True Crime

One of the least “millennial white girl” coded things about me is that I have virtually zero interest in the true crime podcast-industrial complex. I have no real interest in listening to a couple of women drinking wine while talking about severed heads, or a gravelly-voiced man intoning about police pulling a body from a river.

That’s not to say I have no interest in crime stories; I am, after all, one of Bluesky’s foremost “Law & Order” fans. Original series, only, I find Olivia Benson and the SVU squad both boring and melodramatic. I’d rather settle in with Logan and Briscoe.

All that’s about to change, though, at least for the next little while.

Bone Valley 3: Graves County releases its first episodes today, and it's a story that I know well because I was present for an important part of it. It's a story that ultimately is the reason I'm here writing this.

I know I was just on the fringes of all of this, and I’m not ultimately important to it at all. My reporting on the case only really exists in a couple of libraries now, as the Mayfield Messenger office and archives were erased from the map by the 2021 tornado, but it’s been a key moment in my life and career.

The Case

To set the scene: In the summer of 2000, 18-year-old Jessica Currin was killed and her body was dumped and set on fire outside Mayfield Middle School. That much, everyone seems to agree on.

I didn’t know her; she was a couple of years older and, by virtue of being a Black girl in a rural western Kentucky town where segregation might not have been a legal requirement but was in many ways still a cultural one, we didn’t have any overlap in our social circles.

She was a new mom, with a young baby she was raising by herself. Her father was a lieutenant at the Mayfield Fire Department. Then one July night, someone killed her.

The years following her murder were tumultuous for the case, which could charitably be said to have been mismanaged. The lead investigator was a newly promoted detective working his first murder, in a town where killings were not at all common.

Evidence was mislabeled, mismanaged, outright lost. Police went on wild goose chase after wild goose chase, pursuing Currin’s child’s father all the way to trial only to see the case fall apart because police had withheld a mountain of evidence, leading the presiding judge to threaten to pursue charges against the investigating officer. Rather than facing discipline, though, he got promoted to assistant police chief when his boss “retired” after being suspended for selling items from the evidence room.

Finally, years later, an “investigation” by a local busybody and a British reporter turned up another probable suspect, a 25-year-old Tennessee man named Quincy Omar Cross. In 2008, a full eight years after Currin’s murder, Cross went to trial for her death.

The Trial

This would be the point where I come in. In 2007, I was a newly minted journalism school graduate when I got my first full-time reporting job, right back in my hometown. My soon-to-be wife and I loaded up and headed down the West Kentucky Parkway from Lexington back to Mayfield, where I’d be covering, among other things, cops and courts. When Cross went to trial, it was me who was making the drive daily to even more rural Hickman, Ky., to cover the case for the paper.

It was, at the time, the biggest murder trial in years, if not decades, for Mayfield, and I was in the middle of it. I was writing stories from the courtroom, filing via a very sketchy Wi-Fi connection, trying to keep up with reporters from TV and larger papers.

The trial took weeks, during which I was trying to take care of an increasingly pregnant Janie, manage my own emotions and do a good job. I saw photos and heard testimony I won’t ever forget. I lived out of my car, eating home-packed lunches in a town where the nearest McDonald’s was 20 minutes away and making friends with the court security officers so I could get through screening faster.

Quincy Cross was convicted. The witnesses were not especially reliable or trustworthy, the evidence that survived was mostly circumstantial, but at the end of the day everyone seemed to believe they’d gotten the right man.

The Aftermath

Meanwhile, I was looking at becoming a parent, seeing the lack of a long-term future at a dying newspaper in a dying manufacturing town in the middle of nowhere and realizing I’d been handed a gift in a giant stack of stories that I could use to move up.

That fall, with a new baby and an ill-advised mortgage during an accelerating global financial crisis, I took a flyer and sent my clips off to a paper outside Lexington. I got a phone call the same afternoon asking me to come up for an interview. I had the job less than a week later, and by our first anniversary we were moving back to central Kentucky.

I’ve often wondered over the years what would have happened if not for being in the right place at the right time to have covered this case. Without it, I wouldn’t have gone to the Register and won awards for investigative journalism.

Without the experience of sifting through court records and dealing with law enforcement in Richmond, I wouldn’t have gone to law school. Without going to law school, odds are I wouldn’t have found EDSBS and met so many wonderful, amazing friends, and I wouldn’t have ended up with my job at MLive and gotten to Michigan.

Without all of that, I wouldn’t have met and become sisters with the amazing group of trans women who have been my greatest resource and support over the last 18 months, and I wouldn’t be here as Brie at all. I’d still be a sad, depressed, unhappy man, unsure of why he doesn’t feel comfortable in his own body, going through the motions of life without knowing what real joy feels like. At least one of my children wouldn't be here, and Lord knows if Janie would be alive or if we'd still be married.

I don’t know where this podcast is going to go, or what it's going to reveal. I know that Jessica’s father believes Quincy Cross didn’t kill his daughter. I know that there’s an effort to challenge the conviction, to re-examine the evidence of a murder that happened a quarter-century ago now and try to find the truth of this crime. To find some truth in a world full of lies, deception and mystery.

I feel for the families involved. I hope that answers come for them. I know when I sat there in that courtroom, I had questions that were unanswered, contradictions unresolved, a nagging sense that maybe it had all been more about getting an outcome regardless of whether it was the right now.

A trial is ultimately about weighing evidence, weighing facts, to determine the validity of a claim made about a person. In the criminal arena, it's simple: the prosecutor says this person did this thing, and here's how we can prove it.

The process of coming out to yourself as transgender is the same kind of thing. It's taking this claim, that you are not the person you appear to be externally, and weighing the evidence for and against it.

I didn't know when I sat in that courthouse back in 2008 that I was setting in motion a cascade of events that would lead to this moment.

The case wasn't strong then. The evidence hadn't been collected, the testimony taken. It has been now. The jury's heard the case, heard the arguments, and returned its verdict.

It’s that I sit here writing this today as a trans woman, able to experience the full spectrum of emotions and happy for the first time in her life.