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Jessica Betten Court
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh sorry. Namaste.
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In 2010, a family of four in California goes missing and the clues left behind send investigators on a years long search. Is this a family on the run or is the truth far more sinister? From ABC Audio in 2020 this is what happened to the mixed days coming August 11th wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to 2020 True Crime plus on Apple Podcasts for ad free episodes, early access to new episodes, and so much more.
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You're listening to DNAID brought to you by ABJEC Entertainment. Be sure to check out some of the other great true crime podcasts from this network, including the Murder in My Family, Missing Persons, Scene of the Crime, Zodiac Speaking Beyond Bizarre True Crime, Campus Killings, Below the Surface and Killer Communications. All of these podcasts are available for you to binge on right now. Wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe where you're listening to this podcast so you don't miss an episode.
- [01:57]
Jessica Betten Court
Sam. Episode 19 Lee Bich Thuy it was 1994 Rockville, Maryland is considered part of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, but is really a busy, bustling city of its own right. Rockville's population now is close to 70,000 people. It is the county seat of Montgomery county, with government buildings, federal research institutions and a wide array of restaurants and retail shops throughout the city. Rockville and several of the Maryland suburbs beyond it are all connected to the larger D.C. maryland Virginia area via the public transportation infrastructure, which includes buses and of course the DC Metro. Many people who live and work in the area enjoy the convenience, cleanliness and reliability of the D.C. metro, which obviates the need for a car as it radiates over 117 miles of total coverage. One of the regular riders of the metro was Dr. Lee Bich Thuy. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing her name properly since I don't speak Vietnamese, so I'm going to refer to her as Lee. Lee was a 42 year old woman of Vietnamese descent who was a native of France. She was unmarried and lived alone at her home in Rockville on the 1600 block of Martha Terrace. Lee had a PhD in molecular biology, so she was a researcher, not the kind of doctor who sees patients in France. She had worked at the Lyon University Hospital. She came to the US to work for the National Institutes of Health, which is based in Bethesda, Maryland in the late 80s. In August of 1992, Lee took a job at Children's national medical center in D.C. which is where she was on staff in the research department. In September 1994, Lee was working on a pediatric pulmonary medicine research project. She was a very smart and accomplished woman whose work was the major focus of her life. Her friend Henry Plotkin said of her that she was always deeply immersed in her work, one of those people who didn't take any time off. She was a fierce advocate for her department and obtaining funding for its research studies, going up against administrative personnel who opposed her goals. Lee's friend Henry said that she fought so hard for funding for her department that she butted heads with the medical center's director at the time, someone you may have heard of named Anthony Fauci. Reportedly, although they clashed over allocation of financial resources, Fauci greatly respected Lee's contributions to Children's Hospital. Lee did have some interests outside work. One of her passions was playing the cello. She was a member of the Montgomery College Symphony Orchestra. She also loved art and going to museums, attending concerts and having dinner parties for a close circle of like minded and highly educated and intelligent friends. According to everyone who knew her, Lee was just a lovely, gentle, joyful person. As her friend Henry said, she would always give of herself but not have time to take anything in return, he told the Washington Post. I guess the best thing I could say is that she appreciated her friendships very much, took them very seriously and would just give and take pleasure in that. Other friends echoed this sentiment, saying that Lee was a wonderful person and friend, that she enjoyed listening to others, preferring to let others talk about themselves while she observed, she did not share a lot of details about her own personal life. Many attributes Lee had remind me of Gwen Miller, whose case I covered in episode 14. They were both female medical professionals who were dedicated to their careers, lived alone and were fairly private. On the Evening of Monday, October 3, 1994, one of Lee's co workers called the Rockville police. The caller told the dispatcher that Lee's colleagues were very concerned about her because she had not been into work since the previous Wednesday. As I just discussed, this was not the way Lee operated. It wasn't just that she was conscientious. It's that to a significant extent, her work was her life. For her not to show up and not to call in, much less to take time off and not tell anyone, was unfathomable. No one had been able to reach Lee, even after multiple calls to her home over the past few days. Something was wrong, the caller said, and they wanted to report Lee missing. Lee's co workers weren't the only ones who noted her unusual absence. Her musical director, Irvin Clinkton, told the Post, quote, she joined about four years ago and whenever she missed a performance, she always called. Last night there was a rehearsal and she didn't call and I wondered why Police officers headed over to Lee's Martha Terrace house for a welfare check Officers arrived at the small, single story white clapboard and brick home at 6:30pm the front of the house was partially obscured by bushes, but a walkway led to the two front stairs onto a low porch outside the front door. Crime scene photos show what responding police noted immediately. On the concrete front stoop where a doormat and a delivered newspaper lay, there was a large dried blood stain. Blood had also spilled down onto the step below. Walking around to the side of the house, officers found the body of a woman lying in the brush next to a low fence separating her yard from the neighbors. Detective Bob Phillips, who was a sergeant with The Montgomery County PD at the time, told NBC4 Washington, quote, I remember responding to her that evening with Detective Drury and Detective Bond. She was not covered up, but she just naturally sank into this English ivy and was hard to see. Detectives later described this crime scene as gruesome and brutal. The woman, who was clearly deceased, had significant trauma to her head. There was lots of dried blood all over her upper body and visible wounds on her cranium that looked as though they had been inflicted with some kind of hard, blunt object. And lying there among the ivy, investigators found a heavy cement paving stone about 12 inches long that had dried blood caked on it. It was immediately apparent that this was almost certainly the murder weapon, or at least the weapon that had caused the victim's fatal head wounds. The body was partially clothed. The victim's pink shirt was raised up above her bra, and her pants were pulled all the way down, exposing her genitals. Her sneakers lay in the bushes near her body. She had clearly been there for some insect predation was noted on the corpse. Lee's body was removed from the scene and transported to the office of the Maryland Medical examiner in Baltimore, who determined that she was indeed the homeowner, Lee Bichtuy. An autopsy revealed what the officers who had found Lee's body had guessed, that she had suffered blunt force trauma to the head after being hit with the concrete paver. The blows were so severe to the back of her head that her spinal column was damaged. There were also signs that she had been strangled and she had been dead for several days. The ME determined she had been killed at least 72 hours earlier, but he could not tell exactly when the attack had happened. The manner of death was homicide. Finally, Lee had been raped. A vaginal swab containing seminal fluid was taken into evidence and sent in for testing. Police cordoned off the scene where Lee's body was found with crime scene tape, and personnel arrived to start the investigative process. Detectives responded to Lee's home, discovered that the front door to her house was locked. Rockville isn't a particularly unsafe area, but residents of larger metropolitan areas generally lock their doors because burglaries and robberies do happen. I grew up in this area, and we always locked our doors and even had an alarm system. So Lee's door was locked, and there was no forced entry to the home that they could find once they entered the house. Police determined that there was no evidence of an intruder and concluded that the suspect never made it inside the house. But as I said, there was blood on the front step of her home. The initial attack had happened there. And next to Lee's body was found her leather work bag described as a satchel. Police began to form the theory that she had been waylaid as she either came home from or left for work. Her house keys were not out and were not found in the lock. So detectives surmised that she had just been climbing or descending the stairs when she was attacked on the steps, beaten on the head, dragged around the side of the house into the bushes and raped, choked and beaten to death with the concrete block. Others, like this block, were in place around a drainage spout in Lee's backyard where she was found. Her attacker had used what was on hand to finish her off. The weapon he used to bludgeon her in a blitz attack on her front stairs has never been determined. It was something he brought with him and took away with him when he was done. The fact that Lee's bag was lying there near her body also pointed away from a robbery. Usually, a robber will grab a bag and run and go through it later for any valuables. Discarding whatever isn't worth anything to them. That didn't happen here. Lee herself seemed to have been the target. Investigators set about retracing Lee's last known whereabouts and activities to try to determine when she was killed and who could have done it. A D.C. metroCard found in Lee's possession indicated that she had exited the Twinbrook Metro station on the evening of Wednesday, September 28, sometime after 10pm she had not shown up for work on Thursday, so police came to the conclusion that she had been on the way home that night, approaching her front door when she was beset from behind. The suspect attacked her from the rear, disabled her with blows to the head and dragged her into the side yard where he raped and strangled her. Christopher Holmrock, Detective Sergeant at the Montgomery County, Maryland Police Department Major Crimes Division Cold Case Section, told me that he believes that Lee was probably stunned to the point of being rendered unconscious by the initial blow, which she did not see coming. This conclusion was drawn because a police canvass of the neighborhood discovered that no one had heard any screams or sounds of strife on Wednesday night, even though the houses were fairly close together. Neighbors told investigators that Lee did not have a car and walked daily between her home and the Twin Brook Metro station some blocks away. According to Google Maps, this is about a 17 minute walk of 1.2 miles. Sometimes Lee would hop a small shuttle bus that would take her from the subway station to a spot closer to her house, but if it wasn't there when she emerged from the metro, she would walk. The route is largely through a commercial area. In 2021 the walk would take Lee past a Safeway grocery store, across Rockville, hike a major roadway and past a post office, Rockville Fire Station 23, a liquor store and takeout eateries. This urban area is very well lit, very public and safe. Even back then, Lee would have felt totally comfortable walking in this area, even at night. The second half of her walk would take her through a quieter residential neighborhood, past the neat lined up homes along Rollins Avenue to Martha Terrace. Violent crimes in the Twin Book area were very, very rare. The vast majority of the crimes were teenage mischief and crimes involving vehicle theft or break ins, according to the Post. Such crimes are highly unusual in the busy middle class suburb and it's unlikely a woman would have thought twice about walking through this neighborhood on her commute to work. As usual in murder investigations, police wondered whether someone who knew Lee had killed her. Perhaps she was involved in a love triangle or illicit affairs. Perhaps a jealous work colleague resented her success. But investigators struck out in all these departments her personal life was what you see is what you get and no one had a bad word to say about Lee. Her director in the symphony, Irvin Clinton, said she was always enthusiastic and smiling, and she loved to play the cello. I suppose it's possible that Lee was the target of a jealous member of the orchestra, but trained classical musicians aren't usually the type to bludgeon and strangle women in their yards. And this was a local symphony made up of hobbyist musicians, not the National Symphony Orchestra. Of course, there have been murders in research labs like the one Lee worked in, notably the murder of Annie Lee at Yale in 2009. But police found no evidence that anyone wanted Lee dead. The only thing that was notable was that Lee had only very recently moved into the house she was living in. She had purchased it after renting a room in another house just down the street, and she was a creature of habit, following the same routines daily. So it would have been easy for someone watching her to gather that she lived alone and anticipate her movements. But there was no evidence that anyone was targeting her specifically, and her neighborhood was a quiet, secluded enclave that police felt someone targeting her would have had to have been familiar with to find her house. So investigators were left scratching their heads, according to public statements made by Montgomery county police spokeswoman Ann Evans. They had no motive and no suspects. A profile of the attacker told police that he was someone who had a history of violence and a record of sexual assault, but they came up empty when looking at people in the area who fit the bill. Lee's death was labeled mysterious, and no one had any answers as to who would kill this lovely and accomplished woman and why. Police announced a reward of $1,000 for anyone who came forward with information leading to an arrest of Lee's killer. Following the clues in the case, or rather, lack thereof, investigators came to believe that Lee had been killed by someone she didn't know, who had followed her on her walk home after she got off the Metro at the Twin Brook station on Wednesday night, sergeant Homrock told me that it seems Lee was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was a smaller woman leaving the Metro alone at night, and someone had followed her because she was an easy In December 1994, Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan said that the Twin Brook neighborhood remained safer than most. He said of Lee's murder, I think there is more of a connection with the Metro than a connection with the neighborhood. We've seen similar things happen with other Metro stations in the area. D.C. metro spokeswoman Patricia Lamb tried to deflect concern about the metro telling the post that zero crimes against persons and only a handful of property crimes were reported in the metro system in all of 1994. But then there were more attacks that seemed to lend weight to the theory that the predator attacking women was focused on the metro. But first, there was another murder. Six months pregnant, Sunita Johnson was found murdered in a drainage ditch on wells parkway in University park. This was in Prince George's county, not really near where Lee lived. But since Sunita was determined to have taken a metro bus before being killed, police had to whether the crimes were related. And Sunita was murdered the day before Lee was found. She had been dead for several hours, meaning that she actually was killed after Lee was. An article in the Washington times said, quote, police note that both victims were small, framed immigrant women with dark hair and dark eyes. Both were found in secluded areas where their bodies would not easily be detected. Both were strangled, and both had taken public transportation before they disappeared. Could this very similar rape and murder have been done by the same man who had just days earlier raped and murdered Li bich Thuy? The answer, it turned out, was no. Police were right. Sunita's killer had followed her off the bus, walked behind her, and then attacked and raped her in someone's yard. He then strangled her and hid her body in a culvert, where she was found by children at play the next day. The case was long considered linked to Lee's murder. But in 1999, Osmond Thomas Leakins, Jr. Walked into a Prince George's county police station and out of the blue, confessed to Sunita's murder. He said he was burdened by guilt over what he had done to the 24 year old woman 5 years earlier. Leakin stood trial and was convicted. He will spend the rest of his life in prison. So while there was justice for Sunita, Lee was not so lucky. Police did have another person of interest in Lee's murder. For a short time. As police were canvassing the neighborhood, a man approached some officers sitting in a squad car and told them he knew something about Lee's murder. He was interviewed by detectives and he seemed to know some details about the crime that indicated that he might have been involved. But detectives came to believe that he hadn't actually had anything to do with it. His DNA, which they obtained after obtaining a search warrant, was not a match to that found at the scene, which I'll get into in a minute. Anyway, this guy was Lee's next door neighbor, and police thought it was highly probable that he had actually seen Lee's body lying in her yard, very close to the fence, abutting his own, and observed her bloodied head, the paving stone, what she was wearing, and so on. He used some of these details in a sort of false confession, but it seems that really he had just seen her dead body and not reported it. For some reason. He was a weirdo, but he had not killed Lee. Interviews with this guy's family led detectives to another possible person of interest. This was a guy who was a friend of the next door neighbor's family who was a drifter and drug user. The neighbor's sister and mom named him as someone who had been in the area. Police interviewed him and thought he seemed like a promising suspect until his DNA, again obtained by warrant, was not a match. So I just mentioned that police had DNA at their disposal. Lee was killed in 1994, which was in the early days of DNA testing, but it was available, and CODIS was in its fledgling state. All the blood at the crime scene was determined to be Lee's, so that was of no help. But of course, they had the rape kit. From that DNA, analysts were able to develop a male profile that they could use for comparison and elimination purposes. But to eliminate people, you need to have suspects in the first place. And in Lee's case, there were none. Once the neighbor and his family friend were ruled out, police were back to square one. Starting in about 2000, Detective Bob Phillips of the MCPD, who was one of the first officers to find Lee that night in 1994, started reading through cold case files, including Lee's when he retired from active duty. He continued to review cold cases, eventually earning a salary to do so. He looked for patterns in the old cases, many of whom involved women who were homicide victims or victims of sexual assault. And he noted that there was a pattern of cases, one of which was Lee's. But he was never able to put the final puzzle piece in place. And Lee's case stagnated for years. Police just had nothing to go on because none of her known acquaintances or connections could be linked to her murder or even raise suspicions. She had no drama or secrets that police unearthed. Everyone liked her, and she lived a very low risk lifestyle. They had no suspects, and yet they had too many suspects. Lee lived in a very populated metropolitan area with millions of people coming and going. Her killer literally could have been anyone, even if they could narrow it down to someone who definitely rode the Metro and followed Lee home that night. Hundreds of thousands of people take the D.C. metro on a daily basis. Investigators were Baffled and the case went cold. In 2003, though, there was a very important development. The suspect's DNA was entered into a database that compared the profile to those collected at other crime scenes. Of course I'm talking about codis. Montgomery county authorities were methodically entering the information from previous crimes into the still fairly new DNA profile database. And there was a hit. Whoever had raped and killed Lee Bich Thuy had raped a woman in 1989, and this case had startling similarities to Lee's case. But none of this information was released to the public until much, much later. Investigators kept all this under wraps, but they had observed a pattern of multiple rapes or assaults or attempted rapes and assaults in Rockville between June 1989 and October 1994, when Lee was raped and murdered. Even though she was the only victim who had been slain, the patterns in Emma were impossible to ignore. Multiple women had reported these attacks or attempted attacks, but in many of them, because the attacker had been fought off, there was no physical evidence that could be used to determine whether they were all connected, but police believed that at least three of them definitely were. A press release issued by the Montgomery County Police Department on July 9, 2019, reading. Detectives from the Montgomery County Police Department Cold Case Squad continue to investigate the following assaults, rapes and murder involving three women. Due to similarities in these crimes, investigators believe that the same suspect is involved. Details about the three cases were laid out as follows. On June 25, 1989, a 53 year old woman was walking alone on Lewis Avenue in Rockville at 10:15pm this is about a mile from Lee's home. She had just gotten off the Metro at the Twin Brook station. A man approached her from behind and assaulted her. He dragged her into a nearby yard and raped her. When he was finished, he left her there and she reported the incident to police. She was taken to an area hospital where a rape kit was done. The rape survivor was not able to describe her attacker as he had waylaid her from behind and it was dark so she never got a good look at his face. She could not even tell what race he was. Five years passed. On September 19, 1994, a 25 year old woman was walking along the 12, 900 block of Twinbrook Parkway alone at 10:20pm she had just emerged from the Metro at the Twinbrook station. A man approached her from behind, showed her a knife and grabbed her. He dragged her to an area along the side of her house where he tried to rape her. This woman was able to get away, suffering a cut on her hand in the process and called police. When they came to the scene, they discovered a small yellow flashlight that they believed the attacker had dropped in his rush to get away. Unfortunately, the would be victim here did not get a good look at her attacker either. The third crime was Lee's rape and murder. Just 11 days after the attempted rape on Twinbrook Parkway. All three attacks had happened within a mile of each other around the same time of night and involved a man attacking a lone woman from behind and either raping her in a yard or attempting her to do so. A serial sexual predator was on the loose, using the same MO and striking within the same geographic area near the Twinbrook Metro station. Montgomery county investigators had submitted the rape kit from the 1989 victim for a DNA profile. And they also submitted the evidence taken from Lee's autopsy for a profile. And these profiles matched. The man who had attacked the woman in 89 and the man who had killed Lee in 94 were definitely the same person. Investigators also were convinced that the attempted rapist in 9.94 was the same offender, but without DNA evidence, they could not prove that. Investigators asked the public to come forward with any information about who this predator was. And Crime stoppers announced a $10,000 reward for information. So we have the pattern showing that there was a repeat offender on the loose. They now knew what they had suspected for a while. That Lee was not killed by someone who had targeted her specifically, but rather she was selected at random by a serial predator. The same was true for the 1989 rape survivor, but this still did not lead police to their predator. They had no idea who he was. Not Until July of 2018 was there any public movement on the case. And then it was big. It turns out that behind the scenes, Montgomery county investigators had reexamined Lee's case in 2017. They had submitted some more physical evidence in her case for testing, hoping to determine the race of the suspect who was responsible for Lee's murder and the 1989 rape. Taking it a step further, in 2018, the Montgomery County Police Department commissioned Parabon Nanolabs to create a phenotype image of the man who had attacked lee and the 1989 victim. Parabon was basically down the street. Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, abut each other at the bottom of D.C. and the MCPD had heard about the new crime solving technique, forensic genealogy, and felt that it was worth a try. Based on the DNA he left behind at both crime scenes, Parabon created a computer generated composite image of the suspect as he might have appeared at age 25 and another as he might have appeared at age 45. These images show the suspect as a white man with dark wavy hair, blue or green eyes and no freckles, and a distinctive shape to his head as described by Detective Sergeant Chris Halmrock. The MCPD released these images to the public. Sergeant Holmrock said, quote, we're looking for any new information, anything these images might prompt someone to remember. Sergeant Homrock went on to explain why authorities were so interested in solving this case. It wasn't just about Lee. Her killer had also attacked other women. I don't think he did it just two or three times. This guy was targeting women in that area for at least five years. Sergeant Homrock said he was referring to the 1989 rape and the 1994 attempted rape as well as the other reported cases. Sergeant Humrock pointed out that the common denominator was a lone female victim who had just left the station and was almost certainly followed either as she walked home or took a short bus ride. Once she arrived at her residence or a quiet, out of the way place the attackers sprang. Each of the victims had been struck on the head from behind, pushed to the ground and sexually assaulted or narrowly avoided being sexually assaulted. The common theme of these cases is that they all start at the Twinbrook Metro, the sergeant told the Post. Everything generates from there. But the snapshot images and the publicity about the linked cases failed to develop any substantial leads. Investigators were going to have to resort to forensic genealogy to provide answers. On March 15, 2019, a press release from the Montgomery County Police Department read, detectives from the Major Crimes Division Cold Case section have identified the suspect who committed a 1989 rape of a 53 year old female and the 1994 rape and murder of 44 year old Lee Bichtui. The suspect, identified as Kenneth Earl day, died in March 2017 in Upshur County, West Virginia at the age of 52. The release went on to say that the DNA had definitively linked the rape of the woman in 1989 with the rape and murder of Lee. Kenneth Earl Day was responsible for both. Here's what happened. Having exhausted all the investigative avenues into the serial predator attacking women in the Rockville area For at least five years in the early 90s, the MCPD hired Parabon NanoLabs to conduct the forensic genealogy in Lee's case. Parabon obtained the profile of the 1989 rapist and Lee's killer and entered it into Gedmatch. But the results were fairly poor. In other words, Such distant relatives were the only ones located that Parabon recommended against proceeding with forensic genealogy because the possibility of success was extremely limited without incurring excessive cost. The company handed their report over to the mcpd and it showed that there were two limited matches with the suspect, and these were both three or four generations back. Parabon believed that the suspect was likely descended from this line. Here's where MCPD Officer Stephen Smugoreski comes in. Smuggs, as he is known, is not a member of the Cold Case Unit. He normally patrols downtown Silver Spring on a bicycle. However, Smuggs has an interest in and a knack for forensic genealogy. Since he solved this case, he has had a number of other successes for the mcpd, including the identification of the likely killer of James Essel in 1992 and of the perpetrator in the Potomac river rapist cases, who is currently awaiting trial. Smuggs took Parabon's preliminary report and dug in, figuring out the family tree the suspect descended from and tracing the suspect's relatives back to a family in West Virginia, where most of them still resided. But one of the family members had moved to the Silver Spring, Maryland area, which, of course, since it was the area where the crimes occurred, piqued Smuggs interest. This was a man named Russell Vincent Day and Russell had four sons, one of whom also lived in Silver Spring. Kenneth Earl Day. Smuggs took this lead and ran with it. He noted with increasing excitement that Day lived in Montgomery county during the time of the 1989 rape and Lee's murder in 94. He lived at quite a few Rockville addresses during those five years, and one was on Twinbrook Parkway, around the corner from the Twinbrook Metro station. Smuggs went through law enforcement databases to look up more info on Day. He found an old incident report in which Day was written up in Montgomery county for indecent exposure. Smuggs told WTOP Washington. Quote, from there, everything started to pop. At that point, I looked at his previous addresses and it put him within the scene of the crime. Not only did Day live in the area and have a sex related misdemeanor on his record, as well as multiple other arrests, he was the right age to be the offender. And his mug shots showed that he looked like the Parabon snapshot prediction. He had green eyes and dark wavy hair. Smuggs thought, this is the guy. So as stated in the press release, Kenneth Earl Day was deceased. As we've seen before, detectives were eager to confirm that he was their suspect by testing his DNA against their sample. And they got lucky. As is Typically done in many jurisdictions. A blood card was collected during Day's autopsy and kept on file in West Virginia, where he died. Montgomery county authorities contacted the health department officials in West Virginia, and they FedExed the blood card to Maryland, where the Montgomery County Police crime lab compared the DNA sample from Day with the sample taken into evidence at the two crime scenes. They were a match. So who was Kenneth Earl Day? He was born on October 25, 1964 in Buck Hanon, West Virginia, to parents Louise Sherb Day and Russell Vincent Day. Not much is known about his early life. As an adult, he was 5 foot 8 and 170 pounds. He worked as a carpenter and handyman for various construction companies throughout the Montgomery county area. He also worked at a paint store in Rockville. He was living in Rockville and adjacent Silver Spring, Maryland at the time of the 1989 rape and the 1994 murder of Lee. No one knows how or why he selected the Twin Brook Metro station as his hunting ground, except that several of his addresses were nearby and the Metro station provided a readily accessible hunting ground for him when he raped the 1989 victim, his first one known to law enforcement. He was 25 years old. Day ran into trouble with the law quite a few times over the course of his life, but these were mostly in the context of traffic infractions rather than felonies. Nothing that was attributed to him during his lifetime rose to the level where a DNA contribution to CODIS would be required. Day was cited for negligent driving in January 1989, failure to wear a seatbelt in May of 89, and the murder tort of negligent driving resulting in personal injury in August of 1989. Prior to that, in 1988, he had been cited for driving an unregistered vehicle. He has mugshots from 94, 99 and 2001 that I can't figure out what the charges were because the records don't appear in the Maryland Circuit Court database anymore. A 2003 mugshot looks from the image as though Day might have picked up the drug habit that would eventually kill him. He took a break from his vehicular transgressions for a time and was next charged with speeding and driving with a sexual suspended license in 2004, and then speeding and driving a 97 Caddy with both a suspended license and suspended registration in August of 2005. It just continually amazes me that these guys are so arrogant, so confident that they have gotten away with murder that they have no compunction about Attracting police attention by driving like maniacs or failing to comply with basic traffic and motor vehicle regulations. Anyway, Day also had a judgment rendered against him in 97 for $1,600 in back income taxes he owed. So I guess he was not overly concerned about keeping his nose clean. As for his personal life, Day was married twice that we know of. In 1991, his wife, Tony, filed to obtain a restraining order against him. They divorced in 1992. She later told Sergeant Homrock that while Day was not abusive, their arguments were frequent and the relationship was unhealthy for her. In 1993, Tony took him to court to make him pay the support he owed her, per the divorce settlement. Then, in 94, Day had moved on to a woman named Jennifer. In May of that year, he pleaded guilty to battery and false imprisonment. Jennifer was the complainant in that case. But they stayed together until October 2001, when Jennifer's divorce petition was granted. She sued him for unpaid child support in 2005. After that, he seems to have stayed above the law. Interestingly, despite the battery charge, Jennifer had nothing but good things to say about her ex husband, Kenneth Day. Once Montgomery county detectives figured out who Lee's killer was and started digging into his background, they located Jennifer and went to see her in West Virginia. She was completely stunned by what the detectives told her about her ex being a rapist and murderer. She told them that the Kenneth Day she was married to was the sweetest, most personable, easygoing guy you could ever meet. He was a normal, loving husband to her and a wonderful father to his daughter, whom I'm not going to name. Neighbors, family and friends all loved him. He was always laughing. She showed lots of photos to the detectives of Day and the family, smiling and happy. Jennifer had to be convinced that Day was the right guy by being shown the incontrovertible DNA findings. Jennifer said that Day never exhibited any behavior that would have betrayed his secret. But in hindsight, she recalled a few things. She said that after they were divorced, he continued to live in a room in her home, and she noticed that he would disappear for days at a time without warning. He would just leave and leave her to parent his daughter. When he returned, there were no explanations. It's anyone's guess what Kenneth Day was up to during these secret excursions. They moved from Montgomery county back to Buchanan, West Virginia, where he was from around 1997. He died on March 24, 2017, from a drug overdose at age 52, leaving behind three brothers, his daughter, and two grandchildren. His death was just two years before authorities would finally learn his name in connection with the murder of Lee Bich Thuy. Sergeant Homruck spoke with Day's family members, including his daughter. They all showed him photos of a completely normal Kenneth Day enjoying holiday moments with his family and leading a seemingly normal life. His daughter also did not believe the detective's allegations about her father until she was shown the DNA evidence. Sergeant Homrock told me that he believes that Kenneth Day was a true sociopath, someone who was normal at home but then would flip a switch and turn into a rapist and murderer. His family never had an inkling of the dark secret Day harbored. I have to wonder whether his drug habit was a way of anesthetizing himself from the dark urges he felt similar to the way David Mabrito succumbed to drugs after murdering Jodi Sarin. In Jody's case too, Mabrito's wife and son never had a glimpse of his dark side. As for whether Day is responsible for any other violent crimes, detectives believe that that is likely. They continue to pursue cases that fit his M.O. yet remain unsolved. But unless there is DNA evidence in those crimes that just hasn't been tested yet, it's unlikely that they will ever be connected today. Who knows what Li Bich Thuy would have accomplished if Kenneth Day had not given in to one of his urges on that September night in 1994? As Sergeant Humrock concluded, their meeting was a purely fateful one. She just happened to be there when he was loitering outside the Twin Brook Metro station looking for a vulnerable victim, a co worker of Lee's told WUSA9 in 1994, quote she really did have one of the best scientific brains that I've ever encountered. And in the end, after decades of old fashioned detective work failed to pay off, it was science that provided the answers in her case. After 25 years, Lee Bich Thuy's case is closed thanks to Forensic Genealogy. And if you are one of the bad guys, they are coming for you. Thanks to sergeant Christopher Humrock of the Montgomery County Police Department Cold Case Unit for speaking with me about this case.
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Thanks for listening to this episode of dnaid. Before you leave, please let me tell you about some important things related to the show. If you'd like to support this podcast and in the process get access to early and ad free episodes as well as bonus content like Crime Scene photos, you can sign up for a Patreon subscription for only $5 a month by heading over to patreon.com dnaid of course you're welcome to contribute more than $5 a month. We rely on Patreon funds to pay for the original source materials I use to research each episode. If Patreon isn't your thing, you can also show your support with an AbJack Insider subscription through Apple Podcasts. It costs just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Your Abjak Insider subscription will give you the same benefits for not only DNA ID but for all of the shows on the abjak Network like Killer Communications and Campus Killings. Head over to Apple Podcasts and find the DNAID page or look for the ABJAC Network to get started. If you're on social media, we'd love to interact with you there. DNAID is on every major social media platform. Search your favorite platforms for DNAID Podcasts to find us. We also have a YouTube channel and our website is DNAIDpodcast.com you can find links to to all of these anytime in our show Notes. If you need to reach the show, contact us by emailing dnaid podcastmail.com finally, if you want to pick up some fun DNAID merch and represent the show, visit the store at www.customizedgirl.coms dnaidpodcast. DNAID is researched, written and hosted by me, Jessica Betten Court. It's produced by me and Mike Morford of abjack Entertainment Music by Connor Bettencourt.
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