Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Bardstown, Kentucky - Unsolved Murder Capital

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace

iHeartPodcasts and CrimeOnline

True Crime, News

3.9 • 7.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mother of five, Crystal Rogers is last seen July 3 by her live-in boyfriend, Brooks Houck. Crystal Rogers mother, Sherry Ballard, reports her missing on July 5. Later that day, Crystal Rogers red Chevy Malibu is found abandoned on the Bluegrass Parkway. The car has a flat tire, but Rogers' keys, phone and purse are still inside. 16-months later, Crystal Rogers is still missing and her father, Sherry Ballard's husband, Tommy Ballard, is murdered in the early morning hours as he prepares to go hunting on his own property with his 12-year-old grandson.

Ballard is shot from an undetermined distance, but his property backs up against the Bluegrass Parkway. It's a fast getaway in either direction for a gunman. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack explore the disappearance of Crystal Rogers and the murder of her dad, Tommy Ballard. Plus, Joseph Scott Morgan explains how prosecutors can prove Crystal Rogers was murdered, even though they haven't found her body.

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Transcribe Highlights

00:12.12 Introduction of growing up with PaPaw Morgan
03:34.36 Discuss Crystal Rogers missing, her father Tommy Ballard murdered
06:15.27 Discussion of Bardstown Kentucky
07:46.82 Discussion of why Brooks Houck didn't report Rogers missing
08:13.81 Talk about Crystal Rogers car found on Bluegrass parkway
15:45.34 Talk Rogers car found with flat tire, she is still missing
18:16.83 Discussion of Brooks Houck, suspect, brother is police officer
21:13.58 Discussion of police letting Houck talk to his brother on phone
26:27.16 Talk about tracking dogs pick up Crystal Rogers scent at farm, but not at her car
31:09.10. Discussion 16 months after Crystal Rogers vanishes, her dad, Tommy Ballard killed
34:36.43 Discussion of how bullet twists the skin
39:02.99 Discussion of Tommy Ballard hunting, murdered on his own property
40:52.53 Discussion of murder charges without a body
43:45.73 Conclusion - waiting for trial

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Look, y'all, I know I talk about my childhood periodically on body bags and everybody has good and bad in their life.
0:26.4	Everybody doesn't matter who you are.
0:28.6	Nobody's immune to it.
0:30.2	But in my childhood, the good times stand out to me more so than the bad and I could complain about the bad if I wanted to but at this point in my life I like to think about the good and one of the really cool things about my childhood is that I spend a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and my grandfather who I called Papa Morgan I love that man he's big man real
1:00.1	big man he he still raised mules, if you can imagine that, for people that would, there
1:06.9	were actually a group of guys that would buy mules from him that wanted them to pull wagons.
1:12.1	And there was actually one old man that
1:14.8	still preferred a mule-drawn plow over a tractor. But when I had free time with
1:21.0	my papal mooring, one of the things that he would take me to do,
1:24.7	two actually, was to fish for Blue Gill, that's brown, with a cane pole. And number two was to go hunting. Now the thing that think about
1:36.7	this is that in my family everything my family did was for subsistence. They had a huge garden and it's not like it was a hobby. They had to have a garden and it was massive and they worked in it all the time.
1:52.6	When they went hunting, it wasn't like it was a pleasure trip.
1:56.6	My grandfather would probably look back and laugh at these guys that pay thousands and thousands of dollars to go out and hunt from a helicopter.
2:05.5	He did it so that he could put food on the table.
2:09.4	Now one of his primary things that he would hunt for, I know many of you guys will recoil over this
2:16.2	was squirrel. My grandmother could take squirrel and she would make squirrel and rice and it was one of the best tasting things in the world.
2:24.3	Now as I've gotten older squirrel is not necessarily in my repertoire anymore as it were, but I remember going out
2:32.2	in those Pinedy Woods in North Louisiana with my papa
2:35.3	walking along five six seven years old and no he didn't give me a gun I just
2:42.0	walked along with him and his eyes were always toward the sky, looking in the tops of those trees. And he'd bag a squirrel every single time. And that was pure joy to me just being with him, learning from him, covering my ears
2:57.9	from sound of that 12-gate shotgun going on.
3:01.2	But today we're going to talk about a case that involves two deaths.
	...

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