Post Mortem | The Sneak Attack on Katlyn Lyon

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1:11Erin Moriarty:Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green. And today we are discussing the case of 28-year-old Caitlin Lyon Montgomery, who was found unresponsive by her roommate in October of 2022. when she later died of her injuries to her head and her neck at the hospital. The case evolved into a homicide investigation, and it sparked a social media fight for justice from her family. So joining me today is 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty to talk about this case. Thank you, Erin.

1:45Anne-Marie Green:It's another tough one, Anne-Marie, because Caitlin's mother described her as glitter. She was such a loss. So it's a tough case to discuss.

1:56Erin Moriarty:Remember, everyone, if you haven't listened to the 48 Hours episode yet, head on over to your podcast feed for the full audio version of it. You're going to find it just below this podcast. Go listen and then come on back. All right. So let's get into this case. In the early morning hours of October 7th, 2022, Caitlin Montgomery was rushed to the hospital after her roommate, Jacob Piercy, called 911. Now, and this is a heartbreaking part of this, it was her four-year-old daughter who first alerted Jacob that her mom would not wake up. But Caitlin's home wasn't initially treated as a crime scene.

2:36Erin Moriarty:And that's because first responders thought that Caitlin probably overdosed on drugs. At the hospital, doctors discovered the bruises around her neck. So my question to you is, how did first responders miss this? How did they miss that there was a possible strangulation here?

2:56Anne-Marie Green:Anne-Marie, this was a new one for me because, as it turns out, she had been so recently attacked that those bruises didn't come out and they didn't see anything. And because she was unresponsive and because she was young, they assumed she must have taken something. It must have been an overdose. And this case really serves as a reminder, and I hear this all the time, of why every scene, death scene, has to be treated like a homicide. But the other side of this is, of course, that the first responders, you know, she was still alive. Their priority was not that scene. They wanted to save her life.

3:40Yeah.

3:41Erin Moriarty:And now that I'm talking it out with you, I can count the number of times that I've maybe hit my thigh on a table and said to myself, boy, that's going to bruise. And I know the bruise isn't going to pop up probably for another hour or so. And so when I think about that, it makes sense that the bruises would not have been visible by the time the first responders were there. You're absolutely right.

4:05Anne-Marie Green:In fact, in many strangulation cases, I mean, there may be no bruises at all or they may be internal and not show up on the outside. And this was an attack that was very quick. She was probably asleep. So there were no defensive wounds.

4:24Erin Moriarty:But those bruises did become visible at the hospital. And I thought it was really interesting that actually those bruises helped a lot in terms of creating like a timestamp for the attack.

4:36Anne-Marie Green:The fact that the bruises didn't immediately appear actually in a weird way helped the investigation because it helped the lead investigator to determine approximately what time the attack happened. and what they believe is that it happened about an hour before Jacob Piercy called 911, which would make it somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m., and that becomes very important during the trial.

5:06Erin Moriarty:Do investigators know where Caitlin's daughter, Melani, was when the attack happened? Oh, this is so sad, yeah.

5:13Anne-Marie Green:She was in bed with her mother. hopefully she won't have any memories if she saw any of it she was just four years of age when this happened but because she was there she was either awakened by it or awoke on her own right afterwards and thank god that she ran to get Jacob because to be honest if she had not gotten Jacob right away those certainly the bruises would have appeared but they might not have been able to figure out exactly when she had been murdered.

5:46Erin Moriarty:So after Caitlin dies of her injuries, investigators almost immediately zero in on Jacob Percy, her roommate. At one point, they actually tell Caitlin's family that they're 99 percent sure that it's Jacob. So what made them sort of pivot from being 99 percent sure that it's the roommate to looking at, well, what could that one percent be?

6:09Anne-Marie Green:Well, there's a reason why investigators first looked at Jacob Piercy. For one reason, he was the only other adult in the apartment. It was Caitlin, her daughter, and Jacob Piercy. There is no sign of forced entry. This was actually Jacob Piercy's first night living in the apartment. He had just moved in the evening before she was attacked. And they learn that he had tried to ask Caitlin out. And so they're thinking, you know, maybe she spurned him. But on the other side of that, you know, he was so cooperative and handed over his phone right away and wanted to do whatever he could to help out the investigation.

6:58Anne-Marie Green:And that just didn't fit with someone who was trying to hide what he had done. And I should point out, they're also hearing from the family that there was somebody else that the family suspected. But I have to tell you, they were looking hard at Jacob Piercy and he knew it. He was scared. He was. Yeah.

7:19Erin Moriarty:You know, I felt I felt for him, but he looks a little suspicious.

7:23Anne-Marie Green:The investigator, which I thought really helped him before they really moved off of Jacob, He went back and listened to the 911 call and you could hear that Jacob was trying to do what he could to save her life. Right. So it did make investigators finally look at somebody else.

7:45Erin Moriarty:Right. And you mentioned that her family was mentioning, hey, there is someone else you should look at. investigators start looking at Caitlin's ex-boyfriend. His name is Trenton Fry. And he's got a motive because 10 days before the attack, she dumped him. She had discovered that he was really kind of overplaying this idea that he was a successful businessman. And he spun this whole story about who he was and what he did for a living. And so she wastes no time. She breaks up with him. She blocks him. You know, Erin, the investigators and the prosecutor, they're really kind of characterizing this as a case of domestic violence.

8:26Erin Moriarty:I know you've covered many domestic violence cases. When women leave their partners, they are particularly vulnerable.

8:36Anne-Marie Green:You know, I've covered too many of these stories, Anne-Marie. And if there's anything that viewers and listeners take away from this story, I want it to be that. And that certainly seems to be the case in Caitlin's case. So Trenton Fry, on paper, looked like the perfect guy. He had done a lot to promote this image of himself as the owner of a security business and construction business. And he apparently, according to the prosecution, was very upset when Caitlin held him accountable for the lies. You know, when it turned out that he may have had those businesses, but he wasn't making any real money.

9:22Anne-Marie Green:He didn't have good credit. And she was upending that image that he had created. and there's one other i think important point we find out later that that caitlin wasn't the only woman in his life he had other girlfriends you're kidding me yeah no it's true and apparently um this fact that caitlin could walk away so easily according to the prosecutor was enough to make him angry.

9:54Erin Moriarty:See, to me, that's, you know, those one of those red flags that this is not about love. This is about ownership. That's certainly what the prosecution believes was the motive. So, you know, Fry, of course, tells investigators he wasn't anywhere close to Caitlin when this attack happened, that he was hours away. He was working in North Carolina, except they find some pretty solid evidence that he wasn't.

10:24Anne-Marie Green:For one thing, they noticed that there were cell phone tower pings that occurred in Virginia when he had told investigators he was in North Carolina. And those pings started three days before the attack. And then another interesting thing is that two of Caitlin's neighbors saw an unfamiliar man sitting outside the apartments. And one neighbor was so scared of this guy that she actually went home to her parents. So he must have been sending off really creepy vibes. And the other person actually took a picture, and it's timestamped on October 6th, which is a day before she was attacked.

11:08Erin Moriarty:Then we get to what investigators uncover with the browser history. They figure out that he's been actually looking at the layout of her apartment.

11:18Anne-Marie Green:And that is very helpful because this is a case where you have to wonder, how did he get into the apartment? Her apartment was on the second floor. There isn't like a fire escape or anything. So you're wondering that. And how was someone able to find her room so quickly, kill her, get out and get away in a very short period of time? So that layout really mattered because it showed that he was trying to figure out where everybody was in the apartment. And he had, as you point out, Emory, those three days sitting out there. So I think the prosecution's theory was that he was outside looking where the lights were and could figure out where was her bedroom as opposed to Jacob Pierce's.

12:09Erin Moriarty:I do find kind of that part of the case challenging, that he was able to slip in and slip out without anyone noticing, without making noise. And there are dogs in the apartment.

12:23Anne-Marie Green:Anne-Marie, I had the biggest problem with that because dogs bark at everything. Now, I understand why Caitlin's dog might not have barked because Caitlin's dog knew Trenton Fry. But what troubled me was that there are also two dogs in Jacob Piercy's room. But the prosecutor says those dogs were in a closed room with Jacob. Jacob wasn't being threatened. And so there wasn't a reason for the dogs to bark.

12:55Erin Moriarty:And the other thing is, you know, often it's very difficult to disturb a scene without leaving something behind. And investigators found nothing that really placed Fry inside Caitlin's apartment.

13:11Anne-Marie Green:That is true. And that was the strongest argument that the defense leaned on at trial. But that scene was so contaminated by dogs and people and first responders and made it more difficult for investigators later on. Now, the only real evidence that pointed to Trenton Fry being in the apartment is this time when Trenton Fry's phone connects to Caitlin's iPad, which is very damaging. And the prosecution uses that to say he had to be in the apartment to make that connection. But what the defense argued was, how do you know that iPad was actually in the apartment at that time? Because when Caitlin's aunt came to the scene, when they first thought it was an overdose, Aunt Sherry took the iPad home with her.

14:13Anne-Marie Green:And that's where investigators got it.

14:16Erin Moriarty:When investigators sort of confront Frye with the evidence that they have about allegedly being in Caitlin's apartment, He claims he has no memory of it. And he starts to talk about, you know, he has periods of blacking out. We've heard this before, Erin.

14:30Anne-Marie Green:And Anne-Marie, if we've heard it a lot, think how often the investigators have heard that.

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15:47Erin Moriarty:October 20th, 2022, Trenton Frye is charged with Caitlin's murder and he pleads not guilty. Now, before Trenton Frye's trial even began, Caitlin's mother, Crystal, her two aunts, Sherry and Tina, they took to social media. They started posting videos on TikTok to talk about the case. And it's definitely something that we've been seeing, whether it's the families of victims wanting more attention on a case that hasn't been solved. or wanting more attention on a suspect who has been charged.

16:20Anne-Marie Green:I just did a case involving Molly Bish and her sister used TikTok to try to get new tips and new evidence. So, yes, it's happening all the time. In this case, though, as reporters, you really get a sense of what this family went through in a way you couldn't any other way. Caitlin's mother, Crystal, happens to have two sisters. And these women all are very supportive of each other. And so when Crystal was having difficulty grappling with her pain and her loss, her sisters come through in the way they support her is on TikTok and telling people what's happening and how we have to have justice for Caitlin.

17:04Anne-Marie Green:You know, they really were pushing for that.