SPEAKER_02 0:00

In Tragedy, a true crime podcast, we discuss crimes that may be violent in nature. At times we may cover homicides, missing people, and other topics that may be unsettling. Listener discretion is advised. On today's episode of Tragedy, we explore the unresolved and haunting case of Jody Kilgore, a man found stabbed to death outside his home in Walcala County, Florida on October 6, 2014. More than a decade later, his homicide remains unsolved. No arrests, no closure, just questions left hanging in the quiet spaces of a rural community, still searching for answers. To help us examine the case from a new angle, we're joined by two leading experts from incident response and investigative strategies, also known as IRIS. Kathy Decker, founder of IRIS, is a renowned forensic examiner whose work involves reconstructing violent crimes through the lens of science, trauma, and truth. Her dedication to the dignity of victims and the details left behind has made her a trusted voice in some of the most complex investigations. Joining her is Douglas McGregor, an experienced geographic profiler whose work helps identify patterns in space and behavior specific to cold and historic cases. Doug studies the location of key events, where a victim was found, where the offender may have lived or traveled, and he uses these insights to reanalyze data with a fresh, structured methodology. Together, Kathy and Doug bring both precision and compassion to their work. They're here to describe how their areas of expertise could be beneficial to the Walcala County Sheriff's Office and the unsolved homicide of Jody Kilgore. This is Tragedy, a true crime podcast. Today on the podcast, we're joined by two remarkable guests from Incident Response and Investigative Strategies, otherwise known as Iris. We're happy to welcome Kathy Decker and Doug McGregor to the show. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Yes, thank you. All right, we're gonna get right into it. So tell us about Iris and the mission of your organization.

SPEAKER_03 2:43

Well, you you bet. So Iris is somewhat unique in that we're a relatively small team that are made up of some fairly unique skill sets. So we have um background and experience in search and rescue, visual tracking, also known as man tracking, geographic profiling, of course, which is what Doug is going to be speaking about. We have a criminologist uh who specializes in serial violent crime. We have an expert in DNA who manages her own DNA lab. We have a team member who is very adept at interview and interrogation, formerly a homicide uh detective with a large police department in Washington. And we have another uh team member who is very adept at private investigations, and she's good at tracking down anyone anywhere, which of course is very helpful. And then we have some administrative support, fortunately, with my husband and uh another team member who is very good at organizing files and kind of keeping us all on track. And I don't want to leave out one of our key members who's an analyst, and her job responsibilities include organizing hundreds of pages of case data and putting it into a readable format that can be searched easily by not only investigators, but also by family who are seeking to try to understand more about what happened to their loved one.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_03 4:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Um you have a larger team than I was anticipating.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

That's right. Uh we well, we do. I think there's seven of us, uh, plus the two administrators, so nine total. And it's um small, I guess, when you compare it to some of the other somewhat similar organizations that are out there in the United States. Um, but we are happy with uh who we have, and we're finding that we really have some pretty incredible opportunities to do some work to support families who, of course, want to know what happened to their loved one. And oftentimes it's just wanting answers and not necessarily wanting to have somebody convicted for the crime, although sometimes that is the case, and that's that's the concern or the interest. But I'm finding that more often than not, it's just the families want to know what happened, how it happened, um, and who is responsible.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Okay. Interesting. Um, is there a particular case that you know you guys worked on that you're particularly proud of that you can kind of share with us today?

SPEAKER_03 5:28

We don't have one yet that we can talk about. Uh, we have some non-disclosure agreements in place. Sure. We do have a case we're working on that does not have a nondisclosure agreement in place, but we haven't quite gotten to the point where we're able to resolve it. We anticipate by mid-fall we should have answers for the family. We've been making excellent progress. And through the contacts that our team have in place, we've been able to set up some really important meetings with individuals that should be able to give us answers to questions that we can pass on to the family.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Okay. Um, I know one of the reasons we met our meeting today is we kind of wanted to share with our listeners, you know, what you guys did, you know, what the impact of, you know, the type of impact we would normally see on cases, and kind of go through what is geographic profiling as well as what is, you know, forensic examinations and how you approach it. Um can you guys kind of go through that, what that looks like and what that means?

SPEAKER_04 6:30

Yeah, Doug, I'll let you start with the geographic profiling.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Of course. So geographic profiling, traditionally, it's looking at a series of crimes and trying to identify the most the area where the offender most likely resides. In recent uh years, I'd say over the past five to fifteen years, geographic profiling has really developed and it has really expanded into other types of crimes. Uh myself personally, I've developed my own model of geographic profiling, which is the STEG model, S-T-E-G, and that stands for spatial, temporal, environmental, and geographic uh elements of human behavior. So those are the four areas that I look at when assessing a case. And I look at those different components of human behavior relative to um offenders, uh to victimology, to missing persons, and to crime scene analysis.

SPEAKER_03 7:38

And what's most interesting with what Doug is just speaking about, those elements of behavior, I mean, that's so applicable to the forensic examinations that we often are tasked with doing on these unresolved cases, especially when it comes to trying to find human remains of a loved one who has gone missing under what seems to be suspicious circumstances or even in cases where they know it was a homicide or a murder. Um when we put together information on where to search and how to search, we want to be able to do something that is uh defensible in court. We want to be able to explain why we're searching in a particular area, and we also want to be able to tell our searchers that the area that they're going to be looking in is an area of higher probability and being able to explain to them why that is. So taking what Doug does, it actually applies very nicely to the large-scale evidence searches that we're often asked to uh assist with. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

Both of these areas of expertise that you uh bring to the table, I think, are very fascinating. Could you each just talk a little bit about how you got to where you are now, how you entered into the field?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Go ahead, Kathy.

SPEAKER_03 9:01

Okay. Uh well, with me, it all began in college. Um, I was uh attending a university in in Washington State and knew fairly early on I wanted to go into um some realm of investigations. And shortly after graduation, I was hired on by the King County Sheriff's Office, which is the sheriff's office in in Washington. It's the greater Seattle area, and was able to um thankfully kind of found my niche and was able to work my way up fairly quickly into investigations, um, where I knew fairly shortly upon um being um becoming a detective that that was what I was meant to do. And I I loved being able to problem solve. I really enjoyed working with families and and trying to help them understand what happened to their bill loved ones and and just forensically examining crime scenes, I thought was fascinating, that inductive and deductive reasoning that you need to apply to understand every aspect of the scene. Um then I picked up another kind of unusual skill set along the way, which is visual tracking, um often known as man tracking, is the kind of the old term for it. And that is understanding all the physical evidence that goes into human movement, um, being able to identify even partial um footprints, being able to identify um anything that a human has has touched or stepped upon as they're moving about in their environment and interpreting that movement to um to better understand what the state was of that individual.

SPEAKER_04 10:40

So for crime scene work very applicable, you can identify the numbers of people involved with the scene, sometimes who the leader is, who's the decision maker, you can identify and make the model clear, oftentimes. You can age tracks, you can age the core impressions to give law enforcement a better idea of when that particular person was at that particular point, what they were doing, how they were interacting, whether they were walking with purpose, they knew where they were going, wandering, aimlessly, running or fleeing.

SPEAKER_03 11:14

Um, these are all um characteristics that we were trained to see in that footfall evidence. And I was able to apply that to my homicide work, which I was did for just over 18 years, and found that to be just an incredible help to me to ensure I was seeing everything that needed to be seen at a crime scene. And then I was able to take that and apply it to crime scene photography and looking at um photographs that were taken by professional photographers sometimes, sometimes just law enforcement, whoever happened to have a camera on them who's trying to document the scene the best that they can and identifying evidence that was captured in those photographs that was missed because the the detectives or investigators who were looking at the photographs weren't trained to see that type of evidence. And that's kind of been in a unique skill set that I found has been quite helpful in in some of these cases.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

What about you, Doug?

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Yeah, so I I got into geographic profiling a little uh a little differently. I took a different route. I didn't take the law enforcement route, uh, I took the academic route. So I after I finished my my bachelor's in political science, I continued on and did a master's down at Missouri State University in defense and strategic studies. Uh I was really interested in in uh military operations, intelligence, counterterrorism. So that's kind of the path that I was on at that time. And and while at my master's program, we had a guest speaker come in from the FBI, and he came in to speak to us about terrorism, and one of the things he talked to us about was profiling terrorists. So that really got me into the behavioral side of it, and I I've always looked for the the next challenge. I like something that challenges challenges me, like more like kind of like a puzzle. Um, and behavior really is that. It is all this, it's just a gray area, there's no black and white. So from after completing my master's, then I continued on and I really dove headfirst into the world of criminology, environmental criminology, profiling, um, and and completed courses related to crime analysis, geographic profiling, crime mapping, um, psychology. And I guess the the side of me that really took over was I I have a strong logical reasoning, uh, pattern recognition side to me. I've I always loved and did very well in math, and I always loved geography. So the geographic profiling was was an easy choice. And I saw a big opening in that field because uh I mean there were people, there were agencies all over the place, obviously the FBI being the most prominent that did that did criminal or offender profiling, but nobody really did geographic profiling. Uh, you know, there was a there was an established course in the UK, uh, there's a company that sells software in the in the United States, but it wasn't really it wasn't a field that was commonly and regularly used, and it wasn't growing in any sense. So I really saw an opening there, especially as a as a consultant. And ever since then, I've just been, um, I guess for the past 10 years now, I've been networking, working more cases, um, getting involved in more types of cases. As Kathy mentioned, nobody homicides, trying to locate human remains, uh, working cases, trying to get in more into the fugitive apprehension side of it, because that's um there's very it could it's very applicable in that sense, and even more recently into um into wildlife crimes. So there's uh there's a there's a big need for it, but not a lot of people know about geographic profiling or what it is. So that's kind of it's it's a struggle, but it's been a lot of fun and and uh I'm looking forward to the next steps.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yeah, I I feel like I've I've heard you mention before in another you know podcast we were listening to about how you found that even some of the softwares that were associated with this really lack some of the dynamics that you're trying to put in to make them more accurate.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yeah, the software is very good. I I don't have the software. The uh, well, I mean, when I say the software, there's about seven different geographic profiling softwares out there. Uh the most prominent is Rigel, um, which is sold through a company called ECRI. And it's very expensive. Uh, there's a few agencies around the world, I don't know, a couple dozen, maybe a hundred, I have no idea, that have the software and apply it, but you really have to have uh somebody, a full you one, you have to have a full-time geographic profiler, and two, you have to have a need for full-time geographic profiling uh to require the software because the software it's it's kind of like uh you basically you take ArcGIS, which is a GIS um software, and then you add in the linkage analysis um part of it, and there you get the geographic profiling software. So there are agencies around the world that use it, it's very expensive. Um, but myself, I don't even use GIS on a regular basis. I use mapping software. I do probably 90% of my work using Google Earth, and then I supplement that with um other mapping software, terrain analysis software. Just um I overlay it with um whether it's um maps of where mines are located or trails or our property lines. Uh and and that's how I do that's how I do my um my analysis, my geographic profiling.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

I feel like I want to do over on my career. I mean, education was great and all, but this is really, really interesting. Um so let's pivot to to the Jody Kilgore case. So based on what we now know and have been able to collect in regards to the unsolved homicide, how do you think geoprofiling and forensic examination could possibly support a resolution of this case? And um let's start with Kathy. Yeah, you bet.

SPEAKER_03 17:45

So the the key for the forensic investigative piece where our team, where I would be able to be most helpful, would be to have access to all of the documents, the photographs, uh, and to be able to read the reports to understand the details of what the officers saw when they arrived. The crime scene photos would be extremely important. There undoubtedly is a lot of information that was captured in those photographs. I anticipate there's probably information that was captured in those photographs, evidence that was captured that has not yet been readily identified by those who were viewing the photographs. So having an opportunity to look through all of that, I think, would be extremely helpful. And it's really just a matter of doing a gap analysis, so reviewing paperwork is an objective set of ice and being able to come back to law enforcement or to the family and say, here's where the strengths are in this case, here's areas where there could be additional investigation, and if these areas that need additional investigation are areas that we can actually move forward on, we have contacts or we can get hold of people that would be able to help further the case, depending upon what their skill sets and specialties are. So that's I think from a forensic standpoint where we would be most helpful. But like I said, it would necessitate us being able to have access to the files and the folders. And Doug, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

So a lot a lot of what I am going to mention is going to reflect and mirror what Kathy just said. Um but first it it's understanding what geographic profiling does. Geographic profiling, it doesn't resolve cases. It it advances investigations. It's an investigation, it's an investigative uh support technique, is what it is. So I never, for example, I never find a body, I never locate a missing person, I never find the home of a serial killer. I just provide the investigators, such as Kathy, who's a retired investigator, with information that may help them, um, may help them do so. So that's really important to uh to just to just understand about it. And it's I mean it's no different than profiling itself. I mean it is a subset of criminal profiling, and that's the same thing criminal profiling does. It's just an investigative support technique. So in a case like this and with Jody's case, I mean the first thing you're gonna do is what Kathy said is you come in and you're a neutral, you're an objective investigative body, and that is critical in that a lot of these investigations the agency just needs a new fresh set of eyes. They need people coming in who don't know the case at all, so they're gonna start from square one. Then they don't have any biases, they don't have any beliefs surrounding the case, they don't have blinders on in terms of any suspect or person of interest, and that and that's really important. The second thing is you are gonna start going to start at the beginning. So when I come into a case, it's uh I I don't really I I like everything that you've done so far as an investigative team, and I please provide me all your material, but I'm gonna start at ground zero. And that's very important because as Kathy mentioned, the gap analysis is critical. And the gap analysis is what have they missed? What's been missed along the way? Um, and it's not necessarily because they're they're it was poor the the investigation was poorly done, it just means that maybe they didn't have the skill set we have or they didn't look at. It from the same point of view that we're looking at it from. So it could be a very good investigation. They just didn't look at a certain person and and they didn't dive into that person's life, for example. So it's really important to do that gap analysis. Um geographic profile profiling is also going to help from a crime scene assessment point of view. And that's another area that I'm that I've been getting into more of late, in that you have your crime scene technicians, crime scene analysts, investigators go in and they look for specific things at a crime scene, but I look for completely different things. I look for the environmental, the spatial behavior type uh sort of things. So, you know, when I'm looking at Jody's case, you know, right away I see that it's it's likely personal, it's very high risk, it's a daylight stabbing. Um, it's, you know, without having the case files, which Kath, like Kathy said, are critical. We need the case files, but just without having the case files, you know, you look at it and you say, you know, is it some kind of personal grievance or targeted attack? Um, and this is all just from kind of looking at the area where this occurred because it is down a dead end, or if you want to call it a cul-de-sac, it's on more or less a poorly paved or dirt road. Um, and it's somewhere where somebody is going to have familiarity with. They're going to have confidence in that area, they're going to know how to get in, get out of that area. So these are just kind of some of the things that I might look at from a crime scene assessment point of view. Uh and from there, I'm going to take this case and I'm going to get into areas where law enforcement hasn't necessarily entered. So I'm going to start looking at suspects and persons of interest, and maybe they'll I'll start, I'll probably start with their list because usually in a case like this, they've probably already investigated the person who's responsible for this. Not necessarily, but probably. And I'm going to get into get into their life uh more thoroughly than they've already done. So I'm going to identify, I'm going to create a geographic profile for those people. Um looking at looking at their their spatial behavior, their um their schedules, their timelines, their anchor points, um, where these people live, where they go and why. And basically I'm just cross-referencing that with uh with different um evidence and different behavioral indicators from the crime scene to see who is, you know, who's maybe the the I might not be identifying who the most likely suspect is, but I'd be I will be providing, hopefully providing the agency, the investigators with with leads to go on. And uh I'll just give a quick example of that. A case I recently worked, I was brought in to it was a case where a woman went missing, and it was a high-profile case. Uh, and I was brought in to see if I could do one of two things either locate the body or identify who committed the crime or both. Um, but once I went through the entire case and started from the bottom, I was able to identify two new crime scenes for investigators. So before I even got to identifying a suspect or uh where a body might be, I was able to advance their investigation for them. And I think that's the really where my strength would be in a case like Jody Kilgore's, is just trying to advance this investigation, provide them with more leads, because it only takes one little lead to crack open a case.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Wow. Um one question I had, because I when we first started kind of engaging with you guys, I was, you know, kind of researching on my own geographic profiling, how it worked, and what little bit I could find out about it from my point of view. And I was curious is is it easier or more difficult the closer those points are? Because one of the things that sticks out to me in this case is this happened in a small town, everyone knows each other. We've talked about a number of times on the case. And if those points of interest um are very, very close together, does that help hurt the investigation, make it more challenging? I mean, what dynamic does that add?

SPEAKER_00 26:18

That's a great question. Um, it all really depends on the the case itself and the type of case, um what what evidence, what information is available, the the the depth of the investigation, but whether or not the points are close or not is is almost irrelevant. Um it humans can't hide their spatial behavior any better than we we are at hiding other behaviors. Um for for example, I I interviewed a a colleague who's a forensic handwriting specialist recently, and and she said that when when they get um persons of interest or suspects to to write out a handwriting sample, they basically write out a certain amount or certain uh uh length of uh a sample, and then they flip that over and they have them continue because people are able to mask their handwriting for whatever it is, 10 seconds or a couple lines, but then after that it goes back to their normal handwriting. Human spatial behavior is the same thing. You can mask, you can try and cover up uh what you've done, and you know, you can try and go somewhere specific to get an alibi for a certain day, but then your spatial behavior is always going to return. And if investigators, I guess the one area that I try to teach investigators when they when they in when they investigate a case is and they apply for those, they submit those warrants for stuff like digital evidence, phone records, is to go a month before the case. Because you need to have a behavioral baseline for that person. So if you got phone records for somebody a month before the murder happened, you would be able to track them their all their whole life through their through their phone records, let's say, and you'd be able to have a behavioral baseline, and then you can see that that diverges on the day of the murder or the day after. But if you just start from the murder forward, all you're going to have is the new timeline. You're going to have the new behavioral behavior, spatial behavior from that point forward, and it may never return. Um, so when I'm looking at points on a map, it doesn't matter if they're like a again, it doesn't matter if they're close or if they're separate. Um it's uh you're just basically painting a picture of somebody's life. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

That to me, what you just said about going a month before, I like I think I did like a mic drop in my mind. You know, we we have, I mean, we're rookies, right? And so we really did start thinking about from October 6th, right? And I don't think I know I personally didn't think about backtracking on that. So that's like it probably seems so obvious to you, but to me, I was like, oh, and I even wrote it down, you know, things that we didn't think about. So thank you for that. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

And just to just to add to that, and it if this is if this homicide is personal, everything about it led up to it, right? Everything beforehand led up to the murder. The murder was the climax, it was the end, right? But everything before it is what led up to it. So you if if if you have a homicide that's personal, you have to start before. The homicide's the end.

SPEAKER_04 29:53

And that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

They may they may they may try to cover it up after and avoid law enforcement and being arrested afterwards, sure. But everything leading up to that homicide, and um it they may not have been planning it, but everything that led up to it, whether it was a disagreement, a dispute, um, jealousy, whatever it was, a competition between um associates or competitors in your field of work, whatever it is, it led up to that point. So you have to start before if it was if it's a if there's a personal element to it.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

I guess now that I'm listening to you say this, I'm kind of reflecting back. And we have done a little bit of that. When we've spoken to Robin, you know, we said, was there any noticeable change in behavior that you saw from Jody in the months and weeks leading up to his homicide? We've done some loose investigations of people who are surrounding the case and things that they have been involved with with law enforcement. So maybe we've done a better job.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

I think we should do a better job of really, you know flowcharting it out is kind of what's coming into my head as far as, you know, A plus B plus C and what it where it led up. And what what we've primarily focused on is what behaviors were were changed.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

You know, what what was Jody and people around him doing several months before and then versus at during and then again after?

SPEAKER_04 31:19

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 31:21

There's a term in in law enforcement called uh pattern of life, and that's exactly what Doug is speaking to, and understanding the routines of all of your players. So think of it almost like a chess game. So every player has a routine. What's their pattern of life? You need to know what that is ahead of the game so that you can identify those changes in routine. And in Jody's case, um, there is, of course, a change in routine by at least one member. And so that may or may not be important, but those need to be identified and really looked at and dissected to understand completely the relevance of that movement on that particular day.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Okay. Um one thing I wanted to ask is, you know, obviously we've, you know, we've approached law enforcement multiple angles, including, you know, attempting to, you know, get some connection between your group and and the Waucala County Sheriff's Office. Do you find it's pretty common to, you know, pretty common to have trouble breaking into that and getting that cooperation?

SPEAKER_03 32:32

Yes, it it is. And especially in in cases such as Jody's, where you have a rural county, a really tight-net community where everybody knows everybody, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on law enforcement. There's personal pressures, there's professional pressures because everybody knows everybody, and every action has a reaction. And sometimes those reactions have a trickle-down effect that have a devastating effect on the community. So it becomes very difficult for law enforcement in these kinds of cases to really um dwelve into the details and to really get personal and to interrogate because it can be awkward. Um, it's not like a large city where no one really knows anyone. Um, so there's that dynamic, makes it makes it hard. Um, and just law enforcement in general have a duty to protect the integrity of the case. Um, and so what does that mean? Well, that's defined differently by every law enforcement agency. Um, it can mean sharing absolutely no information ever with anyone and doing everything that they can to ensure that that happens, or it can mean selectively sharing information under agreements such as non-disclosure agreements, where there's a trust and the overall goal of the teams is to resolve the case. Um, and that's really what we're all about is just helping law enforcement understand we're we're not there to come in and say, hey, um we can do this better than you. That is not the case. We may not be successful. What we are saying is we have some skill sets that might actually support you in moving this case forward, which really should be the goal. Let's get it resolved so that it's not hanging heavy over this community like it has been all of these years.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

So you'd mentioned um case files. So if the Waucala County Sheriff's Office would be motivated to partner with you, what types of information would be of most value? Like what is in what would you expect to see in a case file?

SPEAKER_03 34:53

What I would really like is the transcript of the 911 call as well as the audio recording, because as a Doug was speaking, it's really hard to hide who you are and to misrepresent who you are. Your words get in the way. And so a 911 call is a great opportunity to kind of assess and get to know a little bit about the person who's calling in the emergency. That is, and that can often be a key piece of information, very helpful moving the case forward. Um, the statements taken from witnesses can be extremely helpful. What questions were they asked? Is it possible to ask the question in a different way that's going to elicit even more information, more details? Um, maybe you need to identify a different person to do the interview. Maybe you want to use a woman versus a man or a man versus a woman. I mean, these are all things that one needs to consider because your goal is to get the information um as quickly and efficiently as you can, but it needs to be accurate. So reviewing everything to understand the timeline can be helpful. Um people's memories fade quickly, and so the the best information is usually that which is documented soon after the event. So being able to look through and see what that information looks like and see where there might be gaps or inconsistencies becomes important. So these are these are all things. And as I mentioned, the crime scene photographs are hugely important. Um what was captured in those photographs? When you have a stabbing like this, um there's a lot of blood. And when there's a lot of blood, there's often a lot of evidence that can be found in that blood around that blood. Um it adheres to the outsoles of shoes, um, it kind of gets on everything and can be transferred and um uh easily um moved about from one point to another all sorts of different ways. So I think that's gonna be hugely important for what we might be able to bring to the table here.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

Uh Doug, is there anything that you might add to that that would support your efforts?

SPEAKER_00 37:15

I I I think Kathy hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's just a few more things. I I guess when I come into an investigation with law enforcement, uh I I just want everything up front, the entire case file. It's hard to get evidence because it just depends on how different agencies uh keep evidence. So sometimes I have to ask for specific pieces of evidence, um, and then I can get that, you know, the the photographs or whatever of it, documentation of it. But the case file itself, I just ask for everything because the I don't always know what I'm looking for until I look into that case file. And they may have read over something 10 times, and then I see it once, and it's it's incredibly important. So I just start from the beginning with that. Um I guess the most important thing for me is that investigators are willing to work together and they're open to pursuing different investigative strategies and recommendations that I may have because that's very important. Um I'm always gonna ask for information on new people. So, you know, are they are they gonna willing to go and get that information for me and provide it to me? Uh digital evidence, uh, data that was collected for the victim or for any persons of interest is very important. Um crime scene photos are critical again, uh, as are the medical examiner or the coroner's report. You know, for for example, like in in Jody's case, you know, uh we know the manner of death, which is homicide, um, and the cause of death, which is uh a stabbing, but you know, we need to know more, we need to have more information about that, um, which the crime scene photos and the and the Emmy report or coroner's report would provide us. So uh yeah, just starting starting there and and then as you go, as you work with investigators, new stuff comes up that you might either ask for and they may have, or they may be able to get a warrant for and get that information for you or conduct a search for you. So it's just really working together as one cohesive unit.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Well, I can I'll speak for myself here. I uh you know, maybe for both of us. I learned a ton on this interview. So this has been great, and I really appreciate you guys taking the time and kind of walking us through what you do and how it could be applied. And um, I'm really hoping our listeners, I'm hoping the Waucala County Sheriff's Office hears this and you know, maybe um becomes a little more cooperative when it comes to interacting with with your group. Um, I think there could be a huge benefit here. And I'm I know I'm along, I agree with Elisa here, and I'm sure the rest of the community, we just want this solved.

SPEAKER_02 39:59

And the family, right? I mean, we've spoken with the family directly, and this is an opportunity that um we don't want to go by without seizing it. We we just need the Walcala County Sheriff's Office to to opt in.

SPEAKER_03 40:15

Well, your persistence will pay off. Um, you've done amazing work. You you truly have. Um, and your ability to keep this in the public eye has been key. So I just encourage you to to stick with it. Um that's that's really gonna be um important um as we as we move this forward. Um there has to be someone who cares, and clearly both of you care dear dearly, as do other members of the family. So uh I appreciate the fact that you've you've stuck with this and just uh um hope that you will continue doing so in the future.

SPEAKER_00 40:50

And if I can add to that, uh you know, I I agree with everything Kathy just said, and if I can add to that, uh one thing I'd like to add is that what you're doing with this podcast can also provide those leads, right? So like they have a tip line out there, they have a reward, and the information that you're putting out, the interviews that you're doing in this podcast, it just takes one for somebody listening to have something snap in their memory and be like, wait a second, I was there that day, or I remember this that day, and then they call the tip line. So as Kathy said, the media exposure, keeping it out there for everybody, I mean, it can have a direct effect on tips coming in and those being quality that being quality information.

SPEAKER_01 41:39

That is definitely what we're hoping for. And um, we're and we're not and to answer you, Kathy, we're not going anywhere. And so I think we're not going anywhere, and we're not gonna give up on this. Um, you know, we've already said it before, we believe this case is solvable. Um, it's got the right ingredients to make it solvable. I think more communication, more sharing, and getting I I told Captain Surachi one of my goals in this podcast was to start a line going out the door at the Walcala County Sheriff's Office with new information. People that are willing to come in and speak, and I'm gonna keep pushing until we get it.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

Despite extensive investigations by the Waucullah County Sheriff's Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, no arrests have been made and the case remains unsolved. It is the only unsolved homicide in Walcala County. Authorities continue to seek information from the public to help solve the case. The Kilgore family has been vocal in their pursuit of justice, keeping the case in the public eye and urging anyone with information to come forward. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has also shared appeals for assistance on social media, emphasizing the importance of community involvement in resolving this case. If you have any information related to George Jody Kilgore's murder, please contact the Waucala County Sheriff's Office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, or you can email us at WhoKilled George Kilgore at gmail.com.