Kelly Dee Wilson (10 of Spades, Ohio)

0:00Brit Prawat:Hi, Crime Junkies. It's Brit, and I have big news. One of my favorite seasonal shows, CounterClock, is back with a brand new season, and it is wild. Host Delia D 'Ambra is digging into the 2008 Lane Bryant murders. I mean, this isn't just a recap. It is a reinvestigation. She's talking to law enforcement, people from the community, even sources who have never spoken publicly until now. And you know I love a show that asks all the questions. Listen to CounterClock Season 8 now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, crime junkies. If you listened to Monday's episode on Nikki McCowan, then you already know why I'm dropping in your feed today and what's coming.

0:39Brit Prawat:If you haven't, let me give you the scoop. Back in 2022, I covered the story of Kelly D. Wilson out of Dayton, Ohio, for my other podcast, The Deck. It is a bizarre and unsettling case that still remains unsolved. Well, as we were reinvestigating Nikki McCowan's case, guess whose name popped up in the case reports that we got? Kelly D. Wilson. Now, the mention is just a one-off that isn't given much attention in the report I have. But it was hard for me to ignore, mostly because the apartment complex where Kelly lived and died is the same one Nikki's missing vehicle was found at the following year.

1:20Brit Prawat:It doesn't mean there is a connection. But I think any investigator, and therefore any crime junkie, would be remiss if you didn't know the facts of both cases. So for those of you who don't listen to the deck every week, first of all, start. But here you go. I'm dropping Kelly's case right here in the Crime Junkie feed. You can listen before or after you listen to Nikki's case. Doesn't matter. And by the way, if you want to listen ad-free, you can find the deck in the Crime Junkie fan club. But when you finish both, come chat with me, either in the fan club app or on social, and tell me what you think.

1:56Brit Prawat:Could there be a connection? Listen close so you don't miss any of the key details.

2:07Brit Prawat:Our card this week is Kelly D. Wilson, the 10 of spades from Ohio. Kelly D. Wilson was a young woman whose life and career as a rising star on radio was tragically cut short, with few clues left behind to piece together the mystery. What happened to Kelly at the start of the new millennium shocked her fans, it horrified her family, and it left detectives baffled to this very day. Telling her story to a wider audience might be the spark investigators need to kickstart their work and to bring whoever took her life to justice. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.

3:19Brit Prawat:I'm your host, and I'll see you next time. in Dayton, Ohio. Just three months after worldwide Y2K, fears had calmed, and people in the entertainment and broadcast industry realized the world was not going to end. The vice president of the station, Stan Boston, spent most days buzzing around the office, feeling really good about the channel's programming. U92 was known as an R &B station, so back then the channel played bands and artists like Boyz II Men, Destiny's Child, and Missy Elliott, who were all topping the R &B and contemporary music charts. And singers like Mariah Carey and J-Lo were helping blur the genre lines between pop and R &B.

3:57Brit Prawat:And because DJs at Stan's station were also playing those artists all the time, the channel just kept gaining more and more in popularity with listeners across Ohio. Stan credited a lot of U92's recent success to one of his biggest disc jockeys, Nikki Brooks. Nikki was just an on-air name, though. The real woman behind the name was 29-year-old Kelly D. Wilson. Kelly hosted a weekday evening show called Jammin' 8 at 8, and listeners loved her. U92 had scooped up Kelly from a station in her nearby hometown of Cincinnati about a year earlier. And from the moment she hit the airwaves in Dayton, listeners tuned in regularly for any programming she was a part of.

4:37Brit Prawat:People were just drawn to Kelly's on-air energy and confident voice. Fans could tell she genuinely loved her job in the music she played. Kelly was dedicated to her work in building the station's branding around her DJ personality, Nikki Brooks. So that's why Stan, her boss, was confused around 7 p.m. on Monday when Kelly hadn't shown up for her shift yet. She was never late and she usually got to the station right at 7 to prepare for her show, which went on air at 8. Now Stan didn't panic right away. He figured maybe she was just having car trouble or had gotten stuck in traffic. So he waited.

5:15Brit Prawat:But by 7.20, he really started to worry. Tons of questions were swirling around in his mind. Did Kelly have an unforeseen family emergency? Why would she be flaking? But no matter what, Stan knew the station would need to be prepared to fill her show's airtime with, you know, a rerun, maybe a syndicated program, or worst case scenario, call in a substitute host last minute to keep their programming going. Stan looked up the phone number for Kelly's apartment landline and gave it a ring. But no one answered. Next, he called Kelly's mom, Charlene, who lived in Cincinnati. He knew that Kelly was super close with her mom, and he figured she might know where her daughter was, or at least be able to explain why Kelly had just ghosted her shift.

5:56Brit Prawat:But when Charlene answered, she told Stan that she had no clue where Kelly was or why she failed to show up to work. She also said that Stan's call made her very worried because she'd actually been trying to call Kelly the day before on Sunday, but hadn't been able to reach her. Stan tried to keep Charlene calm and said, you know what, I'll just go over to Kelly's apartment to check on her. This was actually no big deal for Stan because coincidentally, he lived in the same apartment complex as Kelly and knew exactly where her unit was. The community they lived in was called the Meadows, and it was in a part of the city known as Harrison Township.

6:29Brit Prawat:The Meadows complex is still there today, and it's one of those apartment building layouts where there's several residential buildings sprawled around a pool with an office and a clubhouse, which are sort of the hub of everything. And it also has an on-site bar and social hub. When Stan drove over to Kelly's place after talking with Charlene, he arrived by like 7.30 p.m. And the first thing he saw was her car parked in its space, which he thought was kind of weird because that seemed to indicate that Kelly was home for some reason and just had not been answering her phone. He went up to the door, jiggled the knob, and realized it was locked.

7:04Brit Prawat:So he knocked a few times, but Kelly didn't answer. and there weren't any sounds coming from inside that indicated she was making her way to the door or anything. Stan went to the front office, but no one was there working. So he decided that his only other option to try and get someone on staff to help him was to go to the on-site bar and see if the bartender could get a hold of someone. The bartender called a maintenance man who agreed to come over, but he said there was no way he was going to be able to just let Stan waltz into Kelly's unit and look around. That would be way against policy.

7:34Brit Prawat:Stan explained to the bartender and maintenance guy that he and Kelly's family were really worried about her because no one had heard from her in two days. So they came to a compromise. In order not to break their company policy and just let Stan take a peek, the staff ended up calling the police who offered to come by and do a welfare check at Kelly's unit. A few minutes later, a Montgomery County Sheriff's deputy named Johnny Campbell heard the call come in over his patrol car's radio and he headed over. Just like when Stan had knocked on Kelly's door, when Deputy Campbell rapped on it a few times, no one answered.

8:05Brit Prawat:So he used the maintenance man's key to open the door and go inside. To help explain what happened next, our team went to Dayton and interviewed Montgomery County Sheriff's Detective Melanie Phelps. Detective Phelps is currently in charge of Kelly's case. And sometimes you'll hear her switch between calling Kelly by her real name and her on-air name Nikki throughout this episode. He let himself in with a key and announced, you know, sheriff's office, you know, is anybody here? Sheriff's office, anybody here? It's not a very big apartment. So as he went through, he then located Kelly on the floor deceased and made sure that everybody got, you know, stayed out, secured the scene and called the supervisors and the detectives.

8:43Brit Prawat:According to what Phelps knows from reading through the case file, Kelly lived in a one bedroom apartment and her living room, dining room and kitchen were all in an open floor plan. There weren't walls separating those rooms, but to access the bathroom, you had to actually walk through Kelly's bedroom. And that is where Deputy Campbell found Kelly's body, about halfway off the side of her bathtub. She was laying on her stomach in the bathroom and she had on just a robe and her bra and a t-shirt. She didn't have anything on below the waist. According to crime scene reports filed at the time, there wasn't much blood on or around Kelly's body.

9:23Brit Prawat:So it wasn't immediately clear to the police how she died. But one detail the investigators noticed right away was fecal matter. It was on Kelly, it was around the bathroom, and back in her bedroom on her bed. Now, fecal matter being in the bathroom itself wasn't super strange. I mean, it's a bathroom after all. But the fact that it was also found on the bed indicated to authorities that they may have been looking at a scenario where Kelly had originally been killed on her bed. Then fecal matter from either her or her killer became present there, and then she was moved to her bathroom. They also had to consider the possibility, too, that the fecal matter may have originated in the bathroom, and then the killer left traces of it in the bedroom post-crime.

10:04Brit Prawat:The sequence of events couldn't be determined for sure just by where the matter was found, but it gave police the ability to theorize. Another glaring clue police found near Kelly's body were residues from cleaning supplies, which appeared to be an attempt by someone to cover up the crime. During her interview with us, Detective Phelps wouldn't say specifically what kind of cleaning products had been used, but she said it was likely something Kelly had under her sink and not a chemical that the killer had brought with them to the scene. We just know there was cleanup at the scene or attempted cleanup at the scene.

10:38Brit Prawat:After discovering Kelly's body, detectives collected some of her clothes and other items from her room and bathroom as evidence and were able to lift fingerprints from surfaces in those areas. One of the big things that puzzled investigators was that there seemed to be no signs of forced entry or like a break in, no broken windows, no damaged locks, nothing. The absence of those things caused police to think two things. Either the killer had a key to get in or Kelly willingly let them in. And nowhere in the apartment had things been viciously tossed around or turned over. But there were a few little things that authorities had a hard time deciphering the meaning of.

11:18It was definitely not ransacked. There was one cupboard door that was open. Her purse was on the counter in the kitchen. And it looked as though somebody had picked her purse up and kind of shaken it because there were coins that had gone on the counter and on the floor. She had a very tall jewelry armoire, and that was not opened. She still was wearing jewelry. so I don't believe it had anything to do with robbery. Nothing seemed to be missing of value from the apartment.

11:48Brit Prawat:When Stan and another radio station employee who joined him at the scene were told Kelly was dead, they were shocked by the news. They confirmed for investigators by looking at a photo that it was in fact Kelly who had been found in the apartment. So pretty much from hour one of the investigation, detectives never had a question about who their victim was. But they did have a bizarre mystery to unravel about how she died.

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13:23Brit Prawat:While this was all happening, Kelly's mom, Charlene, sent her son Craig up to Dayton from Cincinnati to see what was going on with Kelly. Cincinnati is only about a half hour south of Dayton, so it didn't take Craig long to get there. And when he got to Kelly's apartment building, he saw police everywhere and quickly learned that his sister was gone. He went back to Cincinnati and had to break the heart-wrenching news to his family. I think it was probably hard, her mom was probably hard for her because her baby now had, you know, it wasn't super far away, but her daughter was, you know, had her own place now and had moved up there for a new job and it was kind of exciting.

13:58So, you know, she just wanted to make sure that her baby girl was going to be okay.

14:02Brit Prawat:It didn't take long before the news of Kelly's death spread through the community, and people who were avid listeners of her radio program began to publicly mourn her loss alongside her loved ones. Fans in Dayton idolized Kelly. And according to Detective Phelps, the crime affected hundreds, even thousands of people who felt like they had a personal connection with her, even though they maybe just listened to her over the radio for a few hours a day. So back then, the radio celebrities were actually like a celebrity here in Dayton. And people would, it was like they would see an actress or something.

14:36If you were out and about and somebody that you said, oh, it's so-and-so, it's so-and-so, it was like building them up or they were on some kind of pedestal or something. So it was very high end to be that well-known on the radio here in Dayton at the time.

14:51Brit Prawat:The day after Kelly's body was discovered, 92.1 FM got flooded with phone calls from fans who wanted to share their grief. Other show hosts sat in on Kelly's show and dedicated it to her, playing calls from fans and airing songs that they knew Kelly liked. Listeners could hear her co-workers choking up on air as they played One Sweet Day by Mariah Carey in honor of Kelly. It would take some time before the coroner in Montgomery County would have the results of Kelly's autopsy. So during the first 24 to 48 hours of the investigation, they couldn't technically call her death a murder. But in their hearts, just due to the certain factors that they'd observed at the crime scene, they knew that they were dealing with a highly suspicious death, which more than likely would end up being a homicide.

15:34Brit Prawat:The first thing detectives started to do to get a better idea of what Kelly had been doing the weekend she died or who'd last seen her was to check her work records and interview her friends and family. They learned that Kelly had for sure gone to work on Friday, March 24th, and she had hosted her R &B show Jammin' 8 at 8 until midnight. You tell me, loud and proud, what station is your radio always locked on? You let us go! Nothing out of the ordinary happened while Kelly was at work on Friday. As for Saturday, according to a man detectives tracked down who'd been casually dating Kelly at the time, he said that he'd been over at her apartment that night to have a few drinks with her and one of his buddies.

16:14Brit Prawat:After drinks, he said the group left Kelly's place and went to a party at a woman named Tammy's house. Tammy was a co-worker of Kelly's, and people who attended that house party were mostly employees of the radio station and their friends. According to several witnesses who were there and two guys who'd arrived with her, Kelly's fun at the party didn't last long. She was not there very long. She showed up with two individuals, and they kind of hung out at the party. Apparently, she had been drinking prior to going to the party. And the two guys went downstairs into the basement and they were watching some football or sports.

16:49I'm not sure exactly what they were watching. And then I guess she maybe became a little too intoxicated. And so they decided that they were going to take her home. So she didn't want to go home at first. But they were kind of like, you know, we really don't want to be here any longer. So they went ahead and took her on back to her apartment.

17:06Brit Prawat:According to police reports, it was at about 11 p.m. when the two men said that they left Tammy's and drove Kelly back to her apartment. After that, these two guys told police that they decided to hit up some bars. The bars they wanted to go to were fairly close to Kelly's apartment. So for them, it was an easy decision to just drop her off and then head out for more drinks on their own. Back in 2000, the two popular nightclubs nearby were Tiffany's and then another dive called Frog's. Both of these places were known for late night dancing, drinks, and music. They first went to Tiffany's, and when they arrived, they ran into Tammy, Kelly's co-worker who'd thrown the house party.

17:41Brit Prawat:By that time, the house party had moved to the clubs, and guests were bouncing between Tiffany's and Frogs. According to Tammy's statement to police, when she saw the two guys who'd been with Kelly, she checked in with them to find out if Kelly had said anything about maybe sobering up some and trying to come back out to join the group. That was a coincidence. when the girl who threw the house party said, oh, is Nikki here with you? It was very loud in the club and he was like, she's not here and then kind of kept walking. They didn't have much interaction other than the fact that he mentioned, no, she was not with them.

18:13Brit Prawat:Sometime after midnight, after Tammy talked to the guys at the bar, Kelly started blowing up Tammy's pager. Data from Tammy's pager showed that Kelly paged her several times using the landline at her apartment. Tammy told police that she had used a phone at one of the clubs to call Kelly. When Kelly picked up, she insisted that Tammy or one of the men she'd been hanging out with earlier come back to her apartment and get her because she wanted to keep partying. Tammy said she didn't feel super comfortable with sending those guys back to get Kelly because she didn't know them all that well. She had spoken to Kelly around the same time that she saw those two gentlemen at the club.

18:49So she said she had been a little leery of the two individuals because she didn't know who they were. But when she saw them out and talked to Nikki, she felt better because, oh, okay, I know that she's home and I know they're here.

19:01Brit Prawat:Police were faced with a big gap in their timeline. As far as they knew, the last people to physically see Kelly were the two guys who dropped her off at home at around 11 p.m. But the last person to actually talk to Kelly was Tammy. The detectives at the time start talking to all of her friends and trying to make a timeline. Who was the last person that saw her? What did she do? How intoxicated was she? Did she see anybody else after she got home from the party? Clearly, something else happened. What that something else was, we don't know. It doesn't seem as though anyone knows exactly who stopped by or would have gone to her house or if she let somebody in.

19:42Brit Prawat:Based on everyone they talked to, detectives learned that Kelly was a welcoming person, especially to people she knew. Everyone just says that everybody loved her. They don't know why anybody would have hurt her. She was, you know, up and coming and very social and she was friends with everybody. So she wouldn't have been like, no, you can't come over or something along those lines. She would have probably anyone that she actually knew would have let into the apartment. When detectives inventoried the evidence they'd processed from the crime scene, they realized they'd never found Kelly's keys in her apartment.

20:17Brit Prawat:That only reinforced investigators' theory that whoever killed Kelly had taken her keys with them when they'd left the crime scene. The door was locked. There was no forced entry. So that individual somehow relocked the door. Now, her keys were not located, but you couldn't lock it from the inside and pull it shut. So it had to be locked from the outside. That says that she knew who it was. She let them into the apartment. By late Monday night into Tuesday morning, police had assembled a fairly clear picture of what Kelly's weekend had looked like leading up to Sunday morning. But they still felt like they needed to get more from the two men she'd been with before and after leaving Tammy's house party.

20:57Brit Prawat:Now, police knew from talking with Tammy that the guys had been at Tiffany's club late into the night Saturday and early Sunday morning. And Tammy herself knew that Kelly was alive and well when she talked to her shortly after midnight. So the men clearly had alibis for the hours of 11 p.m. to roughly 12.30 a.m. But investigators needed to pin down their whereabouts for after that point in time. According to Detective Phelps, law enforcement's thinking at the time was that when these men dropped Kelly off, either they or Kelly had access to her keys to get inside her apartment. What they had to figure out is if either the men had kept Kelly's keys or perhaps remembered anyone else lurking around the unit when they left her.

21:36She kind of had known everybody from about the same amount of time, but the people from the party had never seen those two individuals before. So they right away were thinking, okay, there's two guys we've never seen before, so this is a little shady. So of course, they were two that they wanted to talk to right away.

21:55Brit Prawat:Both men, one of which again was someone Kelly was sort of dating at the time, agreed to cooperate with the authorities and answer whatever questions they could. They both admitted once again that they were with Kelly before, during, and after the house party. But they insisted that when they dropped Kelly off at her apartment shortly after 11 p.m. on Saturday, she was very much alive. The guy who had kind of been dating Kelly at the time, who we're going to call Joe, said that earlier on Saturday, he and Kelly had consensual sex before being joined by his friend to hang out. To police, Joe seemed genuinely distraught when he learned Kelly had been killed.