“But you say he never physically hurt you?”
“No, we’ve never been in no physical…he’s never punched me,” she quickly responded, making excuses for her husband.
Detective Russ looked up, astonished, remembering anecdotes others had told him about the relationship between Amanda and Josh Gouker, “But didn’t he hang you over a balcony?”
“That was many, many years ago and it wasn’t…”
“Well, that’s part of never. I mean…” Detective Russ was skeptical.
Amanda was quick to defend Gouker for his behavior at the motel: “That’s not, there wasn’t, that was more of a show,” she insisted.3
“That’s a pretty serious show.”
“Yeah well, back then he was a different person.”
“Right, and I’m just asking you. I am not trying to be disrespectful. I’m just trying to find out…you say never, but then we hear that he hung…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head.
“Well we, he never…” She paused, pondering. “I’ve been in physical altercations before with men in my life in many different relationships.” This was true. Amanda had emergency protective orders in more than one previous relationship. It appeared that Amanda had not participated in a relationship during her adult life that was not marred by domestic violence.
“Right.”
“I haven’t had that issue with Josh. He’s been a different person since he got out of jail. He sincerely apologized for anything, any wrongdoings he ever caused.”
“Um hmm.”
“And I sincerely believe him and I still believe him to this day. He loves me and I love him.”
“Right.”
“And I truly, honestly, wholeheartedly believe that he’s my mate for life. We’re a good team. Like I said, we have a lot of passion between us. We think alike. The only thing we don’t have alike is we can’t stand to watch television shows together. He likes sports and I like soaps and all that.”
“And you said there was no discipline with him and Trey?” Russ asked.
“No, he did not discipline my child. The worst he ever did was sometimes Trey might sneak into the bedroom and steal loose change or whatever, so Josh put a lock on the door to keep Trey from stealing change.”
“Right.”
“We just know that Trey was going in there and I told my son not to go in my room. I have adult toys in there and he ran across them once. So I’ve had to keep my door locked.”
“I understand.”
“He’s a teenage boy,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
“I understand,” Detective Russ nodded. “What about when you and Josh had verbal altercations or fights or anything, how did Trey react to that?”
“It hurt his feelings. Of course it would; any kid is going to take their parent’s side. So, when I’m mad at Josh, my kid is going to be mad at Josh.”4
“Trey’s a big boy,” the detective observed. “I mean he was one hundred and eighty pounds.”
Amanda nodded, “He is a big kid.”
“Was there ever a point where he confronted Josh and said ‘Look, you’re not going to do this to my mom. I’m not gonna take it.’”
Amanda pursed her lips and looked upward. “One time they talked,” she said, her eyes beginning to well with tears. “And Trey said, look, just don’t make my mom cry. It hurts me,” she said, clutching her arms across her stomach. “He said, I don’t care if you come back in her life. Just don’t make my mom cry.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Maybe a few weeks,” she replied, shaking her head slowly. She paused slightly and seemed to ponder everything, “We have not had a drama-filled life, other than mine and Josh’s spats. What we fight over is just testing each other’s patience. Like, I texted a friend looking for another friend’s phone number for work, ’cause the number was disconnected, so I texted another friend and said ‘miss ya’ at the end. So I come home and my phone is sitting there and he’s like, ‘who’s this man you missed?’”
“Yeah.”
“You know, so that caused a little argument and that was our last breakup. That’s what we broke up over,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I told another man I missed him and it was actually just a friend!”
“About how long ago was that?”
“Like about two weeks ago, I am guessing, it’s hard to…I mean just one week. It’s been a hard week. Or maybe a week before that. I’m guessing maybe two weeks, three weeks. I don’t know. We break up often because we are just learning each other.”
“None of those injuries you had and I know it’s hard to answer these questions, none of those injuries we thought you had on your neck; you say they are hickeys?” Detective Russ raised his eyebrows, gesturing toward Amanda’s neck.
“All hickeys,” she insisted.
“They’re not, umm, some of them look like bruises around your neck.”
“No,” she said, emphatically shaking her head from side to side.
“The ones on your arms, none of them are bruises or anything like that?”
“Promise you,” she replied, looking directly into the detective’s eyes and raising her hand.5
He tried asking one more time: “Nothing over that ‘miss you’ text resulted in any kind of big knock-down, drag-out fight?”
“Nothing. I promise to God; those are passionate love,” she said, her face pale and serious.
“But he was upset obviously, because you all broke up. Do you think he would ever say, ‘Hey, I’ll do something to Trey to show her?’”
Amanda shook her head and vigorously protested, “No, never. You ask any kid that’s ever met [Big] Josh. Every kid loves him. You ask any kid. I’m telling you. Every kid loves Josh. He protects people that are weaker than him. He takes care of kids. Ask Little Josh’s half-sister. She loves Big Josh. He’s great with kids. He’s got a big heart. He grew up with a great man, but his mom was not a great woman.”
“What about the whole bird story that I heard about?” Detective Russ asked.
“You heard that story from my mom,” Amanda replied matter-of-factly.
“Well, I heard it from some neighbors too.”
“That’s because Josh told ’em. Josh walks out back and a bird come flying and he saw it out of his peripheral. He raised his arm up and he hit the bird, just like that. It wasn’t nothing murderous. It wasn’t nothing violent. He just seen something flying toward his head out of his peripheral,” she reiterated.
“Right.”
“And he went like that,” she said, raising her hand in the air and swinging it back and forth, “And he hit the bird. The bird laid on the ground and he said, ‘Ya’ll come look at this with me and my mom.’”
“Okay, it was some other people. It wasn’t your mom I heard it from.”
“There’s nothing to hide,” she stated, minimizing Gouker’s third occasion of harming an animal. The detective sensed that Amanda was beginning to bristle at his questioning regarding Joshua Gouker, so he switched gears and began speaking to her about Trey. He wanted to know the identity of Trey’s close friends. He needed to get to the bottom of why Trey was at the creek bed in the late night hours of May 10, 2011, and he wanted to know who might have been with him.
Amanda began speaking about Trey’s circle of friends. She had no idea who would hurt her son. He was well liked in the neighborhood. “I have wracked my brain and wracked my brain,” Amanda said. “I can’t think of who would do him harm or why else he would go there. There’s gotta be…he only had this one friend circle that I knew of and every one of his friends are here on a regular basis.”
Amanda began naming Trey’s close friends.
“And these are all the kids that are always around each other?” asked Stalvey.
“Yeah, always. They attend school together and I attended school with their parents and their parents attended school with my parents. This is a very close-knit community, this one street. From the end to the other end
, we all grew up together. We are all related in some way or another or connected in some way or another.”
“Have you heard about anybody out here shooting at anybody?”6
Amanda shook her head, “Never. I mean, you hear gunshots all the time. You’re not far from Newburg. You’re not far from the apartments and there’s rednecks up and down the street. It’s common to hear gunshots. On big holidays, you hear a lot of it around here, but it’s not rare to hear it in the middle of the summertime for no reason. Just these redneck men shootin’ ’em off in their backyards. But this is not a violent neighborhood,” Amanda paused, likely thinking about the events of the past week that had turned her life upside down. “At least, it wasn’t a violent neighborhood,” she added quietly.
As Detective Russ reentered the conversation, he began to question Amanda regarding the boys that she identified as Trey’s closest friends, “Do you think [these individuals are] capable of hurting Trey?”
“No, no.”
Amanda quickly interrupted the questioning. She did not believe any of Trey’s friends were involved in his murder. “None of these boys. They love each other. They are family…they grew up together. They love each other, from kindergarten up…” she trailed off. “They were in my dad’s wedding. I mean we’re, everybody’s happy people.”
The detective could clearly see the pain in Amanda’s eyes and it was obvious that it was difficult for her to function. She had mentioned earlier that she felt the detectives had abandoned her and that she believed they were not keeping her aware of how the investigation was going. Detective Russ addressed those concerns: “When I talked to you this morning on the phone, you said something about how you felt like I had abandoned you and that kind of confused me. I wasn’t really sure what you were talking about, because I’ve been in constant contact with you the best I could and Josh and Terry. I kind of felt just the way you felt about me, ’cause you’ve not called me one time since this happened, so I kind of felt like maybe you abandoned me. I’ve asked you to come to the office a few times and you wouldn’t do that.”
Amanda hung her head and closed her eyes, “I don’t wanna leave the house and I say y’all can come here. I just don’t want to go out. I don’t want to go out and for some reason, maybe it was misunderstood, but I was under the impression that you wanted me to take a lie detector test the day after my son was put in the grave.”
“I never once told anybody. I never told Josh that. I never told your mother that. I never told Terry. I never once asked you to take a polygraph. Never once did I bring that up…Listen to me, the way you could have confirmed that is you simply could have called me. I’ve not got one phone call from you and it concerns me a little bit.”
She was emphatic, “I have nothing to hide. I need to know what happened to my kid. The school never called me…I just need to know. I need someone to help me find out what happened to my kid.”
“We are. I’m gonna do the absolute best I can, to follow every bit of leads and evidence that we can, but I also need your help.”
“You’ve got my help.”
“Like I told Josh, in the big scheme of things right now, some of the answers you are wanting, are not…” He paused. “They can’t be answered. The only person that does know what happened, is the person that did it. The problem is, if we say anything and it gets out and then gets to the papers and then gets to the media, it gets distorted. We simply can’t do anything that is going to compromise the investigation. We’d rather catch a murderer than appease everybody with certain bits of information.”
Seeming to understand, Amanda nodded. She appeared to want answers, but one could see she did not want anything to interfere with the investigation. The most important thing to her was learning who killed her son. Gouker had achieved his goal of isolating Amanda and she did not have a lot of people to turn to. She surely felt that her family and people on the street hated her and Gouker. She described this to police as they closed the interview with questions regarding the atmosphere in the area in the aftermath of Trey’s death. Detectives were beginning to realize that Gouker was unpopular on the street and they wanted to know why.
It seemed the neighborhood already understood what Amanda had yet to realize. Gouker was a dangerous man and the street was a better place when he was not living on it. Within months of him returning to the neighborhood, a child was dead.
The detectives assured her that they would get her the answers she so desperately needed but it could take time. As they spoke, Amanda became increasingly upset and began to cry. Preparing to end the interview, Detective Russ attempted to calm her. “Sometimes these things don’t get resolved, obviously, overnight. We are looking at over a week now. So, I mean, I’m gonna be working it til I retire. I’m hoping we can get something resolved quickly, but sometimes it takes time. Evidence gets processed at a slow pace sometimes and we just gotta make sure we get it right.” With that sentiment, they ended the conversation with Amanda and she was left alone in the house to think about her talk with the detectives.
They had asked a lot of questions about her husband and it was unsettling. Prior to her meeting with Detectives Stalvey and Russ, she had not allowed herself to consider the possibility that Gouker would hurt Trey or could be involved. However, after her conversation with the detectives, she must have started to wonder. After all, she was aware that Gouker did have a violent streak. Her memory had to have been jogged. Was it possible that Gouker had left her bed the night of Trey’s death? Was it possible that he was involved?
Detective Russ had brought up serious doubts about her husband’s involvement in Trey’s death. The police asked so many questions about him. Gouker seemed to be their main focus that evening. Amanda began to secretly pack a bag, apparently waiting for a chance to escape. She was scared of Gouker and that fear was due to more than the way he treated her. The questioning must have given her serious reservations about him and she probably believed that she and her daughter were no longer safe in the house with him.
On May 30, she took her chance to get away. She slung her bag into her car and drove to her mother’s house in Shepherdsville, a city in Bullitt County about twenty minutes outside of Louisville. The calls from Gouker started almost immediately. He threatened her mother that she needed to disclose Amanda’s whereabouts. He attempted to intimidate her mom, stating that he wanted to kill Amanda and himself. Amanda’s mother would not answer his questions and tried to avoid Gouker as well. He was acting crazy and was quickly spiraling out of control.
Amanda was terrified and had to have become even more convinced that Gouker was capable of anything. One day she rushed to the courthouse to take out an emergency protective order against him. She feared for her life and her daughter’s safety. She was so terrified that she called the Sheriff’s Department and deputies escorted her to the court clerk’s office to initiate the petition.7 She also met with the county attorney’s office where she was staying and she pressed charges for harassing communications, because Gouker would not leave her alone. A warrant was issued for his arrest.8 Coupled with her already debilitating grief for her son, Gouker’s harassment was overwhelming. Amanda was scared and said she wanted nothing further to do with her husband.
She would do whatever the detectives asked of her. They appeared to suspect that Gouker was involved or knew more than he was telling. She was forced to agree and the guilt was devastating. The question resounded: Had she brought a monster into her home, a monster so vile and horrendous that he had killed her only son?
Chapter 7
Covering the Bases
Little Josh was at Cassi’s house when he received a phone call from his father. Gouker had spoken with the police and they wanted to talk with Little Josh again regarding the timeline of events on the night Trey died. Detective Russ was on his way to the house, so Little Josh stood near the front door waiting for him to arrive.
It was a little after 4:00 P.M. when Scott Russ’s police cruiser slid into t
he tiny driveway at Cassi’s house. Josh was waiting on the porch for him and was speaking on the telephone. As he watched the car turn slowly into the driveway, Little Josh quickly disconnected his call and approached the cruiser.
“Hey, what’s up, man?” Detective Russ yelled out. “If you just wanna come out here and have a seat in my car, it will be cool. It won’t take but a minute.”
Josh jogged around to the passenger side door and opened it gingerly, nodding to the officer as he slid into the vehicle. Josh listened as the detective explained his purpose for visiting the home: “I just talked to your dad on the phone. He said it was cool to just come by and talk to you real quick.”
“Yeah,” Little Josh nodded as he listened to the detective speak.
“And, like I say, I’m not here to yell at you, scream or to jam you up or anything. I just want to talk to you, because I know the female detective that spoke to you that day over there at the school and there’s just some stuff I wanted to ask you about, to kinda clarify.” He looked at the skinny boy crouched in his passenger seat. “Try to get comfortable. You want a mint or anything?” The detective held out a package of mints in his right hand, offering one to the boy.
Josh shook his head as he looked at the officer, “Nah, I’m good.”
Detective Russ turned toward the boy as much as possible in the tight space of the car and began to verify the background information that he had for Josh. Within minutes, he began to discuss the events of May 10, 2011: “Let’s just kind of go back real quick, over to the night, I guess the night they had the cookout.”
As he led Josh through the events of that evening, the boy named the people present at the cookout and detailed the evening’s timeline. As Josh narrated the events as the cookout came to a close, Detective Russ began to narrow in on when Trey decided to take his nightly shower, “Okay. What about, I guess when everybody leaves. What do you all do then?”
“Well, Trey, he was going in to take a shower, so I came down here,” he gestured toward his cousin Cassi’s house, “and started watching movies. I ended up falling asleep down here. He said he was going to take a shower and just calm down for the night, so I came down here and watched movies.”1
Accused Page 9