The man instructed her to hug Jennifer and Josh and she did so, promising each one of them that she would not contact the authorities. He then attempted to buy her loyalty. Handing her a watch that he wore on his own wrist, he apologized for taking her away from her son for the day and said the watch was for him. He once again led her outside alone. She watched the man concentrate as crocodile tears sprang to his eyes. In an elaborate show of manufactured emotion, he wiped his eyes and looked into hers. “You know, my son’s life depends on you not calling the police,” he warned. She took this to mean that he would harm his son if she alerted authorities about her kidnapping.
“I understand and I would never do that to you. I promise that I won’t go to the police,” she said. Erin held her breath and hoped her words would be enough to calm the man. She watched him stand aside as she opened her car door. She reached out to hug him, praying that it would convince him that she would protect him. In that moment, he allowed her to enter the vehicle, start it and drive away.14
Erin held her breath until she made it halfway down the street and then she finally exhaled. She jumped onto the expressway and sped toward Huntsville, immediately calling her son and his father to explain what had happened to her. Her ex-husband notified the police and Erin related her story in detail, praying that police would catch the man and that by the time they did, young Josh would be okay.
Chapter 9
Accused
After Erin reported the abduction, the police quickly descended on the motel room and within a very short period of time they took Gouker, Jahaira and Little Josh into custody. Officers quickly determined that Josh was the subject of an Amber Alert issued in Kentucky and they notified authorities in Louisville and Child Protective Services, informing the agency that they had found Josh and that they could pick the child up at their convenience. Child Protective Services made immediate arrangements for Little Josh’s return to Kentucky. Josh’s social worker flew to Alabama to retrieve him on June 18, 2011, and the two traveled by plane back to Kentucky. Josh was placed in the Home of the Innocents until further notice from the court.
Home of the Innocents, which first opened its doors in 1888, is a private, nonprofit entity that provides a home and services to children in crisis. Children who have been abused, neglected or abandoned receive both residential and community-based services at the facility. It was a whirlwind for Josh. Within a week, his father had ripped him from his home and school, fled with him to Alabama and forced Josh to watch as he took an innocent woman hostage along the way. Now his father had been arrested in Alabama and Josh had been placed in a home for children in crisis. It was more than any child should have to endure. If he could do anything, it would be to go back to the day the court gave his father temporary custody so that he could step up and beg the judge to allow him to stay with the Walsh family. His last few months had been a nightmare and Josh had no idea that things were about to get even worse than he could have imagined.1
Soon after Little Josh’s return to Louisville, Detective Russ asked Child Protective Services to bring Josh to the police station so that he could speak with him again regarding Trey’s death. Officers were suspicious of Gouker due to the abrupt way he had fled the state with his son. As they walked up the steps to the interview room, Russ informed Josh that he wanted to play several recordings for Josh and that the detective wanted to discuss those recordings with him.
At this point, Little Josh was happy to oblige. Many of Trey’s family and friends felt frustrated with the investigation and Josh completely understood that frustration. Nearly a month and a half had passed since Trey’s murder and the police weren’t giving them many answers. He wanted to help but he had heard rumblings in the neighborhood that people suspected his dad. This made him somewhat defensive. He did not want to believe that the man who fought for custody of him could be capable of hurting his stepbrother. However, after his father’s shenanigans in Alabama, he didn’t know what to believe anymore. He hoped his conversation with the officer could answer some of the questions.
“What’s on the disc?” Josh asked expectantly as he settled into one of the plastic chairs in the interview room. He was dressed casually in a cotton t-shirt with a red ball cap cocked slightly to the side.
“Oh, just one of the interviews we had with you earlier. You doing all right today?” Detective Russ asked as he also sat down and prepared to question the boy.2
Josh spoke briefly about the fact that he had arrived home from the strange adventure in Alabama late the prior evening. He was still exhausted from the flight and his days on the road with his father. Josh strained to listen as the detective started up the recorder, which replayed Josh’s conversation with Detective Maroni several hours after Trey’s body was found. He immediately replayed his own interview with Josh that had occurred as they sat in his police cruiser in his cousin’s driveway a few weeks before.
As the recording came to an end, Detective Russ looked toward Little Josh and purposefully asked, “So you understand my concern with your story, right?” The detective remained confused by what he believed were conflicting descriptions of Josh’s movements on the night of Trey’s death.
“Yes, sir,” Josh answered.
“I mean, I would think that your first story that you told Detective Maroni at the school is probably the true version of events, because [your cousin Cassi] says she doesn’t remember if you stayed there that night or not.”
“[My cousin’s boyfriend] does,” Josh piped up.
“No, [he didn’t] either.”
Little Josh looked at the detective knowingly. Everyone knew that his cousin’s boyfriend was a functioning alcoholic. “’Cause he was passed out on the couch.”
“I’m just telling you, so we need to work through what the truth really is, okay. Let’s kind of walk through this part first. Tell me the truth about that night.”
“We were on the back porch and it was me, him, Dad and Amanda. Dad and Amanda stayed on the porch the whole night evidently, because we were on the back porch and Trey told me that he was going to go take a shower and calm down for the night. I went to Cassi’s. I didn’t know if I was gonna sleep down there or down at Amanda’s, but I got comfortable down at Cassi’s and while watching a movie I fell asleep.”3
The detective seized the opportunity to once again ask about the discrepancy between Little Josh’s two most recent statements and his statement made at Liberty High School the day Trey’s body was found.
“I guess the first day, it was a bad day,” Little Josh explained. “You understand that, right?”
“Okay, but do you see what I am saying? Your stories aren’t making sense and I don’t want you to get jammed up in this murder case at all.”
“Okay,” Little Josh replied, nodding, “I don’t have nothing to do with it.”
“I think you were at the house that night.”
“I was not.”
“I think you saw him take a shower and put his clothes back on and I think you, him and your dad went back down to where this happened.”
“No, sir.”
Detective Russ thrust his cell phone onto the table and pointed to its buttons. “And let me just show you this real quick. See on my phone, a lot of people have these nowadays. It’s got a voice recorder on it. I can record and I can stop and then I can save it and play it.” He quickly recorded himself speaking and played the snippet back for Josh who sat quietly, wondering what the detective was implying. “See how it works?” Russ asked as he demonstrated the recording capabilities on his phone. “You would never know that I was recording a conversation. So if you talked to a few people and they were smart enough to do something similar to this…” he said, looking at Josh. The implication seemed to be that people had secretly recorded Little Josh confessing to Trey’s murder. Then the officer took things a step further as he claimed he also had text messages. “You’ve told your friends a few things, in a little more detail, about maybe what happened to Trey,”
he said.
“No,” Little Josh said.
“Yeah,” Russ responded.
“Like what?” Josh asked, disturbed that the officer seemed to be claiming that he had admitted to the murder and that the officer had texts or secret recordings to prove it. Josh knew that he’d said nothing of the sort.
“Why would some of your friends, male or female, come to me and say that you and your dad were talking about how you all have killed people before Trey was murdered? Trey was murdered in a similar fashion and you described how you and your dad would do it.”
“I have no idea. I get along with everybody…It’s a lie,” Little Josh responded. He knew he had never said anything like the horrible things Detective Russ was insinuating and he knew that no one would say he had.4
When Josh failed to cave, the detective took things a step further. He told Little Josh that while he, his father and Jahaira were in Alabama, she secretly recorded Josh stating that he kicked Trey in the head. Josh began to get upset.
“That didn’t happen. I never said that in my life!” he said, purposefully and forcefully. He could not believe that the detective was so matter-of-factly telling him that others had claimed he hurt Trey in any way. The detective was unrelenting and he immediately switched courses again, trying desperately to trip Josh up and trap him into admitting guilt in the murder.
“Okay, so your friends say you all talked about killing people a couple of weeks before the murder and Trey died similarly. Then there’s this girl in Alabama. You’re saying that she’s lying? Everybody’s lying?”
“That’s not true at all.”
“So they’re just all liars,” the detective said, tilting his head.
“I don’t know what they are. They aren’t telling the truth, so that must make them liars.”
Josh was conflicted. He could not believe that his father had involvement in Trey’s death. He and his father were trying to repair their relationship and after losing his mother, Little Josh had seized on the importance of family. When his father fought for custody of him, it felt good to know that someone cared. Kids love their parents, despite their faults. There wasn’t anything wrong with Josh loving his father. He had not known his father long enough to realize the deep-seated issues that plagued Gouker.
“It seems like everybody’s telling me stuff and to you everything’s like, no, no, no,” the detective said, imitating Josh’s denial of the allegations.
“I’ve never said anything like that.”
The detective began to question Josh about the events that occurred in Alabama, “So what’s the deal with the lady down there?” He was referring to Erin Specth and the ordeal Gouker perpetrated in Alabama when he kidnapped Specth at gunpoint. Josh felt his head spinning. By this point, Josh felt that the officer was just trying to get him to confess. He knew that he didn’t do anything wrong, but the repeated questioning and accusations would have made anyone nervous, especially a scared kid with no one to turn to.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk. I ain’t in that. I don’t feel comfortable talking about that. I had nothing to do with anything about that.”5
For the next several minutes, Detective Russ questioned Josh extensively about the events of the evening of May 10 and Josh continued to maintain that he left Amanda’s home prior to Trey’s shower and that he eventually stayed the night at his cousin Cassi’s house. The detective pressed him harder, trying to ascertain that Little Josh was at Amanda’s during the evening and not where he claimed.
“Well, you weren’t at Cassi’s,” the detective accused after summing up the evidence for the boy he was interrogating.
“I was!” Joshua insisted.
“And you may have been there at some point. You were there maybe after Trey took a shower and got dressed and he tried to leave and put his shoes back on, ’cause you saw all that. If your story is that you didn’t see him take a shower; you all weren’t getting ready for bed; you didn’t see him put his shoes back on or his clothes back on, then how can I believe anything else you are telling me?” He paused and looked at the boy across the table from him and shrugged, offering, “I can play it again if you want to hear it.”
Feeling antagonized, Little Josh quickly responded, “I heard everything.”
“I can play it again,” the detective provoked.
“I heard everything on the CD.”
“Well, I can play it again.”
Josh looked up at the detective. Becoming upset, he spoke, “You don’t have to trust me. I mean, you don’t know me.” He began to feel desperate, knowing that no matter what he said to the man in front of him, he was not going to believe him. He’d never felt so alone.
Russ answered, “I mean, if you’re lying about that, then how do I know you’re telling the truth about anything else?”
Josh looked him in the eye, “That’s just a chance you have to take.”6
“I mean, do you see all the information I’m gettin’ from lots of different people, from phone records, from autopsy reports?” the detective asked as he gazed at the boy before him.
Josh was indignant. This was not right. He knew he didn’t say anything the officer was questioning him about but he didn’t know how to convince him. He felt, at that point, any efforts to do so would prove fruitless. “I can tell you I never once talked about killing Trey or kicking Trey in the head. Me, Trey and my Dad were not smoking weed together at nine thirty-seven. That’s all false,” he said, referring to the previous scenario thrown out by the detective that Trey, Josh and Gouker smoked weed together at “The Spot” directly prior to Trey’s death. He softened and looked toward the detective, realizing he was getting worked up and that his discomfort was growing. “I would talk to somebody about that if I had your job. I would be doing the same thing and I understand why you are doing it. But I had nothing to do with it.”
The detective leaned closer to the boy and asked, “You had time to think about what happened down there that night?”
“I mean, it’s just blank in my head. Everybody’s talking about it. I don’t know what could possibly have happened,” Little Josh said, shaking his head slowly and biting his lip.
“My feeling is you know more than you are telling me.”
“That’s not true.”
The detective leaned toward him and calmly asked, “Did you know your dad tried to call me twice yesterday?”
“No, I didn’t know. I haven’t talked to my dad since the police arrested him in Alabama.”
“And you want, you want to find the person responsible for Trey?”
Josh jerked his head up, astonished that the detective would even ask him that question. “Well, of course! What kind of question is that? Yeah, I do!”
“That’s not the question I am asking.”
“As much as anybody else.”
“Your honesty is important in this investigation.”
“I understand and I told you, I had nothing to do with it.”
Russ continued to repeat the questions, attempting to lead Josh toward the night of Trey’s death. “You said ten minutes ago that if you had my job, you would ask the same questions.”
“Yeah, but not keep on going and going and saying that you think I know more, which I don’t. I think that’s harassment. That’s calling me a liar.”
“Well I think, I think I can play it again if you want to hear your statement, which to me, you’re a liar,” Detective Russ accused.
“I am sorry if you think that, sir…I was in shock that day along with everybody else,” Josh explained as he remembered the heavy feeling weighing on him when they learned Trey was missing and that a body was located at the high school. It had been a terrifying experience that had quite literally torn his world apart. He’d lost another family member barely a year after he found his own mother dead. It was a jarring episode and he had little recollection of any of the events from that day.
“Well, I hope you are telling me the truth. There are certain th
ings I heard on the recording and in your own words. I know it is not the truth.” The detective stared at Josh and paused slightly then continued, his words softening, “I just want to give you one last opportunity to tell me the truth.”
“I told you the truth,” Little Josh offered, frustrated that no matter how many times he told the detective how little he remembered, the man continued to ask the very same questions.7 Josh had seen enough episodes of procedural police shows to feel the police asked repetitive questions to try and persuade a person to change his story. He had also seen episodes of the very same shows in which police officers got the story wrong and innocent people went to prison for things they hadn’t done. He was getting more frightened and felt terribly alone.
“I’d like to go now. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with this whole thing,” Josh said, shutting down. He now understood that the detectives felt that he had something to do with Trey’s death and that really scared him. When Little Josh left the police station, he knew that he would have to go back to the Home of the Innocents, where he would remain in foster care away from anyone that he felt he could trust or turn to. Josh had no idea what he was going to do.
The detective asked Josh to sit tight as he went to retrieve the boy’s social worker so that she could transport him back to the Home of the Innocents. Russ rose deliberately and strode toward the door. Turning slightly, he regarded the boy in the red hat once again. “I’m just gonna close this door until your worker comes up so that nobody knows your business,” he said. “There are a lot of things going on here with other stuff.”
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