Ep 7 of 14: A Company Asset
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While you still can. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. At participating McDonald's for a limited time while supplies last. This is episode seven, A Company Asset. In 2012, Bruce may have had a new wife and new beliefs, but there was one kind of providence he'd been a lifelong believer in for as far back as the day he met Marianne, his first wife.

He believed in life insurance. He believed in leaving something to provide for Chris and Caitlin, mainly. That's, you know, what he intended. When it came to their kids, Bruce wanted Chris and Caitlin to be taken care of, no matter what. And in the event of his death, the person he entrusted to do that was his friend and boss, Jared Rickey.

On March 19, 2007, five years before Bruce's murder, Rickey Development and Construction Company became the beneficiary of three separate $1 million life insurance policies on Bruce. That same day, Southeastern Louisiana Water and Sewage Company, another one of Jared's businesses, was issued a $2 million policy for Bruce. Combined, the policies totaled $5 million, and they all came from New York Life Insurance.

Because Jared was the owner of both companies that were the named beneficiaries, he was considered the de facto beneficiary. And there was a reason for this. Basically, while Bruce was alive, he had ownership stake in several businesses and real estate ventures, which Jared and other men were also investors in.

These business interests were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. If Bruce died, his death would be what's considered an involuntary event. In that case, his business interests would need to be transferred to the people associated with each business venture. In order to make that transfer easy and efficient for his family, a buy-sell agreement had to be in place between Bruce and Jared.

Now, here's where the life insurance money comes into play. According to Bruce's family, its purpose was to buy out Bruce's business interests from his family. In exchange, Jared agreed to pay the high premiums on the New York Life policies while Bruce was alive. Here's Bruce's son, Chris, to explain how it was all supposed to work.

It was more of like a loophole or a workaround for life insurance where the business would buy life insurance on it and then if he were to die, then the business would buy out his interest in all these businesses for the $2 million or $3 million or whatever it was. They don't want family members in these businesses. They don't want me and Caitlin making decisions on what their land deals are. They wanted a clean break and that was what the point of it was.

Bruce's family also says that the deal was, after financial control of the business interests went to Jared, what was left of the $5 million was supposed to pay off Bruce's mortgage, go to some charities, and then be split between Chris, Caitlin, and Ann. Over the years, there was no clarity as to if a document existed spelling all of this out, but several of Bruce's family members claimed it to be true. Here's Chris again.

It's not like the whole $5 million had to go out to satisfy all this stuff. He was going to get a couple million, and then a couple million was going to go out to what my dad wanted to do, and then he was going to receive all the business interest, and that was the whole point. According to Mary Ann, this arrangement had been understood for years and years, even when she was still married to Bruce. 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 insurance agent who drew up the policies was P.J. DeMary. When I spoke with him last year, P.J. was still a New York Life salesman in St. Tammany Parish. Bruce and I were friends since grade school. He had some issues in life, and then he got great. He found Jesus and became a part of our Bible study and

We got even closer than we had been over the years and became, you know, he sat next to me at the LSU games and we were just, you know, best friends. PJ says he was aware of a deal between Jared and Bruce regarding the life insurance money, but he never saw a document spelling out how everything was supposed to work. The deal was as long as Jared was paying the premiums, then it was a company asset, right? And...

It was to take care of the business dealings the two of them had. He was considered an asset to the group. There was never a document, but the handshake between Bruce and Jared was that Jared would pay off Bruce's house if anything ever happened to him, that his kids wouldn't have to worry about paying off the house. But a lot had to happen before the insurance money could get paid out. Most of the time, a homicide investigation has to be closed and the proper paperwork filed.

Before any of that could happen though, Bruce's loved ones needed to lay him to rest. His funeral took place on April 28th, 2012, four days after the murder. When I visited Bruce's grave for the first time at St. Joseph Abbey Cemetery in Covington, it was a week before his case turned 10 years old. His kids met me there in the middle of the afternoon. Chris had flown in from Texas and Caitlin made the short drive from her house across town.

She doesn't mind me sharing that information, by the way. She's proud she followed in her dad's footsteps and stayed in the place that meant so much to him. Bruce's tombstone sits directly next to his mother's. The plots at St. Joseph's are meticulously manicured. Surrounding trees are neatly trimmed. Headstones are clean. It's nice.

I mean, being here is 100% of, you know, you get the feeling of being here, you know, being surrounded by the trees and everything like this, and this is where he is. Whatever remains of him is here, is there, right? But I feel like I can talk to him anywhere.

Caitlin got married around the corner in the Abbey's Chapel. Her wedding was in October of 2012, six months after the murder. Instead of her dad walking her down the aisle, he was buried a few hundred yards away. He was helping me plan the wedding. I don't want to get upset, but, you know, he obviously didn't make it before the ceremony. I came out here and

brought him flowers and, you know, said a little prayer. I remember seeing my grandmother at the wedding and she was just crying and I started crying because he should have been there. He should have been there. Bruce's celebration of life service was at Trinity Church and his friend, Pastor Michael Sprague, oversaw things.

It was packed house. You know, there were people everywhere. You know, it's one of those things you kind of have to find more seats. You know, we usually had 400 to 500 seats set up. I think every seat was taken. It was full. Tried to honor Bruce in a way that was really appropriate and really celebrating his life, even though it was hard, hard, hard.

Part of what made it so hard was the fact that there were still so many unanswered questions swirling around Bruce's case. Everyone was a suspect, and no one was, all at the same time. Whispers wound through the church like a cool draft and hung in the air at the graveside service that followed.

There was just a deep interest of, you know, who, what, why, when, you know, this is crazy. Was this just being in the wrong spot at the wrong time kind of thing? Was it something more? The service was fairly typical. I opened in prayer and, you know, we read a few scriptures. With one exception, an open mic floated around the room and didn't stop.

So that went on for a long time. I mean, the service, you know, we didn't keep it to an hour. It went well over. Probably was closer to two hours. I mean, it just kept going on from business people to younger adults that had been part of his coaching to kind of brothers in the Lord that shared what that experience was like. People came from all those different walks of life, you know, the spiritual world, the business world.

There, but only physically, was Anne, Bruce's grieving widow. Before she shook hundreds of hands in the procession and saw Bruce's casket carried off, she got a few minutes alone with him. I remember going to view the body by myself because they allowed that. And I was fixing his hair the way he liked it. That's when I felt in the back of his head there was nothing there.

But everything in his face, you couldn't tell because supposedly it went through the eye. At the time, I felt like I needed to see him. She spent a lot of the service reflecting on everything that had happened and wondering if her husband's killer was a person passing the open mic around. I know as someone that around me could have been responsible for killing him, and I didn't know who it was, but I knew things did not add up. It just didn't add up.

When it comes to clear memories from the funeral, Anne, Chris, and Caitlin don't have many. They remember things in large blurry chunks, like the open casket moment or the long processional line. It's understandable. Funerals can be numbing. But something that is etched in their minds is what happened when they gathered back at Bruce and Anne's house in Covington. Jared, Bruce's boss, had a party waiting for them.

Jared threw a party. There was a huge tent in my front yard, catered event. Just wanted it to be this big celebration, I guess. Ann says the after party sent her over the edge. She openly voiced concerns to whoever would listen that she did not trust the men in Bruce's business world and she did not want them at her house.

I was kind of walking around. I mean, I had friends that yell at me saying, I mean, being a total crazy. And I was my family was, you know, telling me that I needed to stop it because my brother even took me to the pool house. I was like, you've got to stop this because I was flipping out.

At the party, Chris and Caitlin thought her accusations were preposterous because she was pointing fingers at men they'd grown up with and knew were close with their dad. Also at that time, they were trusting what NOP was telling them, which was that Bruce's murder was a robbery gone wrong. After the party, Anne and the kids' relationship got rocky. She was the new wife that nobody knew very well and the kids didn't know if they could trust her.

I think that really played into their feelings about me. Also because they also had a mother who they would have wanted back with their father, I believe. So, you know, I've tried to put myself in their shoes. It just happened that I was the one that was, I feel like everyone turned against me. You know, I had no more relationship with his mother or his sisters or his friends or his children or anyone that loved him.

Chris and Caitlin never outright accused Ann of being involved. But early on, they had their suspicions about her, which were mostly based on how adamant she was that someone in Bruce's business world was involved. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I said, look, everybody's emotional right now. So let's not go saying that. I don't want this to turn into just a gigantic circus, you know. And she was like, no, they did this.

But over time, and the more they looked at the details of their dad's case, Chris and Caitlin stopped suspecting Ann. That was honestly before we talked to investigators more in depth. That was before we, you know, had certain interactions with folks. And that was before, you know, speaking with FBI and all these other people and all the information that they had.

Bruce's kids realized a financial motive just wasn't there for Anne. And that's because she'd signed a prenup before she married their dad. And this prenup was ironclad. It protected Bruce's money and his ongoing business investments.

I got a copy of the document from the St. Tammany Parish Clerk of Court's office, and it's pretty straightforward. Essentially, Bruce and Ann considered their property separate. A section of the document specifies that if either spouse was caught cheating, that person owed the other $100,000.

Chris and Caitlin were initially surprised when they learned their dad had signed a prenup, but they figured it likely came from his associates worried that Bruce's past issues with infidelity would make him and his business interests vulnerable if he ever got divorced again. I was always convinced that it was because business partners told him to do it.

I don't think I've ever actually read the pre-nub. I just remember talking with him about that. It had to be because he had interests in all these different business entities with the business partners and then if he were to die, they don't want her all of a sudden like being whatever business partner, whatever percent, 15%, 25% in all these different businesses and having a say. So it had to be something to do with that.

So, when you take into account the prenup and the handshake agreement over the life insurance, Anne stood very little to gain financially from Bruce dying. The way she puts it, Bruce being alive was the best thing for her.

I left my full-time business back in Baton Rouge. I moved with my son. I changed his school. I moved away from my family, my friends. Everything was about him and being in Covington. I had a prenuptial agreement. I mean, the life insurance, I guess whatever he put in my name, but I had no clue what that was. Everything would have been more beneficial for me if he would have lived, right?

The only thing left to consider was maybe someone in Anne's past had a problem with Bruce. I explored this notion and took a hard look at Anne's ex-partner, a man named Kirsten Fabra. From everything I've learned, Kirsten was a bit of a rough guy, and things between them were described to me as volatile after they split.

They shared a young son together and their relationship, like many, had its share of ups and downs. Unfortunately, Kirsten passed away in 2015, so I couldn't interview him. But based on my conversations with law enforcement, Ann, Chris, and Caitlin, Kirsten was not a person NOPD investigators considered to be involved in Bruce's murder. No one remembers an argument between Bruce and Kirsten or issues of any kind.

I don't think they've ever seen each other, you know, spoken at all on telephone or in person. My honest opinion, there doesn't seem to be a convincing motive for Kirsten to want to hurt Bruce. He and Ann had separated long before she met Bruce. And the question I keep coming back to is, what could he possibly have gained from killing Bruce? Not a whole lot.

What's abundantly clear is that at the time of Bruce's death, Anne was dependent on him for everything. After he was killed, she had no idea how to keep things afloat. Even something as simple as paying their water and electric bills was a challenge for her. According to Anne, Jared and PJ stepped up to help guide her.

Anne says that Jared told her to bring him bills or anything she didn't know how to deal with, and he would sort it all out since he would eventually be in control of Bruce's life insurance money.

On May 22nd, 2012, one month after Bruce was killed, PJ DiMeri submitted claim paperwork with New York Life. These documents included Bruce's official death certificate, which listed his manner of death as homicide. Naturally, the insurance carrier denied the claim because the murder investigation was just getting started and no one had been officially cleared as a suspect.

I asked PJ about why he submitted the $5 million claim. I mean, he had to have known that Jared trying to receive funds for such a large policy so soon after the murder was going to throw up red flags. That's your responsibility to the client. The only time there would be suspect to that is if the person that received the benefits would be a...

under investigation for something like that. And so there was no suspecting that, I mean, no nefarious play, like I said, that I was aware of. And I know the purpose of those policies were to continue the business. So it was important that those funds be funded where they were funded to do what was done.

But that's not how New York Life saw it. The company kept resisting and refused to release the $5 million. The entity wanted to wait until the homicide investigation had concluded, or at a minimum, get NOPD on record saying that Jared was not considered a suspect.

In the summer of 2012, NOPD was not at the point in their investigation where they could exclude anyone as a suspect. So Jared, like everyone else, was still being investigated. However, it should be noted that as of today, NOPD has never publicly named Jared an official suspect in Bruce's murder.

Anyway, June 2012 passed and then July, until finally Jared and his lawyers made a decisive move. On August 7th, 2012, three and a half months after Bruce's murder, Jared sued New York Life for the insurance money.

In 2012, Louisiana law required life insurance companies pay out death benefits within 60 days of receiving proof of an insured's death. By the time August rolled around, almost 90 days had lapsed since PJ DiMeri submitted claim paperwork to New York Life, and Jared had still not received the $5 million. That delay created legal grounds for a lawsuit.

Originally, Jared and his attorneys filed their suit in East Baton Rouge District Court, a jurisdiction over an hour away from St. Tammany Parish. But the lawsuit was removed from that court and landed in the federal court system for the Middle District of Louisiana.

That change happened because the defendant, New York Life, was an out-of-state insurance company. Both parties went back and forth for two months until October 1st, 2012. On that day, the insurance carrier decided to pay out the $5 million, despite the homicide still being unsolved. You see, at some point between August and October, the New Orleans Police Department had given New York Life the green light to release the money.

According to court paperwork, the payout ended things from a legal standpoint and the lawsuit was dismissed. What's really strange to me is that PJ DeMary, the agent who brokered the policies and was someone repeatedly mentioned in the litigation, told me he wasn't even aware the lawsuit happened. Listen to our exchange for yourself. The company felt bad.

Well, that was after some litigation, I believe, correct? By the beneficiary, the lawsuit that said, hey, New York Life, please pay this claim. And then ultimately they settled to pay it. So, but their first response though was we still aren't... Oh, so you weren't aware of the lawsuit that was filed to get the insurance?

PJ telling me he didn't know Jared sued New York Life for the insurance money surprised me. I got the sense that he just wanted to avoid addressing the subject.

But the fact remains, $5 million in life insurance getting paid out to a beneficiary who is not the next of kin of a murder victim is really striking. It's clear that New York Life didn't feel comfortable with the idea. So why did they cave in court? The answer, according to Chris, Bruce's son, may involve politics. Why is that happening?

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Chris says that not long after the life insurance lawsuit ended, he visited NOPD headquarters and met with the lead detective on his dad's case, as well as members of the ATF who'd expressed interest in assisting NOPD. I went down there and I met him. We go up the elevator and he walks me into a room. He doesn't tell me what we're doing. He walks me into a room and there's

Like, I mean, a roundtable with like three or four ATF agents. And then there's all these people and I don't know what I'm walking into. And they start sitting down and talking to me. And the ATF is saying that they want to take the case. As he remembers it, during that meeting, the captain of the homicide division leaned over and was candid with him.

He was sitting right next to me. He was right to my right. I look right to him and he's saying, he says, the one regret that we have through this whole thing was allowing the insurance company to pay out that insurance money. He said, we didn't want him to do it.

We didn't put up a fight because there are people high up in NOPD that live on the North Shore or connect with people on the North Shore. And they said that we have to let this money get paid out. And so we stood down and they paid it out. I mean, he was sitting right next to me and he told me that. Today, NOPD cold case detective Ryan Oakwin told me he wishes the department had handled the life insurance differently, much differently.

In this case, it was a high sum of money, which we don't normally deal with. We don't normally deal with large-sum insurance policies. They're normally smaller. I don't know why we didn't press harder for the insurance company to not release those funds. I don't know why. I think it would have been safe to say back in 2012 that nobody could have been ruled out as a suspect in this homicide and that payout on that life insurance policy probably should have been held.

You know, because, I mean, that is a, that is part of, that isn't part of the investigation. For Chris and Caitlin, the end of the life insurance lawsuit marked a noticeable shift in their relationship with men who were business associates with their dad, specifically Jared. Once that happened, we didn't get a phone call from him after that. Once the court decided

Once Baton Rouge Court granted him the release of the life insurance funds, did not hear a phone call from him. Everything changed. Everything changed from his end. They were still hopeful if their dad had final wishes, those would at least be carried out. They knew Bruce was detail-oriented, so they figured he had to have left a will or some kind of end-of-life instructions somewhere. But when they'd searched his house in Covington, nothing turned up.

which left only one place it might be, his office in downtown Covington. Ann told me she visited Bruce's office at the beginning of May 2012 to give Jared bills she didn't know how to pay. Jared told me just to keep the bills and then to bring them to the office, and he would handle them until everything was settled.

And so I just assumed he would take that out of whatever Bruce had said would be my portion of whatever. I didn't really know. So I go into the office and I wanted his office door was closed. And I just wanted to see where he last was that morning and just see his space. Bruce's office door being closed didn't strike Anne as unusual. But how she had to go about opening it was unusual.

Jared said that only Dan had a key to the office. A quick reminder, Dan Burris is a friend of Bruce and Jared's, who is a lawyer and a longtime business associate. When Dan got back, he opened the door so I could go in. Everything looked like it was kind of in place. It's like things were everywhere. So I couldn't tell if anything was there or not there or what needed to happen.

Anne says Dan and Jared told her that SELA staff went through Bruce's office and email accounts looking for helpful documents, but they hadn't found anything. Chris and Caitlin remember Jared telling them the same thing. Jared came by the house and had a conversation with us about, you know, hey, we...

They went through your dad's office looking for a will. They turned his office upside down. We were not able to find anything. We've also gone through...

Out of the blue one day in early July 2012, Kaitlyn's phone rang.

Kalen was called over to clean my dad's office out because they needed the office space. It's been two months, almost two months, you know, like you need to get all of his stuff out the office and

You know, I guess like whenever you're going through like the grieving process, you're just not in the mode of like, I want to go clean out an office. Like when I mean my dad kept everything there, I mean, there was cabinets of just like paperwork. So, yeah, a lot to go through physically and emotionally. But it didn't take long poking around her dad's workspace before Caitlin found something very valuable.

I pull open the drawer and I'm just looking at the papers and I was like, "Holy crap." I was like, "Kris, I just found a copy, two copies of the will and the buy-sell agreement."

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Of the two documents Caitlin found, the first was a typed buy-sell agreement that read...

This agreement, dated September 8th, 2010, establishes a buy-sell agreement between Jared C. Rickey and Bruce F. Kuchera in the event of either party's death. Jared C. Rickey agrees to purchase for $3,030,000 the following interests in the below listed LLCs. This is a reciprocal agreement in which Bruce F. Kuchera agrees to purchase the interests in Jared C. Rickey in the event of his death in the above listed LLCs for $3,030,000.

The document includes a chart that lists Bruce's ownership percentage in five LLCs. Below that is Bruce's signature. The line where Jared's signature was supposed to go was empty. Bruce's family verified the authenticity of his signature, but just to be sure, I compared the writing to Bruce's checkbook entries, and even though I'm not an expert in handwriting analysis, I feel confident it's the same.

The second document Caitlin found was a photocopy of Bruce's last will and testament. It also had his signature at the bottom, next to the date, September 8th, 2010. There's handwriting in black pen on a few line items and a new date scribble below the original date, which indicates he amended the document, making significant changes on January 12th, 2012, three months before his murder.

In those changes, he decreased the amount of money that was supposed to go to Chris and Caitlin from $1 million apiece to $750,000. He took Mary Ann, his ex-wife, out of the will entirely and adjusted the payoff on his mortgage to reflect its current amount, around $300,000.

He increased the amount of money he wanted to leave to Ann from $300,000 to $750,000, and he left a few more thousand dollars to his former high school, Trinity Church, and Ann's son. The last paragraph of the document reads, in part, In addition, I request that Jared C. Rickey be the administrator of this will, and P.J. DeMary be used to invest the above proceeds as to ensure continued income for the children in years to come.

The problem with the documents is that they're photocopies, not originals. Not only that, they only have Bruce's signature on them, not Jared's, which means they're not legally binding. I've posted both documents on the blog post for this episode. Feel free to look at them for yourself. Chris and Caitlin have always had their suspicions about how easily she found these papers.

I was like, well that's odd for someone saying they turned the whole office upside down and couldn't find it. How did I just find it like top on top? Like it wasn't like it was hidden down in a drawer or anything. It was two folded right there on top. And I just remember being like, so if you're turning around the office looking for it, you would have found that. It's not like you had to dig like in a bottom drawer and oh look, it's in this file. No, it was like right on top. I don't find it in a sense.

that, oh, like my dad just had two copies of the will and they were just kind of overlooked when, you know, it's almost like somebody put it there.

How the documents ended up in Bruce's desk remains a mystery. Maybe Bruce typed them up and put them there himself, and office staff just missed them. But that still doesn't explain where the originals are. Something else that I found strange is when I mentioned both documents to PJ DeMary, Bruce's friend-slash-insurance agent, he got, how should I put it, hostile.

There was no will, sweetie. I'm going to tell you that again. You're making me mad now. There was no will. That's the end of that conversation. You keep saying there's a will. There's no will. There was never a will, though, because I would have known if there was a will. I would have helped him with his finances.

To say that I was baffled by PJ's response is an understatement. He's literally referenced by name in the last Well and Testament. I found it hard to believe he didn't know a will existed, but he doubled down. Where did they find that paperwork? They found that paperwork in his desk drawer in his office in Covington.

Okay. I'm sorry. I never, I never knew there was a will. We discussed it, that he needed one because of the situations between, you know, prior marriages and current marriages and assets and all that. And, and he just didn't get it done. Not that I know of. And if there's something done that I didn't know about, that's fine. But I, and that's all I know.

In October of 2012, after the life insurance lawsuit had settled and Jared was in control of the $5 million, Chris, Caitlin, and Jared took the photocopies of the documents from Bruce's desk to a Covington attorney named Julian Rodrigue Jr., or Rod Rodrigue, as most people refer to him. By that time, Caitlin had dug up another important document from a bunch of boxes of papers she'd taken from her dad's office.

It was a detailed explanation of the specific terms of Jared and Bruce's buy-sell agreement. It was dated May 7, 2007, and only had Bruce's signature on it. It's on CELA letterhead and reads...

It is my wishes, in the event of my death, that my interests, valued at $3 million in the projects listed below, shall be purchased from my family. My family should agree to sell all interests in the projects listed below at the $3 million price, and the Rickey family should agree to purchase at that price. Proceeds from the life insurance policies on Bruce F. Cucera, owned by Rickey Development Company and Sela, and controlled by the Rickey family, should be used to facilitate this buyout.

Rod Rodriguez Jr., the attorney who all the documents went to, had been friends with Bruce and Jared for a long time and was experienced with estate dealings. So Chris and Caitlin accepted his help because they had no one else to turn to at the time.

Basically, Rod would communicate to us and kind of speak in hypothetical terms, and he would say, well, you know, Jared could take the house from you. The fact that no one could find originals of any of the documents that would have needed to display both men's signatures, things became difficult. Technically, Jared had full control of the life insurance money, but no legal document holding him accountable on how to fulfill Bruce's wishes.

We started really getting into the estate part of it. We started having the estate attorney kind of working with us and it got very confrontational. It got very tense between us and Jared. And that's when we were like, "What is going on here?" I mean, you know, you're his best friend and you're not doing anything at all that he wants you to do.

Kaitlyn told me that Jared did eventually agree to pay off the remainder of Bruce's mortgage, which allowed Bruce's house to go to his kids. But the rest of his wishes went unaddressed. End of the day, he got $5 million. We didn't. A possible reason for that is something you're going to want to brace yourself for. It is relatively...

It's all in Counter Clock, Episode 8, Conflict. Listen right now.

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