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National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary, discounts not available in all states and situations. This is episode six, Big Time. In late June of 2012, two months after Bruce was murdered, his wife Anne's phone started buzzing.
When she looked at the screen, she had to do a double take. I got a text message. It was from Bruce's phone and his phone number. Yeah, that Bruce, her dead husband. Obviously, it was impossible for him to be the one sending the text, which meant someone else had his phone. Miss Joyce Whitfield is her name.
Joyce was not someone who Bruce or Anne knew. She was a woman in her late 50s who lived in Baton Rouge, a city an hour west from Covington and almost two hours away from the Mark 7 apartments. I called her and I said, my husband, where'd you get this phone? This is my husband's phone. And he was murdered. She was like, oh. And I quickly called the detective to let him know.
Joyce and Anne only spoke for a minute or two, but in that short time, Joyce said that she'd purchased the cell phone from a secondhand electronics store in Baton Rouge called Big Time Communications. Joyce explained that when she turned the phone on, it had a full contacts list. Anne immediately called NOPD homicide detective Orlando Matthews. She wanted him to get to Baton Rouge ASAP. The fact that Bruce's phone had been missing since the murder made the matter urgent.
But Orlando didn't answer Anne's call, so she followed up with a text that read, Getting text from a lady and called her, and she bought a phone at Big Time in Baton Rouge, and she said all these numbers were in it. Please call me. Several hours went by without a response. Then she sent him another message. Detective Matthews, wanted to know if you found out anything about the phone. Was it Bruce's phone? Hope to hear from you. Thanks, Anne."
While she waited for Orlando to respond, she reached out to Bruce's boss, Jared Rickey. She needed him to give her the serial number and model for Bruce's iPhone so she could provide that information to police. Like I mentioned in the last episode, Bruce's phone was owned by his employer, so Jared was the only person Anne knew to ask for information about it.
On July 7th, Ann texted Jared this. Need serial number on Bruce's cell phone. So if we could call Verizon and ask them, that would be great. Detective Matthews is in BR. Call me.
Jared didn't respond, but a few hours later, one of Jared and Bruce's mutual associates, Dan Burris, sent a text to Ann that said, The next day, July 8th, Detective Matthews responded to Ann with a text that said, I'm working on it.
So if you were counting, that's a total of eight days, more than a week, that passed between when Joyce Whitfield first contacted Anne from Bruce's number to when law enforcement hit the ground running trying to track her down. Despite this slow start, Orlando Matthews did eventually make progress. Here's cold case detective Ryan Oakland. The detective was able to track the phone to a phone store, like a pop-up phone store in Baton Rouge.
The guy who owned Big Time Communications was Richard Chambers. His store operated like a pawn shop and sold new and used electronics, CDs, chargers, lots of stuff. It was in a rundown shopping plaza behind an ethnic food mart in East Baton Rouge.
What exactly Orlando Matthews did when he got to big time is unclear to everyone except Orlando Matthews. According to Ryan O'Quinn, Orlando didn't put many details in his report about his initial interviews with Richard Chambers and Joyce Whitfield regarding Bruce's cell phone.
Detective Matthews, who was the original detective, worked that angle of the investigation. It just didn't pan out in the police department's favor as far as the work that he did on it. It's a sad fact of it. And, you know, in a perfect world, police departments wouldn't make mistakes. But, I mean, we're human beings and people make mistakes. Back in 2012, Caitlin says Orlando gave the family bits and pieces of information about his conversations with Joyce and Richard.
Joyce Whitfield gave the phone to a lawyer, and that's where NOPD picked up the cell phone. They went to Big Time Communications, and they confiscated any other cell phones that were there, which would be one other cell phone that was there. Asked Richard Chambers if he sold the phone. He denied it. He said, I did not sell her the phone. So he has no record of it. He says he didn't sell it to her.
When Caitlin and Chris learned that Richard had denied selling Joyce a cell phone, they naturally questioned her story. And they stayed on police to clear up the matter, but that never happened. Every single time we meet with them, and we would ask these questions every single time, and they would just give us some sort of like, I'm looking into it, we're waiting to get back from Orlando Matthews, I'm asking the questions, and you're trying not to piss them off in the story because you don't want to
for them not to tell you information or to stop working the case. But every single time when it comes to Joyce Whitfield, it stops. Literally every time. If you think that's weird, here's where things get really bizarre. Bruce's cell phone has since vanished from NOPD's evidence lockup.
The New Orleans Police Department isn't in possession of that phone. It was recovered at one point. Its whereabouts now are unknown. That portion of the investigation isn't or wasn't privileged to me from the previous investigator. Only one phone gets actually put in evidence, which is the phone from the pawn shop. My dad's phone is missing. Other than police and I guess technically Dan Burris. The only people who knew about the cell phone was Ann, was us, and was Jared.
So, sometime between when Orlando Matthews allegedly seized Bruce's cell phone from Joyce and her lawyer to when the cold case unit took over the investigation in 2016, Bruce's phone disappeared. Just poof. Gone. Orlando told me that he remembers getting the cell phone from Joyce Whitfield and would have given it to NOPD's technicians so they could examine it. But as far as it disappearing, he couldn't explain how or when that could have happened.
Ryan O'Quinn didn't know anything about the phone being examined by NOPD techs, so that indicates to me it didn't happen. If the phone going missing seems fishy to you, you're not alone. I'm 100% with you, and so are Chris and Caitlin.
I couldn't tell if it was total incompetence or if somebody was like saying like, "Don't look into this case anymore." It could have been either, you know what I'm saying? And I think that's been our whole question the whole time with every single step of this case. Is it like total incompetence or is there something else bigger going on? Like, can every single person who has had this case drop the ball this badly?
To make things even stranger, Joyce Whitfield's story about how she got a hold of Bruce's phone in the first place changed drastically after Orlando Matthews said he spoke with her a second time. Caitlin remembers Orlando telling her this. He said Joyce Whitfield had it. She said that there was a Cornelius Knox staying with her and that he had a bike and a nice watch and had left the cell phone behind.
The first story Joyce gave to police was that she bought a cell phone at Big Time Communications, turned it on, and because the contents clearly showed it had belonged to someone else, she started calling numbers in the contacts. But the second version of her story is very different. She said she didn't actually buy the phone. She found it in a bag of stuff that a guy named Cornelius Knox left at her house.
The phone was in a bag with a wallet and a nice watch. Sound familiar? Both are items believed to have been missing from Bruce Kuchera. The problem is, the family never heard if NOPD investigators followed up with Joyce about her changing stories. And when I recently spoke with Orlando Matthews on the phone, he said he remembers Joyce's story changing, but couldn't remember what he did to investigate her further. The mysterious Cornelius Knox was also never tracked down.
Like, what? We have one story about big-time communications. Now we have this story about this other guy staying with her for a couple weeks, and no one has followed that up. You're telling me the piece of evidence that was taken from a murder suspect, from a murder victim, this woman has it, ended up in Baton Rouge, and they don't even, like, interrogate her or question her about it? They just take her word on it, and she gives two conflicting stories?
It wasn't until the end of November 2021, almost a decade later, that NOPD put out a be-on-the-lookout bulletin for Richard and Joyce. We realized that Joyce would feel and Richard Chambers needed to be re-interviewed, basically in reference to the victim's phone.
On the bolo, Ryan labeled Richard and Joyce as persons of interest in the ongoing murder investigation, but stressed that neither of them was facing criminal charges. Ryan just wanted to speak with them because he believed they might have potentially valuable information. Up until that point, all of his efforts to corroborate their stories or any details surrounding how Bruce's phone wound up in Baton Rouge had failed.
When we tried to follow up on those leads, again, it being so many years later, you know, people either conveniently didn't remember, you know, what happened back in 2012 or, you know, or denied any involvement at all. After the local media circulated the bolo for a few weeks, Richard Chambers showed up to NOPD headquarters and spoke with Ryan.
He didn't have any business records that would have been helpful or any business records at all as far as the purchase or the selling of Mr. Kuchera's phone. His cell phone store isn't in existence anymore and he didn't really have a recollection of much. Whether or not he was telling us the truth or not, I don't, you know, as investigators we always tend to think that everybody's lying to us at first and then they are telling us what we want to
Joyce is still in the wind.
Miss Whitfield has yet to come in. She knows that we're looking for her. We put her on the news and we've reached out to Baton Rouge and they've gone by a couple of addresses trying to locate her. She's an elderly female, you know, so that is still an active part of the investigation to sit down and speak with her as far as we know she was the last person outside of the police department to be in possession of the phone. Before I go any further, I want to take a minute and just logically go through Joyce's story about this Cornelius Knox guy, if that's even a real name.
Let's say he does exist and did leave Bruce's cell phone wallet and watch at her house. It would make sense for Joyce when she discovered those things to be curious about them because they weren't hers. Maybe that's why she contacted Anne. Maybe she wanted to know who they belonged to. And once she learned that the phone belonged to a murdered man, she freaked out. But by that point, she'd already alerted Bruce's loved ones that his phone existed. So there was no going back.
Maybe she made up the story about going to big time communications to cover for Cornelius Knox. Maybe she didn't want him to get in trouble for having stolen stuff. Or maybe she lied because she was afraid he might be the person who killed Bruce. Maybe she didn't do any of those things. I don't know. I can't get inside Joyce's mind. But the Cornelius Knox information she allegedly told NOPD got me thinking.
What if Bruce's phone wound up with Joyce because either she or someone close to her robbed Bruce after his murder? Like, what if Bruce's murder and his stuff being taken from him are two separate crimes that happened minutes apart? I know it sounds wild, but bear with me.
What if whoever shot Bruce intended to kill him and he was set up, but then someone who saw him dying in the parking lot robbed him of his cell phone, wallet, and watch?
They knew he couldn't fight back, so they looted his corpse. It sounds like a stretch, I know, but desperate people can do desperate things. I mean, the fact that Joyce allegedly told Orlando Matthews that this Cornelius Knox rode a bike matches up with the eyewitnesses from Bruce's crime scene who said they saw a man riding a bike away from the Mark 7 apartments after the murder. And look, I'm not saying this is what happened, but
but it is one theory that makes sense. I discussed the scenario with Ryan Oakland, but he doesn't buy it. He thinks it was a hitman or a robbery that turned into a murder, but not a setup and then a robbery. We know that there's one gunman, or we suspect that there's one gunman based on the investigation. You know, I'm not saying that it couldn't have been a straight-up execution, you know, for whatever reason. I just...
I have nothing to prove that. I have something that kind of proves that it was a robbery. Chris and Caitlin have spent years trying to figure out how their dad's phone ended up with Joyce Whitfield all the way in Baton Rouge. They've gone over dozens of different scenarios that might explain it, but nothing quite fits.
It could have been that the person that did it took the wallet phone and gave the phone to some, you know, just ran into some eye random and gave them the phone. Like, hey, you want the cell phone? Boom. And people would be like, okay, I'll take the cell phone. It's, you know, 300 bucks or however much, you know. It could be anything like that. For the people that may think that
and had something to do with this. I mean, I think the fact that she brought this to the attention of the investigators, because this could potentially be a big piece of evidence that they located a cell phone and maybe the place where the cell phone came from. If she had something to do with it, why would she turn around and tell police about it? Because that could end up getting her caught.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to Bruce's phone statements after May of 2012, which means I can't analyze what numbers might have been dialed after his death or what locations those calls were placed from. His employer could find that information out, though, if they pulled the Verizon bills for June 2012. They could determine if the phone was turned on or in use between April 24th, 2012 and when Joyce first texted Anne in late June.
Based on my conversation with Ryan O'Quinn, nothing like that has been provided to police.
In the end, everything about Joyce Whitfield, the phone vanishing from evidence, and the vague Cornelius Knox story made me have a lot of questions. So I chose to put myself in the detective's shoes and do all the things Orlando Matthews said he did back in 2012. I went to Baton Rouge, and I researched big-time communications, Joyce Whitfield, and Richard Chambers. What I found was shocking.
I never knew that till recently, that there was actually no big time.
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At 4 o'clock in the morning on August 30th, 2011, a deputy on patrol for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office came across a burning building. He parked his cruiser, got out, and noticed heavy smoke and tall flames billowing out of a commercial storefront. He called the fire into dispatch and noted that the exact address fire trucks needed to come to was 6537 Greenwell Street.
By 4:30 a.m., firefighters with the District 6 Fire Department had put out the blaze and started an investigation of the soppy, charred scene. They determined that the far-right corner store unit was the point of origin. It had the worst damage. When they walked around the building, they saw that a back window of that unit had been broken into, and inside there were a variety of items in a storage room/bathroom that appeared to have been intentionally set on fire.
The investigators didn't officially rule the case arson though. Instead, they labeled it "undetermined" but "highly suspicious." All of that information came from public records I requested from the investigating agencies. The name of the store that operated out of the far corner unit at 6537 Greenwell Street was Big Time Communications.
The fire department's report is the most detailed and lists Richard Chambers as the owner and operator of Big Time Communications. Richard told investigators that in the weeks leading up to the fire, his shop had been burglarized several times. In each of those burglaries, someone had pushed in the back window that led into his store.
Now, the reason I'm telling you about this fire is because it occurred eight months before Bruce Kachera was murdered. East Baton Rouge Parish Property Records satellite imagery of the site shows pictures of the big-time storefront from before and after the fire. And there's no question, it was a total loss. Take a look at the pictures for yourself on the blog post for this episode.
My two questions are, did Richard Chambers move back into the burned-down building after the fire? And was Big Time Communications even in business after August of 2011? If the answer to both of those is no, then Joyce Whitfield could not have purchased a phone from the store in June of 2012 because there would have been no store to go to.
Orlando Matthews also couldn't have visited Richard's store and confiscated another cell phone like he told Bruce's family he did if there was no store to go to. "I've spoken with Orlando on the phone about this, and he told me he remembers going to a physical store. When I brought up the fact that I have proof it burned down, he said he didn't know anything about the fire and doubled down that he remembers going into a storefront."
So either Orlando is lying or misremembering, or Richard Chambers did reopen at some point between August of 2011 and June of 2012. When I visited the store in person last year, it had been remodeled and a barber shop is now in the unit that used to be Big Time Communications. But nobody there could tell me exactly when the storefront was gutted and rebuilt.
To try and get more clarity, I went searching for the two people who should know, Richard Chambers and Joyce Whitfield. Richard has a criminal history in Baton Rouge dating back to the early 1990s. Most of his arrests are for traffic-related offenses, not paying his taxes, and aggravated assault.
The clerk of court's office in East Baton Rouge listed a couple of recalled bench warrants for him, which fortunately had all of his former addresses on them. Before I went door-knocking to find Richard, I checked in with the ethnic food store in front of the old big-time communications storefront. The owners of that market weren't available, but their property records show their family owned the plaza at the time of the fire in 2011.
I talked with the clerks, who seemed friendly. "I'm trying to find Mr. Richard Chambers, who used to own Big Time Communications. It was in the plaza in the back." One guy behind the counter recognized the picture I was flashing around and said Richard had come into the store about two months before I showed up, but he hadn't been back after getting into a terrible accident. "He cut his toes off." "He did?" "He's cutting grass." "Oh my gosh. When did that happen?"
Just in case that guy was wrong, I asked around at a few more shops on Greenwell Street, and workers at food carts, gas stations, and ironically, another phone store, all said the same thing. We used to be up there in the front, but we haven't seen it. Come on, raise your level.
According to half a dozen people I spoke with, before Richard injured his feet, he would sell things from the bed of his pickup truck at the corner of Greenwell Street and Silverleaf Avenue.
I knew the make, model, and color of Richard's truck thanks to court filings with copies of his recent traffic tickets. So, with my husband and young son creeping along in the car next to me with their windows rolled down, I walked door to door and knocked on all of Richard's former addresses in East Baton Rouge. I struck out a bunch. But right when I was about to give up, one of his old neighbors approached me. Do you recognize him? Oh, Mr. Ritchie, yeah. He's down the corner of Matthew Street.
When I arrived to where the neighbor had sent me, I heard someone rustling inside of Richard's house. I announced who I was, but no one ever came to the door.
If the story about Richard cutting his toes off was true, I imagine he wouldn't have been able to come to the door. So I've called and left messages for him, but still, I've gotten nothing. Unfortunately, I had similar bad luck trying to find Joyce Whitfield. All of her addresses in Baton Rouge were dead ends too.
In the months since, a source gave me another recent address for Joyce, which I sent a letter to, but unsurprisingly, haven't gotten a reply back.
Joyce is an interesting character, though. She has a criminal record in several parishes dating back to 2005 for shoplifting and grand theft. She used two different versions of her name on court paperwork and listed two different birthdays. In 2008, bench warrants for her arrest were issued, but inexplicably, in October 2012, four months after she was questioned about having Bruce's cell phone, all of her warrants were dropped.
I couldn't find any explanation in the court filings as to why. It's like the prosecutor's office where she'd been wanted just recalled her warrants out of the blue. She's been MIA ever since, and as of today, she's in her upper 60s. Part of me wonders, though, if she's even still alive.
I couldn't find a death record for her, so if she's dead, no one knows or has reported her missing. If she's alive, she's done a good job of laying low and not talking about why she had Bruce's cell phone in 2012. The fact that his phone is no longer with police, though, is beyond frustrating to me. It was a critical piece of evidence that's now, once again, gone.
I tried calling Bruce's number just to see what would happen, but I got a voicemail for a guy named Damien. I left a message and a few days later, he called me back. He didn't know who Bruce Kachera was or that he'd been murdered, but he said he purchased a Verizon number about 10 years ago. So more than likely, Bruce's number got reassigned a year or two after his murder.
But Bruce's employer didn't just own his cell phone. Technically, Southeastern Louisiana Water and Sewer Company owned his life by way of insurance, $5 million worth of insurance. I know this for a fact. He believed that some of that huge insurance policy that the company had on him would go to Chris and Caitlin. He told me that. The deal was, as long as Jared was paying the premiums, then it was a company asset.
That's what I'm exploring in Episode 7, A Company Asset, which starts right now.
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