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Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. It's so nice to meet up with you again for another midweek true crime session. I'm your host, Peyton Moreland. On our last pair of episodes, we explored some cases that began with suspicious falls and this week and next, our stories begin with suspicious fires.
The kind of fires that are set for the purpose of destroying evidence and masking a crime. And if you think about it, murderers will use all the elements except wind to cover their tracks. Fire is perhaps the most destructive element of all, but it also attracts the most attention. If you set something on fire, it's only a matter of time before someone sees it under most circumstances and reports it.
24-year-old Kenneth Maxwell was at a point in his life where he was beginning to think seriously about his future. He had just gotten engaged to his girlfriend of five years, Sarah Conley, who was in her final semester of community college where she was an art major.
The couple had made a plan to both enroll at the University of Oklahoma and then get married as soon as they graduated. While Kenneth earned decent money driving a truck for a beer distributor, he planned on studying structural engineering, which was a far better paying and more interesting career than driving a truck. Kenneth was a guy with a good heart.
He believed in doing the right thing and helping other people out whenever they needed it. He was an honest-to-goodness good Samaritan, the kind of guy who would stop to help out stranded motorists changing a tire or looking under the hood for total strangers. And in the early morning hours of February 22, 2003, Kenneth's giving and helpful nature would cost him his life.
It was around 3 in the morning. Kenneth was returning home from a Saturday night party, driving through a quiet residential neighborhood when
when he noticed fire swelling inside of a house on the corner of Yorktown Avenue and Fifth Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So he did what I think many of us would do. He pulled his car around the front of the house and dialed 911 on his cell phone. When the 911 operator answered the call, Kenneth told her there was a house that appeared to be on fire.
I can see a fire in a window, he told the operator. I can see flames, but I can't really see smoke. The back of the house is lit up. The operator asked his name and he told her it was Kenneth and explained that he was on his way home from a friend's house when he spotted the blaze. As the operator asked him to hang on the line, she then heard him interacting with someone else.
Is there a fire in there? Kenneth asked. A male voice could be heard faintly in the background. Kenneth then replied to the person in the background, Okay, okay. It was in a compliant tone. And then the line suddenly went dead. Police and firefighters arrived at the scene four minutes later. When they entered the home, they found that the fire hadn't spread beyond the kitchen except for some flames that had climbed up the wall and entered the attic.
As firemen extinguished the fire inside the home, police outside found Kenneth Maxwell's car, the man who had called 911. It was parked in the street right where he had stopped it. And inside the car, slumped behind the driver's seat, was Kenneth Maxwell himself, barely clinging to life with a gunshot wound to his head.
Inside the house was another grisly discovery. Two more victims, a man and a woman, each with bullet wounds in their heads. All had been shot, it would later be determined, with a .22 caliber gun. As paramedics arrived, two of the three victims still had a pulse. That would be Kenneth Maxwell and the woman that was inside the house.
The man, presumed to be the woman's husband, was dead. The woman was found nude in a bedroom and had been shot multiple times in the head through a pillow. Her jeans, underwear, shirt, and socks were found neatly folded on the dining room floor with her eyeglasses placed on top of them.
It looked like she had probably heard the first shot, went to the kitchen to investigate, and was then confronted by her husband's killer and forced to disrobe at gunpoint before being led to the bedroom, probably for the purpose of being sexually assaulted. Rebecca had three bullets in her head, but she was unconscious and struggling to breathe.
As she was being worked on by first responders, a crime scene tech swabbed her body for any potential DNA before she was taken away to the hospital. And sadly, neither she nor Kenneth Maxwell ever regained consciousness. Kenneth died on the way to the hospital as a Good Samaritan, and the woman would die after being admitted.
The female victim was later identified as 42-year-old Rebecca Barney, who worked as a manicurist and had two grown children. And the dead man inside the house was her estranged husband, 51-year-old Freddie Barney, who worked for a heating and air conditioning contractor. Freddie was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range and covered with a small area rug.
It appeared as though he had been making a sandwich in the kitchen when the killer approached him from behind, completely surprising him and shot him. And then Kenneth Maxwell was obviously shot afterward as the killer was leaving the house. Which, if you haven't guessed by now, that means the person heard in the background of the 911 call was most likely Kenneth's killer.
So Kenneth Maxwell's end of the story here seemed pretty cut and dry. He was a good Samaritan doing, in this case, the bare minimum. Something even people who generally take the don't get involved tack would probably do. You see a house on fire, it costs very little time or effort to dial 911. And the last thing you expect, even in those unusual circumstances, is that someone's going to come from out of the shadows and turn out your lights with a bullet.
Poor Kenneth probably didn't even know what hit him. And a few hours after Kenneth died, his parents were getting ready for work when they got the dreaded call. "Your son's been killed," they were told. Kenneth's father broke down in tears while his mom was in disbelief. Surely they had some other Kenneth Maxwell. This was all just some mix-up, she thought.
But when they went to the hospital to identify the body, it removed all doubt and replaced it with heartbreaking certainty. Their son was dead at the age of 24. He'd never marry Sarah. He'd never enroll in college. And his identity, to most people who would be aware of the name Kenneth Maxwell, wouldn't be husband, father, or structural engineer. It would become murder victim.
Ken's mother looked at her son's lifeless body laid out on a metal slab. She wanted to touch him before he was embalmed and became ice cold and rigid to the touch, but they wouldn't allow it. Police procedure.
This had become a homicide investigation, and they couldn't permit a grieving mother to compromise potential evidence by touching her son one last time to say goodbye. And this is just the heartbreaking reality in many of these stories that we cover. And the truth is, Kenneth's parents had no idea who the Barneys were, who their son had stopped to call 911 for.
Kenneth Maxwell had no known relationship with the murdered couple. It seemed like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if Kenneth Maxwell's unwitting sacrifice did any good for anyone, it was that it got police out to the house well before the fire destroyed valuable evidence in this crime. Because whoever killed the Barneys obviously set that fire for the purpose of covering his tracks and burning away evidence.
and due to Kenneth Maxwell's emergency call, the plan was thwarted. Inside the house, investigators found that the stove in the kitchen had been yanked out of its place and the gas line was cut, and the killer then ignited the fumes. There were no signs of forced entry. Nothing in the house appeared to have been stolen, so it didn't look like burglary was the motive.
The TV set had been left behind, the victim's wallets, credit cards, money, jewelry, nothing was taken except a computer. In one of the back bedrooms, computer wires dangled from a space where a computer tower should be.
There was a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor that had toppled over onto the floor, but there was no computer. Only a computer-shaped break in the dust at the workstation. The killer had obviously taken the computer. The killer believed the computer would lead police to his identity, so this was a significant clue.
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Police canvassed the neighborhood and learned that the Barneys had lived in the house for several years and seemed like, quote, nice, quiet people. At autopsy, Rebecca Barney was found to have been sexually assaulted before her death, and she had been on her period at the time of her rape and murder, so the heavy presence of menstrual blood made it difficult at the time to recover the male DNA profile from her rape kit.
But, if you remember, the CSI had swabbed Rebecca's breasts, abdomen, thighs, and the rest of her body, and those swabs were later found to contain saliva. A partial DNA profile was then developed from that saliva, but it didn't contain enough markers to upload into CODIS, the national database, in order to produce a match. So, this was kind of a setback.
And investigators would need to dig deeper, deeper into the lives of the Barneys, which, as they discovered, had been unconventional. The Barneys were separated and had filed for divorce after six years of marriage, but they maintained a cordial relationship and Rebecca continued living with Freddie for financial convenience, hence why they were both in the home that night.
They both owned the house, the divorce hadn't yet been finalized, and Freddie was easygoing about the situation as well. And even though they were no longer intimate with each other, the romantic and sexual part of their relationship had fizzled completely. They remained good friends.
But even so, Rebecca was lonely and unfulfilled, and she did what many lonely singles and divorcees had begun doing in the 21st century. She sought out companionship online through internet dating sites. And investigators learned that the Barneys had been seen the night they were murdered at a local bar they frequented called Arnie's, which was about five minutes from their house.
And they were in the company of a man that was unfamiliar to those who knew the couple. The man appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s, was lean and very tall, well over six feet, and was wearing a cowboy hat. Rebecca never introduced him by name to anyone, but instead introduced him as her new internet boyfriend and her 10-inch cowboy. She clearly wasn't referring to his height.
Meanwhile, it seemed like Freddie was there not as a participant, but rather as a safeguard. It may have been the first time Rebecca had ever met someone from the internet, and she probably asked Freddie, her separated husband, to accompany her as a precaution. Which he agreed to do, but reluctantly, because he had just returned from a business trip earlier that day and was exhausted.
According to people who saw them at the bar that night, Freddie did not appear to take a liking to the so-called 10-inch cowboy. Freddie appeared aloof and uncomfortable and, based on his body language, seemed to regard this cowboy with disdain.
But they spent a few hours there and all left the bar together at closing time, which was 2 a.m. And a little over an hour later, 911 got that call from Kenneth Maxwell, by which point the Barneys had already been shot inside of their home.
So whoever this cowboy was, he was at this point the prime suspect in the triple murder. And just because their killer took the Barney's computer didn't mean the police couldn't find out whom she was corresponding with online. And their starting point, as it turned out, was right there in the Barney's computer room, completely overlooked by the killer. It was a series of emails that Rebecca had printed out.
And from these printouts, they learned that Rebecca had been exchanging frequent emails and messages with a man who called himself Jimmy, a man that she'd met on Matchmaker.com, which was the distinction of being the very first online dating service.
Rebecca was using the screen name "Wild Ivy" and the man calling himself "Jimmy" uses the names "Cowboy4u67" and "Trueheart481" and included among the printouts found in the computer room was a picture of the man which he had sent to Rebecca Barney. It was a picture of himself wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses.
Enough to give Rebecca a sense of what he looked like, but not enough for police to be able to easily identify him. In the email correspondence, the man told Rebecca he lived in Gore, which was a city in Oklahoma about an 80-minute drive southeast of Tulsa.
Rebecca and the man had exchanged provocative pictures of each other, though Rebecca's were tasteful nudes while the men's pictures were close-ups of his erect penis with a ruler placed next to it. And in the text of the email, he referred to his member as the Big Cannoli. And he misspelled cannoli. We're talking...
really classy stuff but that didn't deter Rebecca not that her standards were low it's just that she was in a low place she had felt lonely in the latter days of her marriage and she felt even lonelier now that she and Freddie were divorced but still living under the same roof
And this mysterious man, who called himself Jimmy, all she knew about him was what he looked like and how well endowed he supposedly was. Having been married to Freddie for six years and now re-entering the field, she was projecting a lot onto the blank canvas that was Cowboy4u67. And police wanted to know who this man was.
They released the screen names from Matchmaker.com to the public in the event anyone else had corresponded or was corresponding with this man.
And within a day or two, investigators obtained a court order and were able to access the Cowboy4U67 email account, which was a Yahoo address. And they quickly identified the man behind the account as James Lynn Kidwell, a 31-year-old man who lived in Gore, Oklahoma and attended computer science classes part-time but was otherwise unemployed.
Kidwell had divorced a few years earlier with a woman he had a child with, and the financial burden forced him to move back home with his mother. So James wasn't doing so well at this point in his life. And there was also an open warrant in another county from 2001 for an incident in which he was alleged to have threatened an ex-girlfriend with a knife while at a ball game, and afterward he slashed her tires.
Police in Tulsa had an arrest warrant drawn up for Kidwell, and although they didn't yet have enough evidence to file murder charges, they wanted to hold him as a material witness. So, they contacted police in Gore, who agreed to keep a lookout for Kidwell, who had no fixed address.
They went to his former apartment complex and talked to one of his neighbors, whom they asked to contact police if she ever saw Kidwell. And one afternoon, she called in to let them know she saw Kidwell with a young woman getting out of a red Ford Probe with a gun and into a red truck. As the police headed toward the complex, they passed a red truck, did a U-turn, and pulled it over.
Inside was Jimmy Kidwell, the man they had been looking for, and a young woman. They asked if there was a gun inside the car and Kidwell confirmed that there was and said that they were heading towards Sallie's Saw, some 20 miles away to pawn the gun because he needed some money. At that point, backup was called while the young woman was asked to stay at the rear of the vehicle for her safety.
Kidwell was then taken in and held while Tulsa police arrived to conduct searches.
The first place they searched was his car, the red Ford, which he appeared to have been living in. I guess living with his mother was cramping his style. His car, when the police searched it, was a total mess. There were empty cigarette packs, soda bottles, magazines, newspapers, plastic bags, fishing rods, cigarette butts in the ashtray, and a loaded rifle on the passenger side floor.
It gave them a sort of window into his mental state. And the young woman that was with him when he was arrested was another woman he'd met off of matchmaker.com mere hours after the murders. So police sat down to interview her and she told them that she was afraid of him from the very outset. He always carried a loaded gun, she said, and he seemed obsessive and overbearing and she couldn't seem to shake him off.
It was suspected that Kidwell was a bona fide internet stalker, the very kind of nightmare person everyone was always afraid of meeting back in the early days of internet dating. Police searched Kidwell's car and his mother's trailer, but they were unable to find a .22 caliber handgun like the weapon that was used to kill the Barneys and Kenneth Maxwell, which was a weapon that was registered to Kidwell.
nor were they able to locate the computer that was taken from the Barneys' home.
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When detectives had interviewed James Kidwell, they asked him about his relationship with Rebecca Barney. He claimed he didn't recognize the name. But when his computer was seized during a search warrant, the data on it showed otherwise. What it showed was that Kidwell had exchanged messages with dozens and dozens of women from dating sites.
And of those many correspondences, there was only one that he deleted. Computer analysts were able to recover the deleted correspondence, and it was his correspondence with Rebecca Barney, the now dead woman. So that's pretty suspicious. And he had also put her matchmaker.com profile on his block list.
Police showed Kidwell's picture to patrons and employees of Arnie's Bar, and they identified him as the man they believed they saw in the company of Freddie and Rebecca Barney the night they were murdered. Also, Kidwell was 6 feet 7 inches tall. If you remember, the man that was with them that night was described as very tall.
Based on the date stamps of both the printed emails and the deleted correspondences, Kidwell and Rebecca Barney had only been corresponding for three days, which makes it even more sensible that she would have had her estranged husband accompany her on the date that night because she hadn't even known this cowboy long enough to get a read on him, even though they had exchanged a high volume of email messages, over 70 of them.
And the day before she died, they exchanged phone numbers. The phone records showed that Kidwell had telephoned her at around 9.30 in the evening on the night they met. Maybe she also got weird vibes from him on the phone, and that could also be why she asked Freddie to accompany them. But either way, after the triple homicide, there was no further communication between Kidwell and Rebecca Barney. Almost like Kidwell knew Rebecca wouldn't be responding.
When confronted about this, Kidwell acknowledged having gone on a date with Barney, whom he claimed he knew as Becky, trying to account for why he initially said he didn't recognize her name. And he said the date was a total bust. There wasn't a spark. And so he left after 10 minutes. This is contrary to witnesses who claimed the three left together at closing time. And he claims he supposedly never contacted her again because there wasn't any interest.
He had claimed he had no knowledge that she had even been killed because he didn't read the newspaper or watch the news. Apparently I don't watch the news. And yet his browser history on his computer showed that he'd actually been following the news coverage of the murders very closely.
Eventually, Kidwell reached a point in his interview with police where he'd been backed into a corner and he had to admit that he had left Arnie's with the Barneys and went back to their house, placing himself at the crime scene within literally minutes of when the murders began. And at that point, Kidwell requested an attorney. During the search of Kidwell's mother's trailer, among the items they confiscated was clothing.
clothing from his closet and clothing from the laundry room. Inside the dryer they found a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, and socks, all of which to have what appeared to be faint blood stains. These stains were carefully cut away and sent to the crime lab where a partial DNA profile was developed. This partial profile was enough to compare to Rebecca Barney's DNA and it couldn't exclude her.
The odds of that DNA profile belonging to anyone else were 1 in 12,000. Blood was also discovered on the gear shift of Kidwell's car, and that also matched Rebecca Barney's. They also wanted to retest Rebecca's rape kit to see if they'd have better luck a second time around, since they weren't able to develop a full DNA profile from the saliva they had swabbed from her body. And this time, they were successful.
Using a specialized process that was cutting edge at the time, they extracted a male DNA profile and it matched James Kidwell's. As prosecutors put the case together and were considering motive, what they believed was that Kidwell was disappointed after driving 75 miles to find that Rebecca was bringing her husband along on their date.
And when they returned to the Barneys' house after closing time and she refused to sleep with Kidwell, he went to his car, pulled his .22, and returned to the house to kill Freddie and then rape and kill Rebecca.
At Kidwell's trial, one of his fellow jail inmates testified against him, telling the jury that Kidwell had expressed fears that the FBI would make a voice print from Kenneth Maxwell's 911 call, proving it was his voice in the background. And if they're able to do that, he told the other inmate, then I think I'm effed.
Kidwell had also told this jailmate that he feared his DNA would be found at the crime scene because he, quote, had sex with Rebecca that night. So this testimony was just one more damning piece in the case against Kidwell, on top of all the forensic evidence and the digital paper trail.
On December 2nd, 2004, Kidwell was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to three life terms without the possibility of parole. Kidwell had no comment at his sentence hearing. Of course, he's since filed appeals, all unsuccessful, and he's also unsuccessfully filed for post-conviction relief.
But one thing he's fought, especially long and hard for, are dentures. Because it seems he really let his oral hygiene go after he was captured. And by the time he entered the prison system in 2005, he was already asking for dentures.
Nine years later, he was suing Oklahoma State and the correctional employees, arguing that they'd been giving him the runaround for nearly a decade and that he was suffering from digestive issues and chronic constipation because he had no teeth to properly chew his food with. Karma's a bit...
Prison officials contended that dentures were not a medical necessity for Kidwell, who was in fact not malnourished or underweight, but actually overweight. And they pointed to the fact that he had been offered a soft food diet, which he had declined. Kidwell explained that this diet was actually a liquid diet.
But his lawsuit ended up being dismissed by a federal judge and the story in Tulsa World carried a great headline. Toothless murderer loses bid for dentures. But where I'm going with this is it's hard for me to muster any sympathy for someone like James Kidwell. The monstrous, senseless, cowardly murders that he committed just chill me to the bone. All for what? Because he felt entitled to sex?
Three people died because he drove 75 miles and didn't get laid? My heart especially goes out to Kenneth Maxwell, a guy who was just driving home from a party, saw a house fire, and did the right thing.
He was taken completely off guard. A guy like James Kidwell is exactly where he belongs. And knowing he may only be able to eat Jell-O for the rest of his life is not something that's going to cost me any sleep. And that'll do it for this week. I'll be back with a new story next Wednesday, as always. So I hope you'll join me then. Bye for now.