went from there, we have no idea. Delia followed up with the daughter-in-law to get a more first-hand account of what she remembers, but she actually declined to participate. Kathy said that she had followed up with detectives not long after receiving the letter, and they told her that they had done some digging on the guy who wrote it.

But in the end, investigators said that they felt it wasn't a credible lead because they determined that the letter writer was in jail when Joseph was killed. But I feel like I'm missing something major because, to me, just because he was in jail, like, again, I don't know the contents of the letter, but as far as I understand, it's not like he was saying that he was an eyewitness or like at the actual murder. Like, couldn't he have still talked to people who were there or who were involved if all of these different people were supposed to have been present? Again, I mean, if we're talking about like several local guys tied up in this, it doesn't

seem that far-fetched to me that he's hearing something from someone else. But unfortunately, because I can't read the letter for myself and I don't know any more about this inmate, this is just one of those huge question marks in the case. After 23 years of rumors and hearing things and having time to think about all of the possibilities, Kathy is the most convinced that Joseph's murder had something to do with people that he saw and had interacted with the night that he died. People who were teenagers back in 1999, or at least young adults, many of them are still around today.

And the only thing that Kathy wants more than her son back is for people who know something to come forward and give her those answers. I don't think people that were involved in it should be out and about. And I don't know how they can live knowing what they did. I wish they would come up and say that they did it. Why they did it? Give me some closure. It's been too long.

I think the one thing that we don't talk about enough in true crime cases is the ripple effect it has. It's not just isolated to the victim, entire families are changed and can feel those reverberations for years to come. Joseph's brother Justin went on to get mixed up in a lot of bad stuff and he has a criminal history of his own now. Kathy says the reason she thinks Justin's life went downhill is because after Joseph's murder in 1999, she kind of went numb and stopped caring for Justin like she should have and

he went wayward. In a way, Kathy lost two sons. Life is gone and the person Justin could have been is gone too. Not even to mention the part of Kathy that died with Joseph. I think Joseph's case needs another hard look from the sheriff's office. And more than anything, if what Kathy was told is true and there was blood at the scene that did not belong to Joseph, now is the time to take a second look at that. Alongside narrowing down their suspect pool by going over their old reports and reinterviewing

surviving witnesses from the house party, I think this case is completely solvable. Someone just has to be willing to put in the work and not let this case be forgotten forever. Joseph Kindle's life mattered. His family deserves closure. They deserve peace. If Joseph had lived past his 16th birthday, he'd be almost 40 years old today. He'd probably be a father, a husband, an uncle, and still a wonderful son to Kathy, his mother, who believes that one day her son's killer will face justice.

Anyone with information about Joseph's murder is asked to call the Criminal Investigations Division of the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office at 863-993-4700 or you can call the Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at 1-800-780-TIPS. Now specifically on the website for the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office, it says, quote, those who have withheld information about the homicide and are not involved will not face criminal charges for failing to come forward thus far, which means just like I believe, the county sheriff believes that someone out there knows something and now it is time to come forward.

If you were moved by Joseph's story, I highly recommend you check out season four of Counter Claw. It's about another young man who died in Arcadia, Florida, and nothing in that case is what it seems, and I'm telling you, our reporter, Delia D'Ambra, has uncovered some incredible things. You can binge that entire series, which just dropped now. Just search for Counter Clock, all one word, wherever you get your podcasts. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com,

follow us on Instagram at Crimejunkie Podcast, and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio check production. So, what do you think Chuck? Did you approve?