The Deck - Kyle Seidel (5 of Diamonds, Connecticut)

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Our card this week is Kyle Seidel, the 5 of Diamonds from Connecticut. Kyle Seidel was a 34-year-old dad to three young kids when he went to pick up Chinese takeout the Friday night before Christmas in 2012. His wife expected him to be gone for only about 20 minutes… but Kyle never came home again. A violent encounter on his way to the restaurant cut his life short. For 12 years, Kyle’s family has been left to wonder why Kyle pulled into a bowling alley parking lot on the way to the restaurant, who he encountered there, and why they shot him. Investigators think they know who pulled the trigger, but they don’t know the why… they’re hoping that just one new piece of evidence could help them find answers and bring his killer, or killers, to justice. If you or anyone you know has information about Kyle Seidel’s murder, please call the Waterford Police Department tip line at 860-437-8080 or call Waterford detectives directly at 860-442-0645 or 860-442-9451.View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/kyle-seidel Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our card this week is Kyle Seidel, the five of diamonds from Connecticut. Kyle Seidel should have only been gone for about 20 minutes when he went to pick up Chinese takeout for his wife and their kids just a few days before Christmas in 2012. But something happened that night that changed the course of his fate. Instead of the Chinese restaurant, Kyle was found in the parking lot of a local bowling alley, shot by a mystery assailant with an even more mysterious motive. And detectives are hoping

that you can help them crack this case. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. It was the Friday night before Christmas in 2012, and 34-year-old Kyle Seidel was a little late getting home from work. He'd been to his company holiday party and then stopped off at a dive bar with a friend. But the minute he walked through the door of his Waterford, Connecticut home at about 7.30 p.m., he'd switched into dad mode, greeting his wife Kate and their three young kids

and agreeing to go pick up Chinese food for dinner. Kyle had just gotten his holiday bonus from his job as a laborer building docks at the Essex Island Marina. It was about $600 added to his paycheck, and he usually handed his checks right over to Kate to pay the bills. Well, at the party, Kyle's bosses usually also handed out some extra cash for the holidays. And I don't know exactly how much more Kyle got in cash, but on this particular night, he held on to at least 40

bucks to pay for takeout from their regular spot, the Lucky Inn. Now, this should have been a quick trip. The restaurant was only about 10 minutes away. So as time started to tick by, Kate started to wonder what was taking him so long. Now, she pushed aside her concern at first, telling herself maybe the restaurant was just really busy on a Friday night before the holidays. But then her phone buzzed with a text from her sister sharing news that was spreading fast through the small town.

Someone had been shot at the local bowling alley. Now Kyle never really went to the bowling alley or the bar connected to it, but Kate knew that he would have driven right past it on his way to pick up the food. And she instantly just felt sick to her stomach. So right away she started trying to call Kyle, but his phone just rang and rang and rang until it went to voicemail.

And phones were ringing over at the Waterford's 911 dispatch center around that time too. It was about 8 20 p.m. when 911 dispatchers got back-to-back calls from people at the bowling alley saying a man was lying on the ground in the parking lot bleeding from his chest. Here's Waterford detective Ray Carroll. The third caller, a male who identified himself as a corrections officer stated, looks like he's got a bullet hole to his chest. He moved his head for a second. His car is running. The door is open.

He's on the ground. Looks like he might have gotten into an altercation and got shot. When first responders arrived at the scene a few minutes after those calls came in, the injured man was barely conscious. The sergeant asked the male, who did this? He asked again, who shot you? The male did barely conscious. The sergeant asked the male, who did this? He asked again, who shot you? The male did not answer. The male's jaw quivered as if he was trying to speak,

but he was unable to do so. Investigators located the man's wallet and ran his tags to identify him. It was indeed Kyle, though Kate wouldn't know that yet. While she waited anxiously at home, hoping he would just pull into the driveway any minute, paramedics loaded Kyle onto an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital, just as investigators would continue to process the scene, starting with Kyle's car. So based on the positioning of the vehicle, it was parked at an angle, so not totally within one parking spot.

And the door was open, engine running, headlights on. So it seemed like he'd either pulled in quickly or needed to exit his vehicle fairly quickly. Now they didn't find anything of note in the car, except for the $40 in cash that Kyle had taken with him to pay for the dinner that he never picked up. Outside of the car, investigators didn't notice any damage, like bullet holes or shattered glass. The only thing left behind was a small open pocket knife on the ground near the car, one that they would come to learn Kyle carried with him often. And all of this led police to believe that Kyle was actually outside of his vehicle when he'd been shot. And he must have known that he was in danger.

He had at least a second to try to defend himself, you know, by no DNA on that other than Kyle's. So that never got used. Basically, Kyle was never close enough to the person who shot him that he was able to use the knife on him. And aside from the knife, nothing else was found. Not even shell casings. But there could have been multiple reasons for that. I mean, the wind was roaring that night,

dropping the temperature into the low 30s, and police said a shell casing literally could have just been blown away. Or maybe the shooter picked up the casings before fleeing. Or potentially they used a revolver, which doesn't expel its casings at all. All in all, investigators didn't have much to work with. So the most difficult part of the case is that there was no real evidence that we were able to get from anybody else.

The only evidence we collected was from the victim, including his knife that was open near the rear tire of the car. Nothing was collected that would say that somebody else was there. Police talked to more than a dozen people at the scene, interviewed local business owners, and took down the license plates

of every car parked in the parking lot. But none of it led to useful information. Police didn't really report any accounts of anyone seeing Kyle pull into the lot or hearing any arguing. There were no witness accounts of any vehicles speeding away from the scene. And by the way, they weren't even sure that their killer was in a car. I mean, it's just as likely at this point that they could have been on foot. And any hope that Kyle himself might be able to identify his assailant was dashed that same night when he succumbed to his injuries. He was pronounced dead at 8.45 p.m.

About this same time, Kate was at home trying to calm herself down so she could focus on finding Kyle. She took their son, Jesse, upstairs and put him to sleep in his crib. And then she went into her and Kyle's bedroom and dialed his number one last time. She listened to the phone ring and ring again. And just then, she saw headlights outside of her bedroom window. She looked out to see a truck pulling into her driveway, and this ominous feeling just washed over her. Kate recognized the truck pulling into her drive. It was her sister, Christie's.

When Christie, Christie's husband, and their friend piled out of the truck, Kate just knew. This wasn't just a bad feeling she was having. This was bad. Though no one had been notified by police, word spreads fast in a small town where everyone knows one another. Christie had a friend who worked at the local emergency room and that friend told her that Kyle had been shot.

So Christy stayed behind with the kids while Kate jumped into the truck with Christy's husband and his friend and headed straight to the ER. But by the time she got there, Kyle was already gone. And Kate was left with a million questions. Like why was he in that parking lot to begin with? I mean, that's a question police were asking her too. But she had no answers. She told them about the holiday party, that he'd gone to the plan to pick up Chinese

for dinner. And she knew that he'd been drinking at the party earlier that day, and Kyle's brother Jeremy confirmed that his brother had sounded like he'd been drinking when he talked to him on the phone about an hour before he'd been shot. But no one could think of any reason why he would have stopped at the bowling alley. That's when the detectives and investigator started asking her about use of drugs

or anything like that. Kate said that Kyle occasionally smoked marijuana and formerly used coke when he was younger. She estimated that he smoked marijuana twice a week. He still bought weed from a local guy, but Kate said that she didn't know his name and she really didn't think Kyle had been planning to meet up with him or anyone on his way to grab food. Kate also told us that Kyle had weed at home, so he wouldn't have been out buying anymore. And when they talked to his mom, Darlene, she added this.

He had all afternoon, because he had, you know, had his Christmas party, I guess he had visited some friends, you know, after the party. So he had plenty of time alone. If he was thinking about doing anything, you know, why would he do it when you go to get takeout? The last thing he would ever do if he wanted to do takeout was to make a detour, let it get cold, and to have to repeat it.

As Kyle's family struggled to make sense of how he ended up in that bowling alley parking lot, they arrived at one possible theory. The first kind of motive we had came from a family member of Kyle's who just said, you know, a gut feeling. I think maybe someone cut him off or he cut someone else off. And it was like a road rage incident that occurred.

And that kind of goes along with the way the cars parked. Detectives took this theory seriously. I mean, they were already in the process of scouring the area for security footage to see if the shooting or the moments leading up to it were captured on camera, but they didn't have any luck. Most of the local businesses had cameras that either weren't working or weren't pointing in the right direction. There was one camera from a nearby ATM that had a motion-activated camera.

Now, it didn't show Kyle pulling into the bowling alley, but at one point it did show Kyle's car in the parking lot, which could have been helpful for investigators, except whenever the camera was motion-activated by a car pulling up to the ATM, the car getting cash would block the view of the rest of the scene. So investigators couldn't see much, and they weren't able to gather any evidence from that footage. Now, there was a glimmer of hope when detectives reviewing surveillance footage from a gas station spotted a car registered to someone with a violent criminal history driving by the bowling alley that same night. But that person had a solid alibi for the time of Kyle's killing and was cleared of

any involvement in his death. Though this road rage theory seemed to be prominent among family, it never made sense to his mom, Darlene, who told our reporter Taylor that Kyle wasn't prone to road rage. In fact, he was really scared of other people being aggressive on the road. When he was a teenager, he drove trucks for an IANA Colombo. After he graduated, he did for a while, and he says, Mom, I'm gonna get killed on the road.

He said, you don't believe how angry these people are. You're in a truck and they pull right in front of you like you can stop on a dime. You know, so he wouldn't have played into road rage. In my heart, he would have avoided it. If another driver had gotten mad at him for something on the road, Darlene thought that Kyle probably would have pulled off

the road to avoid them, maybe into a parking lot. But in her mind, it was more likely that he stopped to help someone. He was the type of guy, if there was a family out there that ran out of gas and it was raining, he'd stop and make sure he'd go and get them gas. You know, the scenario I play in my mind is if a guy was either hurting a girl or a kid just before

Christmas, he'd throw his hands up at a light and say, like, what are you doing? You know? Because that wasn't his thing. He could have known the person and there was an issue going on and he would pull in and say, what the heck? Kyle had good morals like that. So if he saw something like that, he would have stepped in. Those are the two scenarios I can come up with. Either road rage or he saw when he was going by somebody he knew was in trouble.

Detectives considered the theory that he stopped to help someone too. But ultimately, they dismissed it because it was unlikely that he could have even spotted someone in distress. You would barely be able to see anything in that parking lot. You could barely make out the family bowl because you have the lights on the businesses that are on Route 1 that kind of drown out the background and make it seem even darker to the eye.

So you're not seeing anything back there. That made them wonder. If it wasn't road rage and he hadn't seen someone in distress, maybe the stop was pre-planned. Well, we had theories that because he had just gotten a bonus from the Christmas party, that maybe he was going out to buy some harder drugs than marijuana just to celebrate if he was into that kind of thing. Again, they're just trying to go through Kyle's life and find anything that can give us a reason why he was there and if he was gonna meet someone or not."

So they turned to Kyle's phone, hoping if it was a planned meetup, they would find evidence of it being arranged. But sure enough, just like his family suggested, there weren't any messages about anything like that. And talk screens later done at an autopsy would confirm that there were no illegal drugs or even prescription painkillers in his system, just alcohol.

Though quite a lot of it. Kyle's BAC at the time of his death was 0.18%, which is more than double the legal limit in Connecticut. But there was one message on his phone that did stand out, one suggesting that maybe he had been trying to buy something else. The medical examiner had recovered a bullet from Kyle's body, a.45 caliber, and that stood out to police because of a text message that Kyle sent to his friend the day before he was murdered.

Kyle said that he was going to buy a.45 caliber pistol. And that's what started leading us down that road. Was he meeting someone to buy a gun? And then the deal just went bad. Detectives talked to the friend who Kyle had texted about the gun. And unfortunately, Kyle hadn't said anything more about who or where he was planning to buy it from. Apparently, Kyle told his friend that he had a pistol permit, so his friend just assumed that he would be buying it from a store. But detectives learned that Kyle didn't have a pistol permit.

So there was a chance that he was planning to buy a pistol off the books. Now, detectives checked Kyle's incoming and outgoing calls, texts, social media messages, but they didn't find anything to indicate that he'd communicated with anyone about an illegal gun purchase, and there were no calls or texts to any unknown numbers either. Detectives also checked phone records for Kate, Jeremy, and one of Kyle's close friends. One thing they were looking for was to see

if any of them had exchanged messages with anyone about buying any drugs or a gun. Like maybe someone else had set up a meeting for Kyle, but there was nothing. Kyle's mom, Darlene, told our reporter that Kyle had been in the process of getting his pistol permit with his dad. Now she insisted that Kyle was doing everything by the book and he had a specific reason that he wanted a gun,

though not one that you would probably ever guess. He wanted to go shark fishing. And if you're gonna go off Montauk, stock fishing, you should have some kind of gun. The shark gets in the boat or comes up the whole nine yards. So he and his dad both went together. They went to the pistol permit classes. They got the letters. They got everything they needed.

And they had decided the day after Christmas when things quieted down, they got everything they needed, and they had decided the day after Christmas, when things quieted down, they were going to take their paperwork down to the police station and find out what they had to do to file it and get their pistol permits. Darlene said that Kyle's dream was to spend more time on the water, and she and her husband had just bought a boat for Kyle that he was making payments on. That was like his dream boat. He was the man with a plan, you know, paid off in four years with his income tax. He had it all planned. It was the perfect boat for fishing in a family because that was his passion. He fed his family a lot with his fish. Since he was a little

boy, I have pictures of him fishing." Darlene said Kyle had gone to a local gun shop about a week before his murder and had called her afterwards to get her advice about which pistol to buy. He specifically said that he wouldn't be able to get it until he submitted his permit application and got it approved, which they were expecting to happen shortly after the holiday. Kyle really wasn't a rule breaker. He wouldn't need a gun so badly,

he would all of a sudden have to buy one. Detective Carroll said police in Waterford never received a pistol permit application from Kyle. That doesn't mean that he wasn't gathering the paperwork he needed to submit that application. Kyle's brother Jeremy said Kyle hadn't mentioned anything to him about planning to meet up with anyone to buy a gun.

And he really doesn't think Kyle would be spending money on something like that right before the holidays, even if he had just gotten his bonus. He said that Kyle had spent a ton on Christmas presents already that year, and the brothers were planning to go shopping for their wives the very next day. Kyle also didn't have much cash on him. He had that 40 bucks for food, and investigators found $23 in the wallet in his back pocket. I mean, his wife Kate said that he never really had much cash on him.

And even if he'd gotten a cash bonus that day, Kyle's mom said that, as far as she knows from having a husband and two sons who have done a lot of manual labor at marinas and on the water like Kyle did, he probably would have gotten like 50 bucks or so. Detectives still weren't completely convinced that Kyle hadn't planned to meet someone for something out in that parking lot. And since sifting through so many pages of Kyle's phone records hadn't gotten them

any closer to a lead, they tried another avenue for information. They tried to get a search warrant for a cell tower dump. So they just wanted to get everybody's phone that was in the area that night and start picking through it. But the court denied it, wouldn't allow it. So they had to do things the old fashioned way, hit the streets, talk to anyone who knew Kyle, anyone who might have known

why he was in that parking lot that night. And they learned a little more about that night after talking to a friend named Travis. Travis said that Kyle had actually stopped by his place after leaving the bar, but before going home. And he tried to get Travis to go out with him, but Travis said no. Now, this was interesting,

but it didn't give police a new lead to follow because Kyle wasn't trying to get Travis to go somewhere specific, and Kyle clearly decided to just go home himself to be with his family. I mean, why else would he have offered to go get dinner? And in case you're wondering, yes, detectives checked Travis's alibi for the night, and it was rock solid. So there just wasn't much for investigators to work with.

Complicating matters was that when Kyle was killed, law enforcement was already overwhelmed by another tragedy that had pulled the focus of the nation and put a spotlight on Connecticut and its investigators, the Sandy Hook mass shooting. Just a week before Kyle's murder, 20 children and six educators had been killed in an elementary school just an hour and

a half away from where Kyle was shot. And that investigation was massive, pulling resources from across the state. Kyle's family still worries that all those factors could have played a role in the direction Kyle's case went in, because eventually his case was turned over to the state police cold case unit. In hopes of getting more leads, there was a reward put out for information on Kyle's case, and it was plastered on posters that his family put up around town. But even still, nothing happened. That is until police put Kyle's case on a deck of playing cards in 2014 and passed those decks out to Connecticut prisons.

Someone had come forward after seeing the picture and saying that a man that will identify as Mike was playing cards and said, that is my work, as if to say he's the one who killed Kyle Seidel. Then we started looking into him. There was no clear alibi for him that night. But here's the twist. When Mike claimed to take credit for Kyle's murder, one of his buddies, who was also incarcerated at the time, got mad. We heard that there was some arguments made by another person that we'll call Ron saying that Mike didn't do it, I didn't.

So we started looking at both of those people and we saw that there is a connection between those two people outside of prison. They were known to hang out together. Just to be clear, Mike and Ron are not these guys' real names. Police insisted on using pseudonyms to protect their investigation.

Now they said Ron was known to act as Mike's muscle, for lack of a better term. — Mike and Ron both have extensive criminal histories. Mike's was mostly narcotics-related, sale counts, things of that nature. And Ron has a more violent criminal history, also has drug offenses, but shootings and things of that nature. And it wasn't long before someone else came forward to report that Mike had confessed to the crime.

We had a family member of Mike's come forward and say that Mike admitted it to him, that he had killed Kyle Seidel, and that he had come over to a house that night and was acting very nervous and said he had to get out of town and went into a neighboring town later that night. Apparently, this family member had come into possession of a phone that used to belong to Mike. And on that phone were photos of Mike holding various guns. And he decided to go to a cop that he knew and trusted to show him the photos and talk about Kyle's case. Detective Carroll said that as promising

as these tips were at first, the people they were getting these accounts from just weren't credible. The informant's supposed account of the shooting ultimately didn't add up when investigators dug in. He told police that there were other witnesses to Mike's confession, but according to parole and probation records, the people he said were there

when Mike confessed couldn't have been. But police did still believe that there could be a kernel of truth in there. So they didn't want to let up just yet. Mike was incarcerated when that tip from the cold case stack came in. Now he was released from prison sometime in 2014 or 2015, but he wouldn't be out for long.

Because while there just wasn't enough solid evidence for detectives to charge Mike with Kyle's murder, there were other crimes, namely drug dealing, that they could maybe bring him in for. We had a task force officer try to build a narcotics case on him to get him locked up in hopes that if he was in prison, maybe other witnesses would come forward. They would feel safe knowing that he was already locked up and he wouldn't be able to serve

any kind of retribution on him. So that didn't work out. Mike got arrested on a narcotics charge in late 2015 and that's when we talked to him. He just cried a lot but said nothing about the homicide, just denied any ever being at the bowling alley, denied knowing Kyle, denied ever being involved in any kind of violence. He basically just denied and said he didn't know what we were talking about. And detectives' attempt to interview Ron failed to elicit any information at all. He basically came in the room, sat down. Soon as we started talking to him, he said, I'm all set, I don't wanna talk, and left.

So detectives kept looking for more evidence to connect these guys to the scene. First, they turned back to cell phone records. The court had denied their first request for a cell tower dump, but a second request was approved. The data from that tower dump showed that Mike and Ron were in the area of the shooting at the time it happened.

But unfortunately, cell tower data doesn't provide an exact location. It just identifies the tower particular phones are pulling their data from at any given point. And it turned out that Mike and Ron both lived near the same cell tower that serviced the bowling alley. So both men could have just been at home. The interesting thing that they did get from the records, though, was activity. Along with location, the records also showed the numbers of phone calls that both Mike and Ron made immediately after Kyle was shot.

And there was a flurry of them, including a few calls that seemed really suspicious. Yeah, so the tower dump that we executed came back with a lot of information. We got a lot of phone calls from Mike to his girlfriend, other family members, other friends. We also got Ron's information. He made several phone calls. Notably, he called the hospital emergency room. Ron's calls to the North Memorial Emergency Room seemed like something you would do to cover your tracks or to see what the status is of Kyle, to see if he had died or if he was still alive.

The combination of tips about Mike and Ron and their cell phone activity certainly made detectives feel that they were on the path to arresting the men for Kyle's murder. But they still needed more evidence to clinch the charges. The weapon, a witness, anything. And in 2018, it seemed like they got exactly what they needed. Someone claiming to be an eyewitness to the murder

who was willing to talk to them. The tip that came in was from a woman named Amanda, who said that she knew Ron and Mike. Amanda said that she was actually with Mike and Ron the night that Kyle Seidel was shot. Amanda says they pulled into the family bowl. She wasn't sure what was going on, why they were there, but Mike and Ron both got out of the car,

which in her experience meant that they were probably gonna rob somebody, because if it was just a drug deal, then only one of them would have gotten in the car. And so she witnessed the shooting, Mike and Ron got back in the car, and then they left. Now, Amanda is not this witness's real name, and her account wasn't the thing that was gonna seal the deal either.

She has a lengthy criminal history, and a lot of that criminal history has to do with deception. So whether it's fraud, defrauding people, she was supposed to be trusted by larcenies and things of that nature. It doesn't make her a great witness. So while her information's great, and we can use some of that as investigative leads, the court is not confident that they could bring this case to trial

based on her testimony alone. They kept running into similar credibility issues as they followed new leads. At one point, detectives had gotten a family member of Mike's to agree to record a conversation with Mike. But apparently that didn't pan out because Mike didn't trust that relative anymore. Maybe he found out that he'd gone to the cops previously.

Now another woman we'll call Julie also contacted investigators about Mike. Julie came forward and said that she took Mike to a small chop shop to actually get rid of the murder weapon used in the Seidel homicide. But based on Julie's statements, when and where it occurred, those things couldn't have happened.

Detective Carroll said it's hard to tell whether some of these stories have been inaccurate due to people being dishonest or just because they waited so long to give their tips to police. The flip side of that though is the $25,000 reward that's up for grabs could also be motivating people to just make things up. It's tough because when these people came forward with so many years after the fact, that even if they are telling the truth

or trying to tell the most accurate story they can, it's been so long that they get their dates mixed up. But that's part of the reason, probably why the court's looking at it, that they can't take it to trial, because a defense attorney's gonna tear their stories apart. In 2021 and 2022, police tried to see if they could link Mike and Ron to the crime scene using DNA. Back in the early days of the investigation, when they were exploring all possibilities,

they had Kyle's clothes tested for possible touched DNA, and they did find some unknown DNA mixtures on his clothing, including near the chest area of his sweatshirt. So they got search warrants for Mike and Ron's DNA and compared it to the unidentified DNA mixtures found on Kyle's clothing. But there was no match. Now, detectives say that that doesn't rule them out as suspects, since the shooter may have never even touched Kyle. But it doesn't help their case against Mike and Ron either.

And while investigators feel pretty confident that Mike and Ron are their guys, they have other questions that they're still hoping to answer. One possible theory is that Kyle, with a history of some drug use, was going to the bowling alley to purchase drugs since he had a recent Christmas bonus from work and since he wasn't a regular user, he might've been hooked up with these guys, Mike and Ron.

And because he was possibly a first time buyer, they just robbed him of his money. The second theory is based on Mike and Ron's history with guns and having guns, is that Kyle was looking to purchase a gun and a text from just a couple days before the homicide. Kyle texted his one of his friends saying he was going to buy a.45 pistol, and that's the caliber of weapon that was used to shoot Kyle." It's worth noting that while much of the investigation has revolved around Mike and

Ron, police did their due diligence and considered members of Kyle's own family at the start. And detectives told us that they don't consider any of them a suspect in his death. They found no sign of a life insurance policy in Kyle's name, so there was really no financial motivation for him to be killed. And Kate and Jeremy allowed police to look through their phones. Kyle's mom and brother say that he and Kate had dealt with relationship struggles in the past, but had worked on their relationship and were in a good place as a couple. Darlene says that she remains as close to Kate as if she were her own daughter.

And both she and Jeremy believe that Kate and Kyle's marriage would have lasted for the long haul if they'd been given a chance. And detectives are still trying to figure out why they didn't get that chance. But to figure out the motive in Kyle's murder, they need people who knew Kyle or know Mike and Ron to come forward. I think just if people are listening to this, then they will hopefully think about coming forward with any little bit of information that could help connect Kyle somehow to these people or even just connect these people to that area.

It would be great to have a reason why they were both there at the same time. We believe we've definitely developed probable cause. We just need just that little extra information that would place Kyle in the area with those suspects for some reason. Detectives think it is possible that someone who knew and loved Kyle hasn't shared everything they know. We just want to stress to anybody that was close to Kyle, friends and family that might be, you know, looking out for his reputation or their own reputation,

that any small bit of evidence or leads can be very important to this case. We interviewed lots of people that were close to Kyle, one of which when we interviewed them, it felt like they were holding back and weren't telling us everything just based on their emotional response. And we asked to have that person be part of a polygraph.

They agreed, but then shortly afterwards contacted us and said that they did not want to take the polygraph. Detective Carroll also spoke directly to anyone who might be afraid that they could get in trouble for coming forward with information. They're not gonna be looked at in a bad bad light and solving his homicide is a lot more important than Kyle either wanting to buy an illegal gun or buying some drugs. None of that matters at this point. It's just trying to help the family out and solve this homicide.

Kyle's wife Kate wrote in an email to our reporter that watching their children, Samantha, Maya, and Jessie, grow up without Kyle there to celebrate and support their milestones has been a heartbreaking experience. Kyle missed seeing Samantha graduate high school. Maya got her first job. Jessie learned how to ride a dirt bike. They were just eight, six, and two when their father was taken from them. Kate said that Kyle was her best friend and navigating her own grief while

helping three young children understand that their dad wasn't coming home. When she herself didn't understand what happened was a devastating task. At Kyle's funeral, Kate said that she waited until everyone else had left the room and told her husband, I've got this. I will need your help along the way, but I've got this. And over the years, that's what she and her kids have said to each other when their grief feels unbearable, when times get hard. They look at each other and say, I've got this. Kate told us that she heard rumors over the years about suspects in the

case. And based on what she's pieced together, she doesn't believe the suspects are people that she or Kyle knew or even ever met. She believes, like Darlene and Jeremy do, that Kyle encountered his killer in some sort of random run-in. She said healing is impossible without answers about what happened to Kyle. Here is our reporter reading part of Kate's statement to us. To have someone held accountable and locked up would mean so much to us. It's so hard knowing the killer is still out there

just living his day-to-day life while Kyle got a life sentence. My kids and I have to live with this heartache for the rest of our lives. We are learning how to move forward and take Kyle along with us in our hearts." Kyle's parents, Darlene and Rick, moved to Florida a few years after the murder because being in Waterford carried too many reminders of what happened to Kyle. But they carry his memory with them in a visible way.

Before Kyle died, she and Rick got matching tattoos to memorialize their shared love for Chevy cars and trucks. And since Kyle's death, Darlene has gotten a full tattoo sleeve with images that represent her love for him. A rendering of his beloved boat, a sunset over the water, a fishing lure, and a broken heart. Darlene thinks about her son every day and regularly checks in with detectives to find out whether Mike and Ron are in or out of prison. As of this recording, Mike was out on parole

and Ron was incarcerated. Darlene also regularly checks a Facebook group called Justice for Kyle, where she writes messages to her son, posts photos, and provides updates on the case, ending every message the same. -"And I always sign it, I will love you forever and always, Mom."

She writes to Kyle's killer on there, too, expressing her pain and her rage. I really despise him, you know, or her for doing what they did. This person has his right maybe to come and go, maybe he's in jail, I don't know. But he can still do things. He still has the opportunity, if he has children, to take them for ice cream or see them at Christmas. To me, that's not fair. Detectives are looking for any information about Kyle's life that might help them

understand what happened. So anyone with any information is asked to contact the Waterford Police Department tip line at 860-437-8080. Or you can call Waterford Detectives directly at 860-442-0645 or 860-442-9451. The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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