THE MURDER IN THE GRAVEYARD

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case however this particular case wasn't solved for a very long time it was actually an unsolved cold case for 17 years after it happened and it wasn't actually solved until the late 2000s i loved seeing cold cases like this finally get solved and the victim received justice the family received closure so i knew i wanted to cover this case so today we're going to be talking about the murder in the graveyard but before we get into this case i just want to thank jun's journey for sponsoring this video june's journey is a hidden object murder mystery gear map free to download on both ios and android devices you play as june parker a woman trying to solve the murder of her own sister finding clues in hidden object scenes to take you further and further into the story it's a really captivating and interesting game while staying pretty mellow and relaxing it doesn't have any really scary scenes or jump scares it's a lot more about the mystery solving aspect of a murder case it's nice to just take some time to chill with a good game sometimes i like playing june's journey at the end of a long day when i'm trying to wind down in bed or in the bath it's challenging enough to where you want to try and beat all the levels but it's not so challenging that it's impossible because i'm one of those people that gets pretty grumpy if i can't beat a game but all it takes is practice and a bit of perseverance and it also has a little side story to the murder mystery where you get to build and decorate your own estate which is really nice i like that creative aspect to the game and it's just fun to be able to solve your own murder mystery case on your phone so if you want to download june's journey the link to download the app will be in the description of this video thanks again to them for sponsoring the video now let's get into it before we do i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a quick warning before we get into this one this case does involve themes of sexual assault and rape so if you don't want to hear that you can click out this video now i'll be back again very soon with another kiss so jessica lynn keane was born on september 24th 1975 in columbus ohio to parents rebecca and james keane jessica was a very nice girl she was very well behaved she did well in school she worked hard she enjoyed school as well she was a cheerleader and she was very good at it as well she loved all kind of performing things she was always singing always dancing her dream career was to be either a singer or an actress she was very fun to be around a lot of people just remember being very happy around jessica she was quite popular she was well liked and she was just a nice girl she was a talented musician she composed her own music she had a beautiful voice and like i said her dream career was to be a singer however she decided to go for something a little bit more realistic a little bit more academic she decided that when she was old enough to go to university that she wanted to study zoology because she loved animals she was very passionate about animals and caring for them and learning about them jessica was incredibly intelligent she'd worked hard and done well all the way through school she was an honor student in her early teens however when she turned like 14 15 her life took a turn and the catalyst in this major life change for jessica was a boy she met a boy named sean thompson he was 18 years old so a few years older than her and he was a stereotypical bad boy he dropped out of high school some sources say that he committed a few petty crimes i'm not 100 sure about that but overall he was just a bad influence on jessica she started skipping school a lot to spend time with sean and sir in turn her grades started dropping she wasn't doing as well in school she wasn't as well behaved she didn't study as much as she used her she even quit cheerleading which was something that she loved it seemed as though jessica was turning her back on everything that she loved everything that was her identity and it seemed as though she was just going through this really rebellious stage where she just wanted to shake up her life and become a different person and as i'm sure you can imagine all of this led to jessica's parents not liking her new boyfriend sean thompson very much of course for the obvious reason that this boy had come into their daughter's life and completely shaken it up and changed her for the worse however some people believe that racism could be a factor in their dislike for sean this was the very early 1990s and racism then just like it is now was a huge issue and a lot of parents did have an issue with their children dating outside of their race but i thought that it was worth mentioning because a lot of people do discuss that element when they discuss this case and jessica's parents feelings towards her boyfriend but like i said i don't have any solid evidence for that jessica and her mother would get into arguments about this boyfriend almost every single day when they'd never really argued through jessica's life at all and now it was like they couldn't even be in the same room as each other without arguing jessica's mother rebecca actually tried to ban her from seeing sean until her grades got better she said that once jessica started putting in a bit more work a bit more effort and her grades started getting better then she could see shawn again but of course this is quite a hard ban for her mother to enforce she couldn't monitor her daughter 24 7 and sir jessica still found ways to see him jessica refused to break up with shawn she was obsessed with the boy all she ever did was talk to her friends about him and she was actually really happy with him but there was no denying that this relationship was very destructive it was tricky because jessica's family did only want what was best for her and what was best for her was her focusing on her schoolwork and getting her grades up so that she could get a scholarship and go to college but she didn't seem to care about any of that anymore but in jessica's eyes she just kind of saw this as her parents don't want her to be happy she's finally happy with the boyfriend she's found a man that she really likes but her parents want to take that away from her she would always tell her friends that her mother was horrible and that she wanted to run away from home but she didn't really know what she was going to do if she did run away from home so she was never actually gonna do it and when she would have arguments with her mother she would always tell her that she didn't want to live with her anymore she wanted to move out jessica's relationship with sean really just put a toll on every aspect of her life her family relationships her schoolwork her future plans to go to college her out-of-school clubs and so it eventually got to the point where her parents decided to put her into a home for struggling girls this wasn't against jessica's will it wasn't like her parents were putting her in and she didn't want to go jessica wanted that kind of time away from her parents like i said she no longer wanted to live with her mother these arguments got so bad and it was just for a bit of a cool off period so that they could both calm down and maybe get a little bit of counseling a little bit of help with this relationship and it wasn't a permanent thing either it wasn't even a long-term thing i think jessica was only supposed to be in the home for like two weeks and then she was gonna go back so on march 4th 1991 when jessica keane was 15 years old she was moved into this home for struggling girls named huckleberry house in west jefferson ohio and after just a short period in this home jessica began blossoming again she was social she was less irritable she was kinder she was working hard in school again she was getting her grades back up everything was going so well it really seemed as though shawn was the issue here it wasn't just jessica growing up and becoming a teenager and just going through that kind of hormonal rebellious stage because as soon as she was away from sean thompson she was her old self again almost two weeks into her stay at huckleberry house on march 15 1991 jessica calls her boyfriend sean thompson and the two of them are talking for a while and then this call turns into an argument and this argument got so bad that the two of them actually ended up breaking up over the phone that day then and there and after this phone call jessica was feeling overwhelmed she was feeling you know very sad obviously she really liked this boy and so she wanted to go out she wanted to go for a walk go somewhere and clear her head there was a mall just a short bus journey away from huckleberry house where she was staying and she'd been once before so she decided that she was gonna go to the bus stop get on the bus and go to the mall and just have some time to herself some self-care time she let her friend at the house know where she was going before she set off and then she left huckleberry house to go to the bus stop and that would be the last time that anyone would see jessica keane alive 11 p.m that night the house staff were doing their routine check to make sure all the girls were in the house and they were ready for bed however when they got to jessica's room she wasn't there so the staff called her parents to see if they knew where she was or if you know they were with her or if she'd gone home or something and her mother rebecca answered the phone and rebecca hadn't seen or heard from jessica in a long time and so she decided to call the police and report jessica as missing just a few hours after she left the home jessica had last been seen at that bus stop ready to get on the bus to go to the mall around 6 6 30 p.m ish and then there was no sightings of her after that not on the bus not at the mall or anything and bear in mind it was now midnight so it had been about six hours since jessica was last seen so she could be anywhere anything could have happened to her so immediately this does seem like something maybe jessica would do because she often skipped school she often misbehaved however remember the reason why she was doing that was shawn thompson she wanted to see her boyfriend she wanted to spend time with him but now they'd broken up she no longer had a reason to go see him so why would she still be you know misbehaving and going out past the time that she was allowed and stuff she'd been well behaved her whole time at this house she'd never once kind of gone out when she wasn't supposed to or stepped out of line and she even told one of her friends at the house that she was going to the mall why would she lie to a friend at the house so police spoke with her friends her family all the other girls at huckleberry house and they initially theorized that maybe this was a runaway case her mother rebecca insisted that jessica would never do anything like that she would never run away from home and go missing like that off her on a card however to people that don't know jessica it kind of looked like she would it looked like the kind of thing that she would do as much as police wanted to believe jessica's mother when she said that jessica would never run away her track record suggests otherwise and so they still had to treat this as though it was a runaway case so they asked all of her friends and family people that knew her where she might be if she had run away and all of them said sean thompson she'd be with sean thompson yes they'd broken up that day but maybe that's all the more reason for her to meet up with sean thompson maybe he wanted to win her back maybe they wanted to kind of talk it out and you know maybe she'd met him at the mall and maybe they were still together somewhere maybe they'd gone back to his house so police planned to question sean as soon as they possibly could but they were kind of hoping that jessica would just come back in her own time and that this would just be a big misunderstanding where she'd kind of gone away for the evening and not got back until late however two days later the worst case scenario became a reality jessica keane was found dead on march 17 1991 a man had been walking through a graveyard named foster chapel cemetery now this was around 20 miles away from where jessica was staying at huckleberry house her body was found almost completely naked the only clothes that she had on her body was one sock and her bra which was very twisted it clearly been messed with and moved around and other than that she was found naked immediately from just looking at her body police could tell that jessica's cause of death had probably been bludgeoning because she had so many injuries to her head this cause of death was later confirmed in her autopsy jessica had been beaten to death and pathologists also found as they were examining her body that she'd also been raped before she was killed jessica's skull was fractured and she also had a bunch of other smaller injuries all over her body probably from the struggle a lot of cuts scratches bruises the autopsy also confirmed that she had no drugs or alcohol in her system at the time of her murder and it actually only took minimal blurs to kill her however her attacker kept going after she was already dead the murder weapon was quickly identified as a tombstone from that graveyard someone this killer had ripped up a full headstone from the ground and hit jessica keane over the head with it her killer had hit her so hard over the head with this huge 70 pound tombstone that it had actually cracked and split in half and one of these pieces of the tombstone was later found close to her body covered in blood based on crime scene evidence police could tell that this had been a very long very drawn out very traumatic ordeal for 15 year old jessica it seemed as though she'd been running naked through this graveyard for some time before she was finally caught and killed by her attacker for example her other sock that wasn't found on her body was found right at the entrance of the graveyard possibly having slipped off when she was trying to run from her attacker they also found footprints of jessica's size all over the graveyard showing that she'd run from her attacker for a long time she was really trying to get away and behind at least one of the tombstones in this graveyard they found knee imprints in the mud and that told police that jessica had been hiding behind these tombstones behind these headstones crouching trying to hide from her attacker so detectives now began discussing potential motives for this crime of course there was a sexual motive here jessica was found naked she was raped there was definitely a sexual element to this but was that the only motive you know why did they kill her and why jessica why her specifically was she targeted specifically or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time and someone was just looking to do this to a young girl and you know on the other side of that if it was jessica that was specifically targeted who was it and what did they have against her and why did they want to hurt her and kill her one thing that police did rule out pretty quickly was the possibility that this was a robbery like a robbery gone wrong jessica still had her watch on she still had some jewelry on i think she had rings on maybe a necklace and so you know if this was a robbery surely they would have taken those things but something that jessica's friends pointed out to police was that she was actually missing one piece of jewelry just one out of the lot that she was wearing and that was a necklace that sean thompson had bought her this necklace was a gold-plated kind of word necklace and it just said taken on it now there's always the possibility that maybe she just took it off before she left that day because she'd broken up with shawn maybe she didn't want to be wearing the jewelry that he bought her but police did have to keep that in mind obviously because it could be of use to the investigation it was unclear at this point whether the absence of this necklace was actually evidence or a clue so now police had to try to establish a timeline of events what had happened to jessica keane once she left huckleberry house that meant she ended up 20 miles away murdered in a graveyard well the last sighting of jessica was at that bus stop at 6 p.m on the day that she left the house and there were no other sightings after that point so this told police that something must have happened to her as she was on her way to the mall did she even get on that bus did something happen to her when she was on the bus did she get off at a different place than she was supposed to so one of the theories that was put forward and then later adopted as the official theory of this investigation was that jessica had been picked up at the bus stop someone had somehow gotten jessica in their car and managed to drive her 20 miles away maybe they were offering her a lift of some sort maybe this was someone that she knew someone that she trusted getting into a car with or maybe she was coerced in somehow or maybe she was forced into the car no one knows they believe that jessica was held hostage in this car for six hours while her abductor undressed her and raped her and then they think that somehow when the car was in west jefferson jessica managed to escape the car and escape her attacker and she just began running in any direction that she could and she went down this dirt path that led to the graveyard there was a farm house relatively close to the graveyard so it's believed that maybe this farmhouse had a light on and maybe that was where she was trying to go and seek refuge they think jessica was just running in the pitch black she lost her sock as she was running into the graveyard and eventually her attacker was catching up behind her and so she began hiding behind gravestones some sources said that she jumped a fence somewhere however i don't know where this fence could have been because i know that she got into the graveyard fine because her sock was found at the entrance of course there's no way of knowing how long this kind of chase was going on and where she was going as she was trying to run away from this person it's believed that at some point during this ordeal because it was pitch black it was the middle of the night it's believed that jessica as she was running as fast as she could to try to get away from her attacker she ran into a gate post she tried to get up and keep running however that time that she was knocked back gave her attacker the chance to catch up with her and this is when her attacker decided that instead of trying to get jessica back in the car and continue with whatever the original plan was that they were just gonna kill her then and there the killer grabbed one of the tombstones close by and ripped it out of the ground with brute strength like i said this tombstone was 70 pounds and gravestones are very secured into the ground they don't just sit on top of the ground they're like stuck in there so this killer ripped it out of the ground and hit jessica so hard over the head with it that it cracked into two this person then continued to beat her with one of these halves of the gravestone until they were sure that she was dead and then they left her there for her body to be found two days later when police asked jessica's mother about sean thompson they received a very negative character description of course because that's all jessica's mother had seen of this boy this boy had come into her daughter's life and changed her for the worse there was a motive there maybe he wasn't happy with the breakup maybe he didn't want the breakup and you know he was trying to get jessica back they were arguing and then this argument ended in murder maybe he felt like he had ownership over jessica and when she tried to split up with him he didn't like that and he was trying to assert his dominance over her by sexually assaulting her and beating her on top of that the only piece of jewelry missing from jessica's body was the necklace that sean bought her that said taken on it as well and now that she was no longer in a relationship with sean and he was no longer going to be dealing with jessica maybe he took that necklace back so police tracked down sean thompson and went to speak with him however they quickly found that sean wasn't even in the state of ohio on the night of jessica's murder sean and all of his friends had gone on a short trip to florida and they were asked to bring in any kind of documentation that could prove that they were out of the state at that point and all of them were able to do so they all had something that indicated that they'd been in florida that weekend just to be certain shawn thompson was asked to give a dna sample so that his dna could be tested against the dna sample found on jessica's body and the results of that test came back negative sean thompson wasn't the murderer so now sean and all of his friends were ruled out as suspects in this case but who else was there to look into police really thought that this case was going to be easy to solve they thought they had the killer with sean thompson because this boy had suddenly come into jessica's life shaken it up changed it for the worst and now suddenly she'd turned up dead it seemed as though this guy was a bad guy with his past and you know his image so they thought it was going to be him but now they were back to square one and sean was the only really questionable character in jessica's life all of her other friends were so sweet they were so well behaved they were all good people just like jessica so who else could have wanted to do this to her well the fact that jessica's body was found 20 miles away from where she was last seen told police that maybe the killer lived in that kind of area maybe they lived far away from where they picked up jessica and maybe they were trying to take jessica back to their house or back to a location near where they lived maybe the killer just happened to be there in the area at the time and jessica was in the wrong place at the wrong time and this attacker saw this as an opportunity to abduct a young girl and assault a young girl and if this was accurate then maybe jessica didn't know her killer or maybe she only barely knew them so this meant that this case was going to be all the more harder to solve and there was always the fear that this person could strike again this person could kill again because if this murder had been purely out of impulse and opportunity they just saw jessica at a bus stop and decided to abduct a murderer then they can do it again who knows how many more attacks this person could carry out or how many they had carried out before jessica that just hadn't been connected jessica's case was all over the news it was all over newspapers crime stoppers raised a 3 000 reward for anyone that could bring forward any information that led to her killer being charged this reward money just kept going up and up as well as soon as her family could raise a bit more money or as soon as a little bit more money could go into this case the reward money just kept getting higher and higher they were desperate for any information but really at this point as soon as they'd ruled out sean thompson this case was at a standstill there were no other leads to go off there were no suspects there was no clues at the crime scene there was nothing there was absolutely no direction that police could take this in and before long the case of jessica king's murder became a cold case in the years following jessica's murder every time a young girl was attacked in like a 30 mile radius of the west jefferson area this case was looked into as a possible connection to jessica's they would always get her case file out and check it detail by detail next to these other cases to see if there were any patterns to see if they could identify a suspect but nothing ever came of this there were never any patterns or similarities between jessica's murder and any other murders or attacks or sexual assaults in that general area now you often see in cold cases like this one where dna samples are collected from the crime scene that these dna samples can be resubmitted into the database periodically to see if any matches come up because new dna samples are getting added to this database every single day you know what if the killer didn't have their dna in the database when the dna was first submitted so a match didn't come up but what if the killer had committed another crime since then and now their dna was in the database it's worth running the dna samples from crime scenes again to see if there's a match in the system yet around the late 90s or the early 2000s a new law was passed that said that every violent criminal every person that commits a violent crime has to by law give a dna sample so that it can be put in this database for that exact reason whether their crime specifically needed a dna sample to test or not they had to give it just in case this person committed another violent crime and it needed solving in the future so it was worth rechecking dna samples from crime scenes every few years and that is exactly what they did with the dna found at jessica keane's crime scene and eventually on march 17th of 2008 exactly 17 years to the day that jessica's body was found a match was made the dna sample matched with a man who had just been released from prison for committing another violent crime and this man was martin lee smith jr smith was 51 years old he served nine years in prison from 1991 to 2000 for the rape kidnap and robbery of two other young girls the law that meant that violent criminals had to submit their dna was actually brought in while he was in prison so they for the people that were already in prison that had committed violent crimes they were just doing the dna sample on their way out so when he left prison in 2000 his dna sample was taken and put into the database and then eight years after that in 2008 they ran jessica keane's dna sample well the dna sample found at her crime scene and it matched his dna thanks to this new law these two other attacks so the ones that he was charged and sentenced for actually happened before jessica keane's murder so he'd committed those two attacks on those two other girls he was arrested and i think charged with those i don't really understand what bond is but he was out on bond at the time and that was when he abducted and murdered jessica keane smith admitted that he didn't actually go out that day intending to murder someone he actually went out with the intention of just abducting a girl and sexually assaulting her and then letting her go but i think it got to a point when jessica escaped his car that he knew that if jessica did successfully escape him that she would probably go to the police and there would be evidence and he would get a third charge on top of the other two that he already had and bear in mind he was out on bond at the moment so that would mean that his prison sentence that he would eventually get would be it would be a lot higher than it was already gonna be and so to make sure that jessica couldn't go to the police and that he couldn't be found for this sexual assault he decided to silence jessica by murdering her in march of 2008 martin lee smith jr was arrested in connection with jessica's murder and luckily he admitted to every single aspect of this case he confessed to abducting jessica holding her hostage raping her and murdering her in 1991 and thankfully this case could finally be put to rest now because of the severity of this crime smith was going to be up for the death penalty he could potentially be executed over this so to avoid the death penalty martin lee smith jr pled guilty to every single charge against him he was sentenced to 30 years to life with no chance of parole until 2038 when he'll be in his 80s although even then it's unlikely that he'll ever be free jessica's family have since of course given her a proper funeral a proper burial but they've also given her a memorial at the graveyard where her body was found right at the entrance to that graveyard there's a cross that says jessica lynn keane on it and a lot of people often leave flowers and little gifts for jessica and that is all i have on this case i think this has been a pretty short one but i think it's really important to cover cases like this cold cases that have eventually been solved many years later because it gives hope to a lot of other cold cases that maybe one day with advancements in technology new laws things like that that a lot of cases can be solved and will be solved and justice will be served thanks again to june's journey for sponsoring this video remember the link to download the app for free is in the description of this video so don't miss out thank you so much to all of my channel members for helping me pick the cases that i cover especially all of my tier 2 members whose names are on screen right now but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed make sure you leave a thumbs up on this video because that really helps me out if you want to subscribe the link to subscribe is right here in this little circle if you want to subscribe to my second channel the links in that circle and if you want to watch another video from me there'll be a playlist on screen right now bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,123,740

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, eleanor neale makeup, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror

Id: hijScHWPYgw

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020