A Podcaster Started Covering a Cold Case. What He Uncovered Shook the Whole Town

A young woman vanished from her own home. And from the beginning, almost nothing about the case made sense. The longer police worked on it, the more questions piled up. And for years, they never got close to the truth. Then a retired investigator started covering the story on his podcast. And once he began going through the case, everything changed.

 What came out stunned the whole town and eventually led to an answer no one was ready for. Courtney Koko was born on March 30th, 1985 in Alexandria, Louisiana. She was the youngest of three girls and as the baby of the family, she got a lot of attention and love. Courtney was especially close to her father, but when she was just 8 years old, he died suddenly, and the loss hit her incredibly hard.

 Despite that, she helped with the funeral arrangements, and she even chose the spot in the cemetery where he would be buried. After that, she told her family that someday she wanted to be buried next to him. As a kid and teenager, Courtney was very active. She played baseball and softball, joined the cheerleading team, and was already involved in gymnastics.

And even before she finished high school, Courtney started taking classes at a college in a nearby town. She became interested in forensic science, and before long, she was seriously thinking about building a career in that field. She loved writing out the details of different crimes on paper and then solving them step by step, almost like she was working through a real investigation.

 After high school, Courtney’s older sister helped her get a job as a receptionist at a local dental office. Around the same time, Courtney wanted a little more independence, so she rented a small house and moved out of her mother’s home. Still, she stayed very close to her mom and visited whenever she could.

 On Friday, October 1st, 2004, Courtney stopped by her mother and stepfather’s house to see them before the weekend. They were getting ready to go camping, so her mom asked Courtney to feed the dogs while they were gone. She also told Courtney to use the milk and bread that were still in the refrigerator so they would not go bad.

 But when Courtney’s mom came home on Sunday evening, she noticed something strange almost right away. The dog’s bowls were empty, and they were acting like they had not been fed in a while. The milk and bread were still sitting in the refrigerator, too, and the whole house looked as if Courtney had never come by at all. Even then, her mother did not panic.

 Courtney was 19, and her mother thought maybe she had gotten caught up with friends or had just been busy with work. She also assumed Courtney must have fed the dogs at least on Saturday, or maybe even earlier that morning. So, she pushed the thought aside and went on with her day. But the next day, Monday, Courtney’s mother got a phone call.

 It was Sergeant Green from the local police department. He asked if Courtney was home, and her mother told him that Courtney lived on her own. Then, she asked him what was going on. The sergeant explained that he had just been contacted by officers from a small town called Winnie in Texas, almost 180 miles from Alexandria, and police there had found the body of a young woman.

 She had no ID on her and nothing else that clearly identified her except for a ring on her finger. It was engraved with the name of Alexandria Senior High School along with one name, Courtney Coco. Courtney’s mother refused to believe the body could be her daughter. She told the sergeant there was no reason Courtney would have been that far from home and she had absolutely no connection to Texas.

 Then she remembered something else. Just a few weeks earlier, someone had broken into Courtney’s house several times and stolen different things. So, her mother immediately thought Courtney’s class ring may have been one of the stolen items and that somehow it had ended up in Texas with a complete stranger. In fact, those burglary reports were the reason Sergeant Green had found Courtney’s mother’s phone number in the first place.

 When he entered Courtney’s name into the department system, those reports came up. But he also told her that police in Texas still had not been able to identify the young woman because the ring was the only real clue they had. According to the detective, earlier that morning, a farmer in Winnie had been driving his tractor past an abandoned building when he thought he saw a human body inside.

 He reported it to police and one of the local detectives who lived nearby headed out to check the area. At first, he thought the farmer may have been mistaken or that he had seen something else and only thought it was a body. Murders were almost unheard of in their small town. So, the detective had a hard time imagining that this could really be what it sounded like.

 But, as soon as he pulled up to the abandoned building, he realized the farmer had been right. There was a young woman’s body inside, and she was already badly decomposed. Her clothing below the waist was missing, and her shirt had been pulled up. She was lying with her feet pointed toward the entrance. And to the detective, it almost looked as if someone had placed her that way on purpose, like they wanted someone to find her in that position.

 Because the local police had very little experience handling murder investigations, they immediately asked the Texas Rangers for help, and the Rangers took over the case. There was no purse near the victim, no ID, and nothing else that immediately told investigators who she was. The only things crime scene technicians found were tire tracks near the abandoned building, a few shoe prints left in the dust on the floor, and a beer bottle, although they had no way of knowing yet whether the bottle had anything to do with the crime.

Detectives also noticed that the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, but at the same time, they had serious doubts that she had been lying in that building for several days. People drove past the place regularly, and police believe that if the body had been there that long, someone would have noticed it much sooner.

 So, the scene seemed to point in one direction. The young woman had likely been killed somewhere else. After that, her body had been brought to the abandoned building by a car and placed with her feet facing the entrance. The lead detective believed the killer may have been trying to make the scene look like a sexual assault, which made him wonder if the real motive had been something else entirely.

 Another strange detail was that there were no obvious signs of injury. The medical examiner looked over the body and found no visible wounds, no signs of strangulation, and no clear trauma that explained how she died. After Courtney’s mother got the call from police, she started calling relatives and people Courtney knew, trying to find out if anyone had seen her over the weekend.

 To her horror, she realized no one had heard from Courtney since late Friday night. Then she thought back to the empty dog bowls and the food still sitting in the refrigerator, and her panic only got worse. Still, she kept hoping that was all some terrible misunderstanding and that her daughter was okay.

 Detectives in Texas asked for someone from Courtney’s family to come to the morg and identify the body, but neither her mother nor her sisters could bring themselves to do it. In the end, Courtney’s uncle decided to make the trip to Texas. Her mother told him that Courtney had a butterfly tattoo on her back and had recently gotten braces.

 And then he went to the morg while the rest of the family gathered at Courtney’s mother’s house waiting for news. When the phone finally rang, Courtney’s mother was too afraid to answer it. So, her sister picked up. After a short pause, she turned to the family and said they needed to start preparing for a funeral.

 That confirmed what everyone had been afraid of. The young woman found in Texas was Courtney. Detectives were still waiting for the medical examiner’s reports, which they hoped would explain how she had died. But in the meantime, they began trying to retrace Courtney’s final movements. The biggest question was how she had ended up so far from home.

 So investigators started at her house. The first thing they noticed was that Courtney’s car was gone. Then they saw that all the doors were locked and there were no signs that anyone had forced their way inside. In the living room, detectives found dominoes laid out on the table along with a beer can and an ashtray. There was also a notebook with three names written inside.

 Courtney, Jackie, and Lewis. It looked as if Courtney had been sitting there playing with friends, then simply left everything where it was. Other than that, the living room looked normal. There was nothing there that immediately stood out as suspicious. But when detectives went into the kitchen, they saw that the trash can had been knocked over, which could have been a sign of a struggle.

 Then they got to Courtney’s bedroom, and that was where things became more troubling. Her clothes were on the floor, including her jeans and her sneakers. Since none of these items had been found on her body, investigators began to wonder if Courtney had been killed in her bedroom, then carried out to her car and driven to Texas.

 The blanket was missing from her bed and the shower curtain was gone from the bathroom. Detectives believe those items may have been used to wrap her body so it could be carried out of the house without drawing attention. They also found a small safe under the bed. It was open, but instead of money inside, there was only an empty cigarette pack.

 Because of that, police started looking at a possible financial motive, and they also considered whether Courtney’s death could be connected to the earlier break-in she had reported. But there was an obvious problem with that theory. Those earlier incidents involved someone breaking into the house, while this time it looked as though Courtney may have let the killer in herself.

 There were no signs of forced entry, and based on the scene, it seemed possible Courtney had been in bed when she was attacked. That would mean the killer was already inside the house. And to detectives, that strongly suggested Courtney knew the person. Investigators went to speak with Jackie and her boyfriend Lewis, whose name had been written in the notebook on Courtney’s table.

 Jackie was Courtney’s best friend, and she said they had spent Friday evening together. According to her, she and Courtney met up around 7:00 p.m., then went to the restaurant where Lewis worked. After his shift ended, all of them went back to Courtney’s house where they played dominoes and talked. Jackie said Courtney seemed completely normal that night and nothing about her behavior felt strange.

 Then Jackie said Courtney drove her and Lewis home at around 2:30 in the morning. The next day, Courtney was supposed to pick Lewis up and take him to work, but she never showed up. Detectives did consider the possibility that Jackie or Lewis could have been involved, but from the very beginning, that theory did not seem very likely.

 Jackie had brought her children along that night and they were at Courtney’s house the whole time. On top of that, police found no evidence that Jackie or Lewis had gone to Texas. The drive would have taken up most of the day and both of them appeared to have been in Alexandria throughout the weekend. The next person detectives looked at was a man named Floyd Williams who had been seeing Courtney not long before she died.

 He was Jackie’s brother. And according to people close to Courtney, the relationship between them had been pretty rocky. They were constantly breaking up and getting back together. But detectives soon learned that was only part of the story. When they spoke with Courtney’s sister, Lace, she told them Floyd had been selling drugs.

 She also said she had once seen bruises on Courtney’s arms and tried to ask her where they came from. Courtney avoided the question at first, but later she told her sister that if anything ever happened to her, Floyd would be the one behind it. That was more than enough for detectives to start treating Floyd as a serious suspect.

 They brought him in for questioning, and as the interview went on, he only made himself look more suspicious. When detectives asked where he had been on the night Courtney was killed, Floyd could not give them a clear answer. He said he had been somewhere around town, driving from place to place, which already sounded strange.

 Then he started insisting that he and Courtney had been broken up for a long time and that he had no reason to kill her. At the same time, detectives learned that Floyd was now seeing another woman, and that led to one interesting detail. When police looked through Courtney’s phone activity, they saw that the last call from her phone had been made to that woman’s number.

So, investigators began wondering if there could have been some kind of love triangle and whether the motive might be hiding somewhere in that part of Courtney’s life. The fact that Floyd already had a criminal history tied to drugs only made him look more suspicious. Still, Floyd denied having anything to do with Courtney’s death, and without solid evidence, detectives could not move any further.

 They took his fingerprints and a DNA sample, then kept looking for other possible suspects. Before long, police learned about another man named Fred, who had also dated Courtney not long before she died. During questioning, Fred said that the relationship had never been very serious and that he had no reason to hurt her.

 He also agreed to give detectives his DNA and fingerprints and after that he was let go. Then sometime later, detectives got a new lead. Courtney’s SIM card suddenly showed activity in Houston, about 60 mi from the place where her body had been found. Police traced the phone activity to an apartment building in one of the city’s more dangerous neighborhoods.

 They still could not tell exactly which apartment the phone was in, but they got lucky. When officers arrived at the building, they saw a teenager in the hallway, and the moment he noticed them, he took off running. Officers caught up with him and found Courtney’s phone in his pocket. The teenager insisted he had nothing to do with the murder and said he had bought the phone from two local criminals.

 He also said that he had been driving a dark green car and detectives immediately wondered if it could be Courtney’s missing vehicle. Detectives put out an alert for the car and a few days later someone called in with a tip. A similar car had been spotted in the same area and police quickly confirmed it was Courtney’s.

 It turned out that ever since the murder, her car had basically been sitting abandoned on the streets of that neighborhood where different people had been using it whenever they wanted, including for drug dealing. Police tried to find out who had originally abandoned the car there, but they were never able to identify them.

 Several people said they had seen two men driving it, but no one was ever able to identify them. Detectives thought those men might have been directly involved in Courtney’s murder and that they may have abandoned her car in that neighborhood on purpose. If that was the plan, it was a smart way to destroy the value of anything left behind in the vehicle.

 Different people would get in and out of the car, leaving behind fingerprints and DNA, and whatever evidence might have been there from the night Courtney was killed would be buried under all of that. And if that really was the goal, it worked almost perfectly. When crime scene technicians processed the car, they found a huge number of smeared fingerprints.

 And with so many people having been inside, they could not isolate any clear DNA profile from the interior. But the trunk still gave them a few things to work with. Investigators found several dried stains that looked like blood, and they also recovered DNA from the trunk lid. When experts compared that DNA to samples collected from different suspects, they got a match.

 The profile belonged to Fred, Courtney’s former boyfriend. Detectives brought Fred in for questioning right away, but he continued to deny having anything to do with Courtney’s death. When they told him his DNA had been found on the trunk lid, he said there was a simple explanation. He had been in Courtney’s car plenty of times, and at some point he could have opened the trunk to put something inside, like groceries.

 Detectives were not ready to simply take his word for it, but they also did not have enough to prove he had killed Courtney. As for the blood in the trunk, DNA testing showed that it belonged to Courtney. And at first, that seemed strange. As we remember, there were no obvious wounds on her body, and the medical examiner still had not been able to determine exactly how she had died.

 Since then, detectives had been waiting for a more detailed medical report. And several weeks after Courtney’s body was found, the results finally answered some of the biggest questions in the case. First, there were no signs of drugs or large amounts of alcohol in her system, which ruled out the possibility of an overdose.

 And second, despite the way her body had been found, experts found no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted. That only made detectives more convinced that the killer had staged the scene on purpose, trying to make the police think the case was about sexual assault and pulled the investigation in the wrong direction. As for the cause of death, experts came to the only conclusion that seemed to fit.

Courtney had been suffocated. But whatever the killer used had not left the kind of clear marks they would normally expect. It may have been a pillow or even just a hand over her mouth and nose. And because of the condition of her body, any marks on her face would have been impossible to see. There was still one question experts could not explain at first.

 Why was Courtney’s body in such an advanced state of decomposition? She had been found only about 2 days after her death, so they expected her body to be in a much better condition. But once investigators found her blood in the trunk of her car, the pieces started to come together. They believed Courtney’s body had been transported in the trunk and may have stayed there for some time.

 Under the hot Texas sun, the temperature inside the car could have climbed well over 100°, which would have caused her body to decompose much faster. But none of that brought detectives any closer to finding out who was responsible. And for months, the investigation made almost no progress. About a year and a half went by like that, and Courtney’s family became more and more frustrated because they felt police were not doing enough to solve the case.

 They blamed Sergeant Green, who was leading the investigation and accused him of being unprofessional and not doing enough to solve the case. Eventually, the family started looking into things on their own. They tried to collect evidence, talk to witnesses, and find any information that might point to the killer.

 Every so often, they would pass along what they thought were promising leads, and police would check them out. But each one ended in another dead end. Then one day, the phone rang in Sergeant Green’s office. When he picked up, the caller said only three words. Follow the money. And then the line went dead. Green thought the call was strange enough that he asked other officers to trace it.

 And to his surprise, they found out it had come from the home of Courtney’s grandfather. He started looking into the tip and before long he uncovered something no one had told him before. When Green went through Courtney’s finances, he found large payments being sent in her name and he was quickly able to trace where they came from.

 Not long before Courtney’s father died, he had lost one of his legs in a workplace accident. As part of the settlement, his employer agreed to pay him a substantial amount of money over several decades. But after his death, Courtney became the only beneficiary. The reason was simple. He was not the biological father of Courtney’s two older sisters.

 They were from her mother’s previous marriage. Because Courtney was only 8 years old when her father died, her mother controlled the payments for the next 10 years. But once Courtney turned 18, the money started going directly into her own account. Sergeant Green learned that she was receiving $1,500 every month. plus a much larger payment every 5 years.

 And just a few weeks before she had been killed, Courtney had received $20,000, and she had taken that money out in cash. That immediately made Green think about the empty safe under Courtney’s bed. Suddenly, the pieces began to fit together. Maybe the real target had been that money because Courtney almost certainly had not spent all of it in just a few weeks.

 But that raised two important questions. Who in Courtney’s life knew she was receiving those payments? And why had no one in her family told police about the money during a year and a half of investigation? Green began looking at the case from a different angle. And now Courtney’s family’s behavior started to bother him. He began to seriously wonder whether someone close to her could have been involved and whether all those tips they kept giving police were actually meant to lead the investigation away from the truth. After looking deeper into the

payments Courtney had been receiving, Sergeant Green learned that if Courtney died, her mother would become the beneficiary. So, he brought her in for an interview. And almost from the start, he made it clear that he was looking at her as a possible suspect. But Courtney’s mother insisted she had nothing to do with her daughter’s death.

According to her, she had no idea the payments would go to her if Courtney died. She said she had always assumed that the next beneficiary would be someone from her ex-husband’s side of the family. Green also understood that if Courtney’s mother really had a financial motive, she would not have needed to take the money from Courtney’s safe because the payments would have come to her legally.

 And beyond that, he had a hard time believing that a mother would kill her own daughter. What he suspected more than anything was that she knew more than she was saying. But Courtney’s mother kept insisting she was telling the truth. So Green shifted his attention to Courtney’s sister, Lace. As we remember, she was the one who had told police she had seen bruises on Courtney’s arms and that Courtney had once said that if anything happened to her, Floyd would be behind it.

 The problem was that detectives had never been able to confirm that story. Green also learned that Lace had a criminal history, including charges connected to robbery and assault. At that point, he began seriously wondering whether Courtney’s sister could have been involved. He asked Lace to come to the station, telling her there had been new movement in the case.

 But when she was in his office, Green began questioning her. Lace denied anything having to do with her sister’s death, and she even agreed to take a polygraph test. But as soon as the examiner asked whether she had killed Courtney, Lace broke down crying, ribbed off the sensors, and ran out of the room.

 That looked extremely suspicious. But the next day, Lace came back to the station and agreed to take the test again. This time she answered every question and the examiner found no signs that she was lying. Lace explained that she had a medical condition and needed to take medication for seizures. But because the interview had gone on so long and because she was under so much stress, she had missed a dose.

 Even then, Sergeant Green still did not fully trust her. To him, Lac’s behavior felt strange. He thought she answered questions too reluctantly, too carefully. almost as if she was not really interested in helping police solve her sister’s murder, but there was nothing he could do because there was not a single piece of evidence tying Lace to the crime.

 Not long after the interviews with Lace, Green was told he would no longer be handling Courtney’s case. It turned out that Courtney’s mother had gone to the police chief and complained about the way Green was treating the family, saying he had crossed the line and was harassing them. She wanted him fired, but the chief did not go that far.

 Instead, he took Green off the investigation and handed the case to another detective. That detective tried to find new leads, but he could not make any real progress either. And eventually, the case went cold for years. Courtney’s family kept trying to push forward on their own. They continued looking into the case, giving interviews, holding memorial events, and doing everything they could to keep Courtney’s name alive.

 But none of it brought them closer to an answer. Then in 2015, a new detective took another look at the case and sent a preserved sample of Courtney’s blood for testing. Back in 2004, experts found no signs of drugs or any significant amount of alcohol in her system. But this time, the results came back differently.

 They showed traces of powerful prescription medication along with a high level of alcohol. Based on that dangerous combination, the medical examiner concluded that Courtney may not have been suffocated after all, and her cause of death may have been an overdose. For Courtney’s family, that was a complete shock.

 For years, they had never seriously considered that possibility. And now, detectives were telling them that because of this new finding, there was almost no point in continuing the investigation. But there were still major questions left unanswered. Someone had still moved Courtney’s body to another state, and someone had still taken the money from her safe.

Courtney’s loved ones refused to believe the overdose theory, but for police, it was essentially the end of the road. So once again, the case slipped away. That went on for several more years. During all that time, Courtney’s family kept pushing for someone to take another look at the case, and they tried to bring as much attention to it as they could.

Then, in 2019, they reached out to a former state police investigator named Woody Overton. By then, Overton had retired and started a podcast where he used his years in law enforcement to break down criminal cases in detail. Overton became interested in Courtney’s story and started looking into it himself.

 Pretty quickly, he came to believe that the overdose theory made no sense. To him, it looked less like a real explanation and more like something police had leaned on because the investigation had gone nowhere. Then he requested the case files, and as he went through them, he realized it would probably be almost impossible to solve Courtney’s case without help from the outside.

 Overton believed someone out there had to know more than they were saying. So, his goal became simple. Get Courtney’s story in front of as many people as possible and hope that someone would finally come forward with a real lead. He started releasing podcast episodes about the case in September 2019. And the series quickly became a huge topic in Alexandria.

 The podcast immediately brought Courtney’s murder back into the conversation. Her old friends, acquaintances, and locals who remembered the case started talking about it online, sharing theories, and trying to piece together what had happened. But there were also people who clearly did not want the case moving forward.

 At one point, someone smashed the windows of Overton’s car. Another time, someone cut the wiring inside it. Still, even with those obvious threats, Overton had no intention of stopping. Once the podcast was out, Overton received plenty of calls and messages. Most of the tips were vague and went nowhere. But then about three weeks later, a real lead finally came through.

A woman named Tiffany called Overton and instead of offering him some vague theory or small piece of information, she told him something much bigger. She said she had known the killer’s name for years and she had no doubt the information was true. According to Tiffany, Courtney had been killed by her ex-husband’s best friend, a man named Anthony Burns.

 She said that back when it happened, her husband Sheamus had told her Anthony was the one behind the murder because Anthony had admitted it to him himself. Overton understood that Tiffany’s story could be the key to finally solving the case. But her word alone was not enough. For one thing, she was repeating something someone else had told her.

 And for another, there was an obvious question. If she had known this for years, why had she stayed silent for so long? So Overton asked if she was willing to find out what happened to Courtney. And Tiffany agreed. He told her to meet with her ex-husband, turn on a recorder, and try to get him talking about the case.

 If Sheamus said on tape that Anthony had killed Courtney, then they would finally have something much stronger than a secondhand claim. Tiffany agreed and did exactly what Overton asked. She brought up the new podcast and told Sheamus that people all over Alexandria were listening to it. She said he needed to listen too and asked him to tell the host what he knew about the person who killed Courtney.

Sheamus responded by saying it was Anthony Burns and that he did not need to listen to any podcasts because he already knew that for a fact. He even added that Anthony had done it for the money and that Burn’s mother had even washed the blanket he used to wrap Courtney’s body. Altogether, Sheamus said Anony’s name 16 times.

 And for Overton, that felt like the break the case had been waiting for. But there was something else on the recording, too. One specific comment that made Sheamus’s story sound more credible, while also raising even more questions. When Tiffany asked how Anthony had killed Courtney, Sheamus said he did not know, but then he added that her body had looked badly beaten and blew from her head down to her waist.

 Tiffany immediately asked him, “How do you know what her body looked like?” And at that point, Sheamus hesitated. He said that he must have heard it somewhere in the news. But Overton quickly checked and found that that detail had never been released publicly. Part of Courtney’s body really had turned blue after she died, but that information had not even been included in the official autopsy report.

 So Overton called Tiffany again and asked if she remembered where Sheamus had been when Courtney was killed. That was when she remembered something strange. Sheamus had been gone the entire weekend and he never told her where he had been. He came home in the middle of the night on Monday and when Tiffany went outside to meet him, she was hit by a strong awful smell coming from him.

 At the time, she did not know how to explain it, but she said it smelled like death. Later, she also found women’s underwear in his work trailer next to a roll of plastic wrap. All of that made Sheamus look much more suspicious. Overton began to wonder whether he had helped his best friend get rid of Courtney’s body or maybe even take part in the murder itself.

 And there was one more detail that stood out. Sheamus often traveled to Texas for work and his route sometimes took him through Winnie. At one point he had even gone to a local hospital there which was confirmed through records. So Sheamus knew the area well and he could have suggested it as a place to leave Courtney’s body.

 Finally, Tiffany added that not long before the murder, Sheamus and Anthony had gone riding ATVs and had brought Courtney with them. That meant all three of them knew each other. Now Overton had to figure out exactly how Anthony was connected to Courtney. And that was when the case took another unexpected turn.

 To his surprise, he found out that at the time Courtney was killed, Anthony was engaged to her older sister, Lace. Overton immediately contacted Detective Tanner at the local police department and gave him everything he had. After reviewing Tiffany’s statement and the recording of Sheamus, Tanner basically started the investigation over from the beginning, and he quickly came to believe that Anthony really could be the person behind Courtney’s death.

 Before questioning Anthony, Tanner decided to meet with Courtney’s family and tell them the investigation was active again and that there was finally a real chance of progress. Then he said Anony’s name and explained that he was now the main suspect. The reaction in the room was intense.

 Courtney’s mother could not believe it and ran out. While Lace, Anony’s former fiance, could not say a word. For the family, the accusation was almost impossible to process. Back when Courtney died, Anthony had been treated almost like one of them. He had helped carry Cornney’s coffin, and he had even put a cross at the place where her body was found.

 Later, after Lace had time to collect herself, Detective Tanner began asking her about Anthony. And to his surprise, she told him a lot that investigators had not heard before. According to Lace, on Friday, when Courtney was still alive, she and Anthony had a major fight. After that, Anthony left the house for the entire weekend and did not come back until Monday evening.

 But that was only the beginning. 15 years after Courtney’s death, Leace suddenly said she believed Anthony and Courtney may have been having a secret affair and that she had suspected it even before the murder. According to Lace, she once called Anthony and heard Courtney’s voice in the background. She also noticed that Anthony and Courtney often seemed to disappear at the same time.

 Lace said she had asked both of them if something was going on, but they both insisted it was not true. Sometime after the murder, police returned Courtney’s belongings to the family, and among them, Lace noticed a gold ring. It looked familiar. And then she realized Anthony had given her one almost exactly like it.

 When she compared the two, she believed they were matching lovers rings, which only made her more convinced that Anthony and Courtney had been secretly involved. Finally, Lace said that about 4 years after the murder, she went into Anony’s house and saw his mother sitting in a chair wrapped in a blanket.

 According to Lace, the pattern looked very similar to the blanket missing from Courtney’s home. Even with all of that though, Lace insisted she had never suspected Anthony and that this was why she had never told police any of it. But detectives had serious doubts about that explanation. And not only because her silence seems so strange.

 The bigger problem was what Sheamus had said in the recording Tiffany secretly made. In his podcast, Overton did not reveal every detail from that recording, but police listened to the full version and they clearly heard what Sheamus had said. He repeated, “Lace and Anthony did it for the money.” So Sheamus was essentially accusing Courtney’s own sister of being involved in her murder.

 And based on what detectives already knew, that no longer sounded impossible. Still, they had already spoken with Lace more than once, and they understood they were not going to get a confession from her. So, instead, they started working the case from other angles. While going through the old case files, detectives found something interesting.

 There was a statement from a Winnie resident named Jud Wilson, who said he had driven past the abandoned building at around 10 p.m. and seen a dark green car pull out from the area, almost crashing into him. At the time, Jud thought someone might have been stealing copper from the building, so he tried to remember the license plate and get a look at the driver.

 He only caught a quick side view of the driver, but he did remember a few details from the license plate. Two letters that matched his own initials, the number eight, and that it was from Louisiana. But there was one problem. Jud said this had happened on September 27th, 2004, about a week before Courtney was killed.

 Detectives contacted Jud and asked if he was sure about the date. He admitted he may have gotten that part wrong, but he was certain about one thing. It had happened the day before Courtney’s body was found. Because for people in Winnie, something like that was impossible to forget. Detectives believe Jud had most likely seen Courtney’s car because the part of the license plate he remembered matched hers.

 And if that was true, then the person behind the wheel was probably the killer. So they asked Jud if after all these years he could still remember anything about the driver’s face. To their surprise, Jud said he had a photographic memory. He was also an artist and at the time he had even sketched the driver’s face from the side.

 When detectives looked at the drawing, it really did look like Anthony. So they put Anony’s photo into a lineup with several other men, showed it to Jud, and he pointed to Anthony. With that, police finally went to speak with the suspect. When they asked him where he had been that weekend, he said he had spent it at home with Lace and that they had been in bed for most of the time, but that directly contradicted what Lace had told them.

 According to her, Anthony had left the house on Friday and did not come back until Monday. Detectives then asked Anthony to take a voice stress test and he agreed. This method is not considered completely reliable and it basically looks for changes in a person’s voice that may suggest they are not being truthful. Anthony went through with it, but his answers to the key questions were flagged as deceptive.

 Even then, detectives still could not arrest him because they did not have enough evidence. But before long, they found something else. They were still digging through the old case files, and there were several boxes of them. And to their surprise, they found reports from several different witnesses who had told police that Anthony Burns had admitted to killing Courtney.

 He had allegedly said it to a woman he met at a bar and to one of his friends, and both of them had reported it to police. According to those statements, Burn said he had killed Courtney and he even described how he strangled her, wrapped her body in a blanket, and took her to Texas. But at the time, police had not taken those witnesses very seriously.

 For one thing, they were not exactly considered reliable. They had criminal records and struggled with addiction. And in both cases, Anthony had supposedly made those admissions while he was heavily drunk. So, officers did not treat his words as solid evidence. Now, police had three different witnesses who said they had heard Anthony confess along with Jud Wilson’s statement identifying him as the man driving Courtney’s car near the place where her body was found.

 So, with all of that together, prosecutors decided they finally had enough to take the case to court. Preparing the case took months, but in April 2021, 17 years after Courtney was killed, Anthony Burns was finally arrested. According to prosecutors, Anthony and Courtney really had been having a secret affair, and at some point, he may have found out about the large payment she had recently received.

 They also believed jealousy could have played a role. It was possible Courtney wanted to end the relationship, and that this became part of the reason he killed her. Prosecutors believed Anthony attacked Courtney in her bedroom and suffocated her, most likely with a pillow. After that, they said he wrapped her body in the missing blanket and shower curtain, carried her body out to the trunk of her own car, and drove her to Texas.

 At the same time, prosecutors did not have enough evidence to charge Anony’s friend, who may have helped him move the body, or Lace, Courtney’s sister. So, their possible involvement was not part of the trial, and both of them testified as witnesses. Anthony denied having anything to do with Courtney’s death, and his defense attorneys focused heavily on the fact that there was no physical evidence tying him to the murder.

 They also tried to discredit the witness and argued that police had not done enough to investigate other possible suspects, including Courtney’s former boyfriends. The trial ended in late October and the jury unanimously found Anthony guilty of secondderee murder. As a result, the judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

 Right after that, his attorneys appealed the conviction, but the appeal was denied. The court agreed that the evidence against Anthony was circumstantial, but said when all of it was taken together, it was enough to support the verdict. So Anthony remains in prison serving a life sentence. The possible involvement of his friend or Courtney’s sister was never proven and officially the case is now closed.