00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, y'all, it's Maggie.

00:00:01
Speaker 2: I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

00:00:19
Speaker 1: Here's a preview of the first episode. I am so excited for you all to hear it.

00:00:28
Speaker 2: Heads up, this series contains graphic descriptions of violence. There's a saying I heard on a recent trip to the South, A half truth is a whole lie. And if there's a place that breathes life into that proverb, it's the town of Mayfield in Graves County, Kentucky.

00:00:51
Speaker 3: A horrific murder when unsolved for six years in Mayfield, Kentucky, a town of ten thousand people, then one local residence decided to take matters into her own hands.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: On August first, two thousand, the body of Jessica Curran was found outside of the Mayfield Middle School. It appeared as though she'd been beaten and set on fire. Jessica was just eighteen years old, a new mom and the daughter of a lieutenant with the Mayfield Fire Department, and her case would go unsolved for years.

00:01:24
Speaker 4: When police in Mayfield, Kentucky found a body, Susan Galbreth found a purpose. She had to know who murdered Jessica Current.

00:01:34
Speaker 2: Until a local homemaker and a handful of girls came forward with a story, a story that police would use to convict six people, lending Susan Goalbreath in the newspapers and the radio and on national TV.

00:01:50
Speaker 4: Galbreath was a housewife, married three times and drifting. She had no law enforcement training, and she'd never even met Jessica Curran. But whatever her wouldn't let go.

00:02:02
Speaker 1: Somebody had to do something, and if somebody was me.

00:02:06
Speaker 5: So be it.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: Years later, the Kentucky Attorney General would even honor Susan with an Outstanding Citizen Award for finding the key witness in the Jessica Current case.

00:02:18
Speaker 1: It's a made for TV story.

00:02:20
Speaker 2: Ordinary woman help solve murder, brings justice to a small town.

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Speaker 4: Susan Gallibreth was named Citizen of the Year by the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation.

00:02:31
Speaker 6: And to know that I had just the slightest part and it just I feel like I was meant.

00:02:37
Speaker 4: To Susan Gallibreath has done more than just proved one person really can make a difference through sheer, persistence and nerve. This Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica.

00:02:48
Speaker 2: Current catnip for the press, and who could blame them? It's a good one, maybe too good to be true, because this story will go beyond one woman. It's about the lengths our legal system, our communities and the press will go in order to find someone to blame. And it's about the tales we tell and choose to believe in pursuit of justice, the repercussions of which have uprooted lives, shattered families, and exposed a deep rought in Kentucky's halls of power. This is Graves County, Chapter one, Something Stinks.

00:04:22
Speaker 1: My name is Maggie Freeling.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: I'm a Pulitzer winning journalist and producer who has spent years reporting on the criminal legal system. That's how I first heard about this case and about Susan Galbreath.

00:04:34
Speaker 1: I didn't get a chance to meet Susan in person.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: She died in twenty eighteen at the age of fifty eight. A lot of what I've learned about Susan comes from her interviews with the press and her own writings emails I've had the chance to review, and from her testimony in the trial for the murder of Jessica Currn.

00:04:52
Speaker 6: When I was a child, I either wanted to be a comedian or a police officer. So I wn't neither, of course, but I've just always had fascination with the law and things like that.

00:05:08
Speaker 2: Susan Galbreath was born in Chicago and moved to Mayfield, Kentucky, in her early thirties. She liked living in a small town with a tight knit community, and she had a son she loved. But by the time her fortieth birthday.

00:05:22
Speaker 1: Hit, Susan was in a rut.

00:05:24
Speaker 2: A self described cigarette smoking, busybody. She was on her third marriage to a man who drank too much, and she'd lost her job from an injury she was aimless. On top of that, she had a string of deaths in her family.

00:05:38
Speaker 5: In nineteen ninety nine, I had the death of my brother, father, and mother, so it was a real rough year for me.

00:05:44
Speaker 2: Here she is talking to a local public radio station WKMS in twenty thirteen.

00:05:50
Speaker 5: And I think that I've always felt that I was meant to be there today that they've found Jessica's body, and I often refer to it as through her, somehow got my purpose back, because it was a real rough year in ninety nine.

00:06:09
Speaker 2: In her telling, Susan was sitting at a restaurant on a summer day when she overheard a waitress saying that police had found a body. What happened after that can only be described as spiritual, an epiphany of sorts. She just had to go to the scene of the crime and see it for herself, and what she found horrified and captivated her. She would spend every waking hour wondering what kind of monster could have done such a thing. But time passed and the case went unsolved, and after four years, the police had little to show for their work except for some failed leads and a string of rumors about what had happened to Jessica Curran. That's when Susan says her curiosity turned into an obsession. If the cops weren't going to crack the case, she would she'd play detective and string tidbits of information together chase leeds find the truth. But this amateur sleuth needed help, so she started emailing people important people like Oprah and Julia Roberts, anyone who could connect her to resources or give this case much needed attention, but she heard nothing.

00:07:29
Speaker 7: A federal investigation in Brooklyn.

00:07:31
Speaker 2: And then on TV one day she saw a British investigative journalist by the name of Tom Mingled.

00:07:38
Speaker 7: Bobbie revealing how they'd blind to see the manipulated the truth for forty years.

00:07:42
Speaker 6: So she wrote him as well, Date four four, two thousand and four from Susan g It chartered that net.

00:07:50
Speaker 2: This is Susan reading part of that email for a radio piece Tom produced for the BBC in twenty twelve. It was a retrospective on the work Susan ended up doing for the case.

00:08:01
Speaker 5: Hello, mister Mangold, I am writing concerning a murder in a small town in the state of Kentucky here in the US.

00:08:07
Speaker 1: The victim a beautiful eighteen year old black girl.

00:08:11
Speaker 2: Tom flew to Kentucky about a month after getting that email in two thousand and four. It was the beginning of a year's long partnership with Susan and the launch of their investigation.

00:08:27
Speaker 1: They were an odd duo.

00:08:29
Speaker 2: Here are segments on how they describe each other in Tom's radio piece.

00:08:33
Speaker 5: When I first met Tom, I thought he was prim and proper, like he had to stick up his ass.

00:08:39
Speaker 4: I mean, he was just really formal, you know.

00:08:42
Speaker 7: When I first met Susan, I liked her on site. She's chubby, lively, great sense of humor, sexy, deep voice, and passionate about the one thing she needed to be passionate about the murder of Jessica current.

00:08:54
Speaker 2: Tom, then in his late sixties, said he brought his experience as a seasoned investigative report and taught Susan how to parse gossip from truth. They drank bottles of Sauvignon blanc together, Chase Leeds discuss theories, and eventually they pinpointed a local girl who turned out to be key to solving the case.

00:09:18
Speaker 1: Victoria Caldwell.

00:09:19
Speaker 8: Doors Victoria Caldwell, and what did people call you? Victoria?

00:09:24
Speaker 2: She came forward saying she was an accomplice to the crime, and she ended up being the state's key witness.

00:09:32
Speaker 8: So in July too Fatus Power was here fifteen years old.

00:09:38
Speaker 2: Victoria's account about what happened to Jessica Curran would be the driving force in the conviction of her accused killers.

00:09:47
Speaker 6: Cavalovell Firsi's Quinsey Omar Crouch.

00:09:51
Speaker 1: This was the story Victoria told.

00:09:54
Speaker 2: We've edited her statements for length and warning it contains descriptions of physical and sexual violence.

00:10:03
Speaker 7: Vamos Victoria Bill.

00:10:06
Speaker 2: On a summer night in two thousand, Victoria says she was hanging out with a few kids from around town, including Jessica Curran and Venetia Stubblefield, all of them teenagers at the time. According to Victoria, they eventually ended up in a car with some older kids, all in their early twenties, including Victoria's cousin Tamra, Tamra's boyfriend Quincy Cross, and a guy they need from school named Jeff Burton, the only white person in the group.

00:10:33
Speaker 8: Well, whence he started passing out the drugs.

00:10:38
Speaker 1: Coke, She says. They did cocaine and other drugs in the.

00:10:42
Speaker 8: Car, yes, ecstasy.

00:10:45
Speaker 2: Tamra and Quincy were driving in the front with Jessica and they started touching her.

00:10:51
Speaker 8: Quincy and Tamar were rubbing on Justica's legs. She was told them to stop and no.

00:10:58
Speaker 6: Did they stop?

00:11:00
Speaker 7: No?

00:11:02
Speaker 3: I didn't want that.

00:11:03
Speaker 8: Then when we got to the driveway of jeff house, Quincy he wreked under the seat, and he had a bat and he hit her in her head.

00:11:31
Speaker 2: From Lava for Good, this has been a preview of Graves County, a new story of corruption and the fight for truth. Listen to the entirety of Graves County in the Bone Valley, feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts,