Even once apprehended, Gouker refused to go down without a fight and continued to wrestle with the police in an attempt to escape. To the officers’ credit, they were able to quickly subdue him and place him in handcuffs. For the second time in just a few months, Gouker was charged with a violent felony offense. He was lodged in Louisville Metro Corrections where he remained as he awaited trial. The violence did not stop there.
Even while incarcerated, Gouker could not let go of his need for brutality and threats. Only a week after he was taken into custody, he made a phone call to Steven, a witness in one of his pending cases. He warned Steven that he would eventually get out of custody and that he knew Steven had spoken to police about the way Gouker had tortured him in the month before his most recent arrest. He told Steven that when he was released from jail, the first thing he planned to do was track him down and kill him.
Gouker and another man had previously lured Steven to a basement and held him throughout the night. Steven was tied to a chair and beaten and assaulted until the early morning hours of the following day. Gouker either believed the man had stolen from him or was a “rat” and had informed the police of Gouker’s illegal activities. After enduring a horrific night of torture, the victim was able to escape captivity and had reported the incident to police, revealing that while Gouker was beating him, he’d had no idea whether he would live or die.11
After he received the phone call from Gouker, the terrified Steven immediately reported the call to police. Jail telephone calls are recorded, so the allegation was easily verified and Gouker once again found himself charged with a serious felony offense. As he sat in jail in October 2002, Gouker faced a slew of violent felony charges and any hopes that he had of release in the near future were dwindling fast.
Gouker faced the initial charge of assault third degree for his fight with the police officer in the spring of 2002. That charge alone was punishable by up to five years in prison. He also faced a robbery first degree charge stemming from his attack on the elderly man who was nice enough to give him a ride. That charge carried a penalty of ten to twenty years in the penitentiary and another indictment charged Gouker with assault second degree, intimidating a witness in a legal proceeding, resisting arrest and criminal mischief second degree for holding Steven against his will in the basement and torturing him, as well as the subsequent call from prison when he threatened Steven’s life. He faced up to fifteen years on that indictment alone.
Gouker’s brutal ways had caught up with him and it appeared that even the best legal team available could not dig him out of the violent hole he had dug for himself. In the end, Gouker was ordered to serve one long prison term with the sentence in each of the charges ordered to run consecutively into each other. If Gouker were to serve the entire prison sentence, it would be at least a decade until he was a free man.
In Kentucky, most inmates will not serve their sentences in their entirety. In fact, most offenses are parole eligible after the inmate has served 20 percent of the sentence. However, some crimes are classified as “violent” offenses and any sentence imposed for such charges is not eligible for parole until the defendant has served 85 percent of the sentence.
The robbery first degree charge Gouker obtained was one such offense. In order to be eligible for parole on a robbery first degree charge, Gouker would need to serve no less than 1,551 days in custody. Unfortunately, his charge was amended to robbery second degree, a lesser offense than robbery first degree and, therefore, Gouker would be parole eligible after only 20 percent of his sentence. It was unlikely that the parole board would grant early release to him but it would review his case after he served 20 percent of the sentence. Gouker still received a substantial prison term for his offenses and his victims surely felt that they could rest easy knowing Gouker would spend at least some of his next nine years safety secluded in a Kentucky prison. They had confidence that the parole board would keep him locked away. They probably all hoped they had seen the last of Gouker.
However, Gouker believed they would see him sooner than they expected. He stayed busy in prison compiling a list of people on whom he wanted to exact revenge when he was released. He had nothing but time and a penchant for violence. At age twenty-four, Gouker knew that he had many years left to live, so he spent a great deal of time plotting his movements when his release finally came and he was confident that it would come one day. He enjoyed fantasizing about the people he would kill after the Department of Corrections released him and he spent a lot of time planning how he would kill each one. It kept him busy.12
He also stayed busy penning rap song lyrics that predicted the savagery that would underscore his future. In one rap song he wrote, he talked about killing a woman he felt had betrayed him: “Alright you deceiving bitch, you can scream to the top of your lungs/But I’m going to stick one of these nails through your lying tongue.” The song went on, “I’m gonna scalp you from your forehead and cut off your titties too/What’s that? You’re pregnant—again? Do you think it’s a son or a daughter?/We’ll find out in a minute, cause we’re gonna play doctor/Why couldn’t you live the life and the lie that you told?!/You’ve turned my heart from pure to black and cold.”13
The long, horrifying song concluded, “Back at the house when I killed that kid, it was easy cause he had your eyes/He would have ended up full grown, learning from you telling lies/Your whole body is shaking, it’s probably going through shock/Since you ain’t feeling no more pain, I guess I’ll go ahead and stop.”
Gouker drafted these lyrics in 2004 while he was serving his long prison sentence. It seemed that sadistic violence remained on his mind for the duration of that incarceration and his untreated mental illness was likely raging out of control. Even while in custody, he retained the ability to control friends, family members and associates on the outside. Gouker manipulated everyone and did not appear to mind dragging other people into the chaos that was his life.
Gouker’s twisted rap lyrics did not surface until years later. When Gouker was eventually released from prison in 2010, he took most of his belongings to his mother’s home. Although he did not plan to live with her, he stored several boxes in her basement. This rap song would eventually surface and be important.
During Gouker’s incarceration in his early twenties, Ruby was a regular visitor and she appeared to succumb to any request her son made of her. Ruby was no angel. By the time she visited her son at the Green River Correctional Complex in September 2007, she had amassed a criminal history of shoplifting and possession of drug paraphernalia, but those charges were nothing in comparison to what Gouker convinced her to do during that visit in September.
Narcotics are a hot commodity within prison walls. Gouker had the bright idea that he could make some money and amass a stash of drugs for his own use if only he could smuggle some product into the prison. Ruby made regular trips to see her son and by this point was in her forties. He felt the officers responsible for searching visitors would not regard her as suspicious or a threat. He convinced his mother to sneak marijuana and prescription pills into the facility. Things did not go according to plan and she was caught. Officers charged her with promoting contraband in the first degree, a Class D felony. The case eventually worked out as a misdemeanor, with Ruby pleading guilty to promoting contraband in the second degree and serving thirty days in jail.14 However, the implication was clear. She would do anything for her son, including serving jail time. Gouker, it seemed, could convince anyone to do anything and did not think twice about placing loved ones, even his mother, in a precarious position where she could get in serious trouble.
As Gouker spent years locked up throughout his twenties, outside the prison walls the various players in Trey’s short life were going on with their own. Gouker, however, spent his time planning ways he could tear all of their lives apart once he was released.15
Chapter 4
Little Josh
Josh Gouker had dated a woman named Angelina Young before he went to ja
il. Angelina, or “Angie” as she was called, was a beautiful girl, petite and slim. Her golden blonde hair fell lushly down her back. Angie had large, round eyes, fair skin and was quick to break into a gleaming smile. She turned heads everywhere she went and it was easy to see why Gouker was romantically interested in her. Most men who met Angie were immediately attracted to her and she had no shortage of suitors throughout her life.
Angelina was a year older than Josh Gouker. She was sixteen years old when they began dating. Her mother was not happy about the budding relationship, but Angie assured her that there was no harm in dating Gouker. Soon after the pair became a couple, Angie learned that she was pregnant. She and Gouker eventually married after their baby was born. Both were teenagers when Angie gave birth to their son, Joshua Young, on January 6, 1996. Immediately, Joshua became the light of Angie’s life. The little blond-haired baby was her spitting image. Everyone who saw them together remarked on how sweet the baby was and how he looked exactly like Angie.
Angie was so proud of him and looked forward to marking all the milestones in his life. She saved her money to take Josh to the mall photographers to take their “family” pictures, just she and him. From the start, they were inseparable, two against the world. She was young but she was determined to be a great mother to her son.
For the first year of little Joshua’s life, Angie tried to make things work with Gouker. She got along with his family and she wanted the relationship to work out for the sake of their son. She desperately desired a two-parent family for Joshua. She wanted to give him the best life possible. She tried to keep strong ties between the baby and both sides of his family. She did her best to take little Joshua on regular visits to her own mother and Gouker’s mother.
To all who knew him, Josh Gouker appeared to love his son, whom friends and family affectionately called “Little Josh.” Naturally, when people began referring to Joshua Junior as “Little Josh,” Gouker became known to friends and loved ones as “Big Josh.” Angie knew that Gouker could be affectionate with their son and that he was proud of him, deriving a type of self-worth from the knowledge that he had impregnated Angie and produced a son, his namesake. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right with her husband and his parenting style. He could be aggressive with the baby and he did not seem to have the nurturing capacity necessary to raise a child.
Angie’s marriage to Gouker did not last. He was his normal, violent self with her and Angie seemed to know that he was not father figure material. He may have been Joshua’s biological father, but that didn’t mean Little Josh needed to grow up thinking it was okay for Gouker to act the way he did. If she stayed with him, Angie knew she would be setting a terrible example for her son. Angie realized that she needed to part ways with Gouker and decided to file for divorce. By January 1998, that divorce was final and Angie attempted to move on with her life.
By that point, Angie had taken out an emergency protective order against her ex-husband. She was scared of him and what he was capable of doing and she did not want to expose her baby to his propensity for that kind of behavior. She was thankful they were officially divorced but she was also aware of Gouker’s track record of bad conduct after breakups. She did not want to take any chances. Joshua was only a year old at the time. Yet she was hopeful that Gouker’s harassment would finally end. She just wanted to focus on her life and raising her sweet baby. She had lived in fear of Gouker for quite a while and finally she could start rebuilding her life.
Gouker did not take the situation well. He continued to harass Angie, especially over the phone. On one such occasion, Angie had had enough. Gouker obviously had no hang-ups about violating the protective order, so she would have to take even more drastic measures. She drove directly to the county attorney’s office in downtown Louisville and filed a complaint. Shortly thereafter, a judge entered a warrant for Gouker’s arrest on charges of custodial interference, violating an emergency protective order and harassing communications. Gouker would eventually serve six months on the charge.
After the final domestic violence order was entered against Gouker, Angie was successful in cutting off contact with him, especially once he went to prison. However, she did allow Little Josh to maintain contact with his father’s side of the family, especially Gouker’s mother. It was Ruby who took Joshua on the rare visits he had with his father in prison while Gouker served his nine-year sentence for his violent crimes. During that nine-year span, Little Josh visited his father four or five times in the company of his grandmother. He never quite knew what to think of his father. The visits were short and supervised and his father never felt like a true, present father. Josh did not know what it felt like to have a father who was there for his day-to-day activities. It was something that he had never experienced. Instead, he had sporadic visits in a cold penitentiary with a man he barely knew.1
When he was ten years old, Josh’s grandmother took him to visit Gouker. It was nerve-wracking for the boy when he went on these rare visits. He later recalled his stomach was aching as his grandmother pulled her vehicle up the winding driveway to the prison. His dad tried to act nice to him but both Gouker and the stifling walls of the penitentiary were imposing and intimidating to the boy. They had to pass through metal detectors before they could reach the interior of the building where his father waited for him. It was a place that Little Josh knew he never wanted to live. It was scary.2
As they entered the visiting room, he immediately spotted Gouker. It had been almost a year since the last time he saw his father and the ten-year-old surveyed the scene, noticing that his father, clad in the short-sleeved jumpsuit indicative of his status as an inmate, had shaved his hair into a Mohawk. Joshua noticed the familiar two-word tattoo that adorned his father’s right forearm: Bad Ass. He felt his legs shake a little. Gouker strode quickly toward Little Josh and Ruby and quickly enveloped Ruby in a hug. Whipping out her camera, Ruby was permitted to take a picture of her son and grandson. Gouker stood behind Little Josh, wrapping both arms around him, head tilted to the side with his best convict expression on his face. Joshua pressed his lips together tightly, willing himself to smile.
Gouker was his father and Joshua knew his grandmother expected him to look up to the man and to respect him as his dad. In some ways he did love him, but even at that young age, he realized on some level that his father was different and his interactions with the man were limited. It is understandable that a child, especially the child of an absent parent, would still have love for that parent.
Little Josh’s relationship with his mother was a different story. Angie loved her little boy, whom she affectionately referred to as “Joshy.” He was a sweet, fun-loving little boy and he was very smart. She was proud of him and she tried her best to be a good mother. Angie didn’t have a lot of money or material things but she lavished what she could on her son. The two were living in an apartment house, where incidentally, Trey Zwicker also lived at the time with his own mother, Amanda. It was just the two of them there in their tiny home. Angie felt a great sense of independence living on her own and taking care of her little boy. She told herself that the public assistance was only temporary. They needed a little help and she was grateful that the state was willing to aid them. She was not getting any form of child support from Little Josh’s father due to his incarceration. She was on her own. She was still a very young woman in her early twenties and was trying very hard to make things work. She never wanted Little Josh to realize how she struggled with money, so she put a lot of effort into making sure that he always got everything he needed and special treats.
At the beginning of each month, Angie received her monthly allotment of food stamps. Then she and Little Josh went to the grocery store together to gather the monthly food and drinks for their apartment. Angie always made a big production of apportioning a certain amount of the food budget for Joshua’s treats.3
It was very exciting for a little boy. He could dash up and down the aisles
at the grocery store and pick out the candy and goodies he wanted. He also had to learn to count the dollar amounts of the products to make sure that they fell under the preset amount of money Angie allotted to him. Sometimes, he got to spend up to one hundred dollars on all the foods he loved. This time with his mother was something that he would always remember. He was the number one person in her world and Angie tried to do everything within her means to make sure that Little Josh felt special and that he always felt loved. He always did. Even as a little boy, he knew that despite his mother’s faults, she loved him dearly and would do anything within her power for him.
Joshua was a good student. However, it is difficult for a child to excel in his education when he is constantly moving around and changing schools. Joshua attended school in the Kentucky public school systems in both Jefferson County and Bullitt County. Those systems were broken into three different levels. Elementary school was grades one through five, middle school was grades six through eight and high school was comprised of grades nine through twelve.
Looking back years later at the early days of his education, Little Josh would come to the realization that he had attended eight different elementary schools. It was a shocking number. This is almost unheard of for a young child. It is amazing that Joshua was able to do as well as he did in school given his spotty attendance record and lack of stability. In addition to living in different places with his mom, Josh also lived sporadically in homes with relatives when his mother had trouble making ends meet or when she served various prison terms.
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