It was obvious that Amanda’s brother felt great sadness recounting his final day with his nephew and he clearly despised Gouker. As he left the witness box, he was understandably overcome with emotion.
Immediately after he exited the courtroom, his sister, Trey’s mother, next took the stand. It was clear that Amanda grieved for her son. She also likely felt tremendous guilt that she had brought Gouker into her home, giving him access to Trey.
Although her hurt was evident, Amanda appeared to minimize the abuse Gouker rendered in her home and she also testified that he did not live in the house. This was in direct contrast to the emergency protective order that she sought after Trey’s death. In her request for the order, she stated that Gouker had lived with her for the previous seven months. As she testified, she stated that Gouker never lived with her and only stayed the night occasionally. According to Amanda, he did not keep clothes or toiletries at her house and actually lived with Cassi and her family two doors down.
It is likely that Amanda’s testimony was a coping mechanism. She did not want to admit to herself and the world that she had allowed a monster into her home. She did not want people to think that she had failed to protect her child. She struggled with believing that the person who claimed to love her could hurt her and her family in the way Gouker had.
Only a small portion of her testimony touched on her relationship with Josh Young. According to Amanda, she and Josh always got along fine and she thought that he got along well with her son. The judge allowed the attorneys to question Amanda by avowal and outside the presence of the jurors. During that questioning, she told the judge and attorneys that Little Josh was a jokester and liked to tease others in a mean-spirited way. However, Pete Schuler reminded her that in an interview with Detective Russ shortly after Trey’s death, she had indicated that Josh, Trey and their friends in the neighborhood “loved each other.” She did not mention any problems between Josh and Trey.
Amanda’s testimony was heartwrenching. Losing one’s child is the most difficult thing a mother can bear. However, when she minimized Gouker’s role in her household and denied that he lived there, it invited skepticism about her statements since previously filed court documents clearly showed that he had.
As the trial crept along, Judge Willett allowed the defense to call their first witness out of order, interrupting the prosecution’s case-in-chief. During the course of preparing Joshua’s defense, his defense team had consulted with an expert regarding Trey’s cause of death. That witness, Dr. George Nichols, ran a consulting firm and was only available on August 2 to present his testimony in the case. Courts will often allow a professional who is called as an expert witness to give his or her testimony out of order to accommodate the professional’s schedule.
Gray-haired and distinguished, Dr. Nichols was a highly effective witness with impressive credentials as a pathologist that supported his expertise and testimony. Dr. Nichols approached the witness box in a gray suit.
He projected confidence indicative of his experience in the field of forensic pathology as he began by giving the jurors a short pathology lesson and detailed his education and career in the field. He had worked as a deputy coroner in Hamilton County, Ohio, for several years as well as a chief medical examiner for over twenty years. During the seventies, eighties and nineties, he served as a part-time faculty member at the University of Louisville and was president of an anatomical laboratory. By the time of the trial, he owned a consulting firm, through which he was routinely retained for forensic evaluation of legal issues.
Dr. Nichols revealed that he had previously testified in over one thousand trials, both for the defense and the prosecution. On June 6, 2013, he was asked to perform an independent investigation into Trey’s death. In doing so, he examined photographs of the body and the scene where first responders found Trey’s body. He also used the autopsy report and photos taken by Dr. Amy Burrows Beckham, the medical examiner who performed Trey’s autopsy. Dr. Burrows Beckham had been a student and protégé of Dr. Nichols.
Dr. Nichols described the horrific details of Trey’s injuries. Trey had a depressed nasal fracture and a deep black eye. He had suffered an internal skull fracture and a subdural hematoma. His back was covered in bruises. In considering all of the traumatic injuries present during the autopsy, Dr. Nichols told the jury that he was confident a rod-like object caused the injuries to Trey.
During the Commonwealth’s case, the prosecution would continually argue that Trey was killed with a baseball bat. Specifically, Cassi would later testify that Joshua came to her in the middle of the night and asked her to help him dispose of bloody clothes and a bloody bat. Investigators believed wholeheartedly that a bat was the murder weapon. However, the defense’s expert concluded that the murder weapon could not have been the size of a baseball bat. He was certain that it was a thin, rod-like object and, although there was no way for him to tell whether there were two people at the scene, he felt confident that all of the blows to Trey came from a person standing in the same position for the duration of the attack.
He felt that the attack began when Trey was knocked to the ground and rendered unconscious by the first blow of the rod-like object and that he was beaten repeatedly with at least four or five hits to his back and several that hit the back of his head, forcing the boy’s face into the underlying stone and rock, causing the facial injuries that Trey endured.2 The beating was a classic example of overkill. The traumatic brain injury that Trey sustained was the actual cause of his death. However, it appeared that the killer continued to pummel the teen’s body even after he sustained that injury.
When the medical examiner, Dr. Amy Burrows Beckham, testified later in the trial, her opinion differed only slightly from Dr. Nichols’s findings. She gave her opinion that the black eye sustained by Trey was likely caused by a direct blow or punch and she believed that this hit had initially knocked him to the ground. However, she felt that there was a possibility the injury was caused by his face hitting the ground.
She believed that Trey died within four hours of eating due to the contents she found in his stomach during the autopsy. Her findings initially reflected that the head injury was caused by a sharp object. However, after Detective Russ asked her whether a baseball bat could have been the murder weapon, she reexamined her findings to reflect that a bat could have caused the injuries.
Perhaps the most penetrating questions asked of the medical examiner were posed by the jurors. The bat that the prosecution believed was the murder weapon was an old bat, a collectible that belonged to Cassi’s live-in boyfriend. It was a wooden bat. Jurors specifically asked Dr. Burrows Beckham whether a wooden bat would have left splintering or fragments of wood in the wounds. She believed that it likely would have, especially if it was an older bat. During the course of the autopsy, she had found no such wooden pieces. The forensic testimony seemed to indicate that a wooden bat did not cause Trey’s death. This was the murder weapon implicated by Gouker’s cast of characters, yet the forensic testimony did not support their assertions.3
When the prosecution resumed its case-in-chief following the testimony of Dr. Nichols, it called a parade of crime scene technicians and officers to the stand. After Trey’s body was discovered and identified, the police had secured a warrant for Amanda’s home and collected a variety of items, mostly ones that could have served as a murder weapon.
Three bats were collected from Trey’s upstairs room and a sword and knife were taken from the garage. All items were fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA. After the investigation, analysts determined that none of these items were connected to the murder. The technicians also took photographs of the home and DNA swabs from Gouker and Amanda.
There had been other items collected from the scene of the murder which also were sent to the Kentucky State Police lab for testing, including swabs from concrete blocks and trees which confirmed that the blood found on those items belonged to Trey. None of the items at the scene bore DNA from anyone e
lse.
At the conclusion of that portion of the testimony, it was clear that there was no forensic evidence that linked Josh Young to Trey’s murder. In fact, there was no forensic evidence that linked anyone to the murder. The murder weapon was never recovered and it seemed from the forensic testimony that the murder weapon was not a wooden bat, as alleged by the prosecution, but a rod-like object as postulated by the defense.
The prosecution shifted gears and began calling to the stand the colorful cast of characters who had associated with Gouker when he was a free man. They began with Jahaira (or “Jennifer” as she was known to the woman whom Gouker kidnapped in Alabama). Jahaira had gotten married in the two years that had passed since the kidnapping and changed her last name to Friend to match that of her new husband.
Jahaira Friend and Angelic Burkhead were important witnesses for the prosecution. Both women claimed that while they were in Alabama, Josh Young confessed to them that he had killed Trey. If the witnesses had been credible, jurors may have believed that Josh made such statements. However, both women would instead damage the prosecution.
Jahaira claimed that Gouker drugged her for the entire trip and that she did not remember anything except that Little Josh had confessed to her in a motel room “with no feeling” that he had killed Trey. She claimed Gouker held a gun to her head and that when the group embarked on the trip to Alabama, she had no idea they were leaving the state. In the aftermath of Erin’s kidnapping, Jahaira was arrested and criminally charged as well.
Leslie Smith used her cross-examination of Jahaira as an opportunity to confront her on her inability to recall even the most basic facts regarding her trip to Alabama with Gouker. Throughout the questioning, Jahaira continued to deny that she and Gouker engaged in a sexual relationship, despite evidence to the contrary.
“You were his sexual partner, though?” Smith pressed.
“No.”
“You never had sex with Josh Gouker?”
“No.”4
“He is not the reason that you and Angelic have issues between the two of you right now?” she asked, referring to the nearly lifelong relationship between Jahaira and Angelic that became irreparably broken after their trek south with Gouker.
“No,” Jahaira stated, her series of one-word answers echoing through the courtroom.
Smith stared at her for a second and changed gears, “Let’s just establish the timeline. You left Louisville on what day?”
“I have no clue,” Jahaira shrugged.
Not missing a beat, Smith continued with her questioning, “At what time?”
“Don’t know.”
“On what day of the week?”
“I don’t know.”
“What day of the week did you return to Louisville, Kentucky?”
“I don’t know.”5
“You remember talking to anyone while in Alabama, anyone at all?” she questioned incredulously.
“No.”
“Do you recall saying that Joshua Gouker choked you with a tube sock?”
“Before today, no.”6
Her testimony appeared to weaken the prosecution’s case against Little Josh.
The next in the trio of Gouker’s women to take the stand was Cassiopeia Gouker, his cousin. She strode to the witness box in her University of Louisville sweatshirt. Gouker’s ladies all resembled each other: they could be described as full-figured.
The Commonwealth used Cassi’s testimony to show yet another person to whom Little Josh had confessed. All of the women seemed scared of and intimidated by Gouker. She testified that in the middle of the night on May 10, Little Josh had attempted to wake her up several times. After she ignored him twice, he returned to the room with his father, stating that he had killed Trey and needed her to aid him in disposing of a bloody bat and a garbage bag full of bloody clothes.
If Cassi’s version of events was to be believed, she would have loaded the bloody bat into the back of her van, failing to leave any blood behind in the vehicle. Defense counsel Pete Schuler revealed that he had met with Cassi in his office prior to the trial. She arrived with her attorney and answered questions. Most notably, Schuler had drawn a sketch of a bat and asked Cassi to draw the way that the blood looked on the bat when she saw it. She drew one circle of blood. Both the medical examiner and the defense’s medical witness had testified that based on the crime scene and Trey’s injuries, blood would have splattered all over the bat and not pooled in one spot as Cassi claimed.
When Schuler finally had the opportunity to cross-examine Cassi, he immediately seized on her failure to alert police to her allegations regarding Josh Young. “You waited almost two years to tell somebody that Gouker was present,” he said, alluding to her assertion that Little Josh visited her room with a bloody bat on the night of Trey’s murder. As she testified, Cassi changed her previous story. Although she originally stated that Little Josh came into the room alone, she was now asserting that Gouker had come into the room as well and Schuler seized on that inconsistency, asking why her story had changed.
“Because they had told me that Amanda said Big Josh was with her the whole night,” she replied matter-of-factly.7
“So you were basing what you told police on what other witnesses said?” he asked skeptically.
“I remembered at the time, after I thought of it,” she said slowly.
Schuler continued to probe into whether Cassi had any indications prior to Trey’s death that Gouker was plotting to kill him. “Did [Joshua Gouker] tell you he was thinking about killing Trey?”
“He didn’t say he was thinking about killing Trey; he did say an eye for an eye because of the abortion,” Cassi said, referencing the abortion Amanda underwent in the years prior to Gouker’s initial incarceration.8
As the questioning continued, Cassi appeared to have trouble remembering some of the details of her previous police interviews. Pete Schuler approached the witness with a transcript of her prior conversations with police. He handed Cassi the transcript as she sat in the witness box. “See if you can refresh your memory with this.”
Cassi took the next five minutes quietly flipping through the pages and once she completing reading the transcript, she looked up at Schuler. He continued with his questions, “So did Gouker talk about having Trey killed before that night?”
“No, he never talked about having Trey killed. He may have said ‘an eye for an eye,’ but that didn’t lead me to believe that he was gonna kill Trey.”
Judge Willett then gave the jurors an opportunity to pose questions to Cassi. After calling the attorneys to the bench and determining which questions were appropriate, the judge looked toward Cassi and read the questions to her.
“Did you ever witness any angry outbursts from Josh Young?”
“No.”
“Did you think the blood from the bat would rub off or transfer to your house or car?”
“I didn’t think about it.”
“The bat was not in a bag when you saw it. Was it soaked in blood or just bloodstained?”
“Just bloodstained.”
“In the three times Josh Young attempted to wake you, no one else woke up?”
“No”
“Was Josh Young at your house when you went to bed the night of the cookout?”
“Yes.”
“Was Josh Young playing video games by himself?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever afraid of Josh Young or Josh Gouker?”
“No.”
She also confessed that she had been drinking that night at the cookout.
Perhaps the most telling was the final question: “Were you controlled by Gouker?”
As she pondered the question, she looked to the side, “Maybe; I don’t know if that’s what you would call it.” She admitted that she was in love with him at the time of the murder.9
This was news to her fiancé, who was the next witness in the Commonwealth v. Joshua Young trial. He testified to the events of the evening Trey was m
urdered and he also revealed that after Amanda fled her home, he had burglarized it with Gouker. Cassi’s fiancé had since pled guilty to a felony in connection with those actions.10
Next Angelic walked to the witness box and settled in. She agreed that after the trip, she and Jahaira were no longer friends and that the trip was the reason for their falling out. Angelic was clearly terrified of Gouker.
She too claimed that Little Josh had confessed to her in a motel room in Tennessee. However, to some observers her claims appeared to be contrived and orchestrated by Gouker. Defense counsel played a tape of the telephone call between Angelic, the incarcerated Gouker and Detective Russ. After nearly ten minutes of prodding, Angelic had finally told the detective that Little Josh had admitted the killing to her.
As the tape was played, it appeared to some of those in the courtroom that Angelic was saying what she thought Gouker wanted her to say. During her cross-examination, it came out that in the past she was so loyal to Gouker that she hid him from authorities and had been charged with hindering prosecution.
“Did you all date that fall?” the prosecutor asked as she conducted her direct examination of Angelic.
“No.”
“Did you date any time after he got out of prison?”
“No.”
The prosecutor continued to touch on Angelic’s relationships with Gouker, his family and the other residents of the neighborhood, “After Trey’s murder, what caused Gouker to contact you?”
“He had said that Amanda was really emotional and that they were separated. They spent a few nights at our house because he said they didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, referring to Gouker and Josh Young.11
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