Police struggle for answers in the violent assault and death of WKU freshman Katie Autry. Originally Aired 01/05/23 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to Katie Autry?
Hi, I'm Brad Milkey. I'm the host of The Crime Scene Weekly, a new show from ABC Audio about the latest headlines in true crime. This week, I'm talking about the shocking allegations against the Alexander Brothers, once the golden boys of luxury real estate, now facing serious sex crime charges. Listen to The Crime Scene Weekly on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, 2020 listeners. This is Deborah Roberts. This week, we'll be bringing you the sixth and final episode of Death in the Dorms. In our closing episode, you'll hear the story of Katie Autry, a first-year student at Western Kentucky University, and a horrendous act of violence that leaves police struggling to find answers. Let's listen.
We were very proud of Katie for going to college. She was actually the first member of our family that went. For my family, that's a major deal.
What was initially thought to be a simple fire is turning into a mystery. All the students got out of Hugh Poland Hall safely, except for one.
Chapter 2: Who was Katie Autry and what was her background?
It was apparent this did not happen, that this was done to her.
And me at 16, I didn't really understand.
This was a horrific, horrific crime. We were playing with a crime scene, not only just located in this dorm, but we were playing with a crime scene that spread the whole campus.
She did matter. She mattered to a lot of people.
What happened? What happened to Katie?
I feel like I still need to fight for her. And I'll continue to do that as long as I'm breathing. My cousin Katie was born June 10th, 1984 in Rosene, Kentucky, which is where she spent most of her young childhood at. I always looked up to Katie just in general, just because she was such a loving person. Like she loved so many people. She loved life. She was so happy all the time.
Rosene, Kentucky was, you know, it sounds kind of cliche, but if you drive by and blink and miss it, it was one of those kinds of things. If you didn't know that you were within Rosene, you wouldn't register that you're in a town. It's just a stoplight.
We grew up most of our early life there, what we call the home place, which is family land that's been in our family since like the early 1900s is where my grandparents raised our parents and us. Initially, Katie lived with her grandparents, Peggy and W.D. Autry, her mother, Donnie, and she has one sister, Lisa.
Katie's my cousin, and I'm about 11 years younger than her. My sister and Katie liked to play dress up with me whenever I was little. They enjoyed that. Katie was a very funny and sweet person. She couldn't stand for somebody to be around her and be down. She wanted to make them smile and be happy.
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Chapter 3: What led to the tragic incident at Poland Hall?
Katie was probably about seven or eight when she went into foster care. It was because her mother was sick and couldn't take care of the girls. Katie and Lisa both went into foster care together. They moved foster homes several times in the beginning before they finally went to Jim and Shirley Inman. They were her foster parents for 10 years.
When Katie lived with the Emmons, her life was a little bit stricter than most people's. She was allowed to go to church. She was allowed to attend school, school functions. But Katie wasn't allowed to just go out with her friends or date. They were trying to keep her out of trouble. When Katie was in school, she was very determined. She was an AB student, honor roll, every club imaginable.
She was in track. She got several awards for cheerleading. I think she actually got cheerleader of the year a couple of times. Around here, there's not a whole lot of opportunity as far as work goes. You're gonna work in a factory or a fast food joint. Katie did not want to end up in a dead-end job. She wanted more for her life.
Katie wanted to make a life for herself better than what she had. She wanted to have a family, kids, and just be around the people she loved.
Katie decided to go to college to be a dental hygienist. She said she wanted to make people smile. We were very proud of Katie for going to college. She was actually the first member of our family that went. For my family, that's a major deal. Just because up until that point, we'd actually only had one member that had graduated high school.
So for her to graduate high school and go to college, we had major dreams for her.
I'm sorry.
Katie decided to go to Western because it was closer to her biological family. She could come visit us on the weekends.
Western Kentucky is a nice college campus in a rural town out in the country. You know, there's a lot of activities to do. Western Kentucky is definitely a fun place to go to college.
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Chapter 4: How did the police respond to the fire alarm?
Western had a couple majors that they were pretty well known for. It certainly attracted students of all talents and academic abilities. It definitely had a reputation for partying. It had a pretty strong Greek life.
Katie was super excited about college whenever she first got there. She was excited because it was a new town. She was excited because, you know, it was really the first time she'd had freedom to do whatever she wanted to do, you know. All 18 year olds get excited whenever, you know, they have a little bit of freedom.
I did meet Katie right outside of the Hugh Pullen Hall where we were both living. I think we kind of bonded over the fact that we both came from a strict upbringing, Christian household with a lot of rules, a lot of expectations. So the opportunities for us seem to be a lot bigger than what other students may have experienced.
I definitely think Katie was finding herself that year. She was experiencing a lot, having heartbreaks for the first time, but she was feeling more comfortable with who Katie was. And I think that first year at college, she was starting to like herself a little better.
Katie was quiet and shy, I think. But again, once you got to know her, she would open up. She was a pretty funny girl. She liked to laugh. She liked to crack jokes. She was well-liked around our groups, the different cliques that we had in the dorm. Katie was in room 214 on the second floor. She had a roommate. Her roommate was Danika. Danika was a cheerleader at the school.
They formed a really tight friendship.
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Chapter 5: What were the details of the crime scene investigation?
They kind of described each other almost as like sisters, you know, in addition to being best friends.
Yeah, I've always loved them Social life was a big deal. Thursday nights were the unofficial party night I would say on campus. Pizza parties, movie gatherings, you name it. If it was something that we could do other than schoolwork, we were probably doing it.
One of the biggest things that Katie did during her freshman year that shocked me was if you knew Katie, you knew she was terrified of needles. And somehow, for some reason, she decided to go get her tongue pierced and get a tattoo. It just blew my mind to think of Katie doing that. I guess it was her experience in life, just trying things.
Katie did get a job on campus. We had a little smoothie shop in the university center where our cafeteria and bookstore was. You could always count on seeing her behind the counter when you walked through the door there.
It was the end of the semester. And so a lot of students were preparing for finals, finishing up their last papers. There was a lot of like kind of end of the year partying as well.
May 4th, 2003, somewhere around 4 o'clock in the morning, the smoke alarm in the building went off. This was not an unusual thing. Kids like to play pranks, and the fire alarms got pulled quite often. At some point, our floor RA, resident assistant, came around and started knocking on all the doors.
I was in my dorm room sleeping. I covered police that semester for the Herald. And so we had like a little portable police scanner that the police reporter would have. And so I just had that in my room and it just kind of stayed on. When I heard the alarm call, because I was so close to there, I just headed over just to see what was going on.
It was a chilly, brisk, early, early morning. The dew had settled on the grass. It was a thick, moist night. Everybody's standing around. We're all in kind of little groups chatting and trying to figure out and understand like what's going on. We're starting to hear little bits and pieces of rumors. Something happened in room 214. It was the blonde, the blonde girl there.
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Chapter 6: What evidence suggested foul play?
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My name is Kevin Pickett. I'm a retired Kentucky State Police Sergeant. At the time, in 2003, we were assigned as a team, the investigative team, to assist West Kentucky University in the case. On May the 4th, at approximately 4.08 a.m., the fire alarms went off at Poland Hall. The fire department were there in less than three minutes.
The sprinkler has flooded the room, and fire is now smoldering. It's very contained at this point.
Captain Bob Sanborn was with the fire department, and he entered room 214. It was just pitch dark, and he saw something glistening, and that was Katie. And the part that was glistening was a part of her arm that was exposed that wasn't blackened by the fire. She was still alive and she was in a very bad place.
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Chapter 7: Who were the key witnesses in Katie's case?
They took her to the, I think it's called Greenwood Hospital in Bowling Green, while the police were trying to figure out what happened.
When the archivist came in, the fireman, we look up on the sprinkler head and there's a rag over the sprinkler head to detain the heat. So there's a lot of thought that went into this fire. This is most obvious, she got a crime scene.
Once she was at the hospital, you know, the medical staff, they were immediately struck with this. These are not the burns that happens when someone falls asleep with a cigarette. It was apparent this did not happen, that this was done to her.
She was stabbed three, four times in the neck on the left side. She had a T-shirt wrapped around her neck. It appeared to be trying to choke her. It was kind of over her face. She was beaten. There was a curling iron with a cord wrapped around her neck. So this was a horrific, horrific crime. This was not just a beating. This was pure torture. That's what it was.
It was probably around 5 when the phone was ringing. The answer machine picked up, and I heard Shirley Inman, which was Katie's foster mother. And she said Katie had been in an accident. So me and mom and dad and Johnny, my little sister, got dressed real quick, jumped into the truck, drove to the medical center in Bowling Green.
We waited for the doctor to come in, and he sat down, and he immediately was like, you know, she had a towel tied around her throat and her mouth. And me at 16, I was like, what does he mean, you know, because I didn't really understand. But he was talking to my mom, and she was like, he means that somebody done this to her.
Katie's condition was very critical. She was essentially in a medically induced coma the entire time that she was at the hospital. It wasn't as if police were ever able to talk to her or get information from her after the fire.
Mom had asked to see Katie because at this point she was fixing to be airlifted to Nashville. She looked like she was sleeping. And my mom started panicking and screaming for her to wake up. Katie, get up. Katie, wake up. They told us we couldn't touch her because of the burns. You know, we didn't want to cause an infection. So me and my dad had to literally physically remove my mom from the room.
What was initially thought to be a simple fire is turning into a mystery.
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Chapter 8: What were the police findings regarding the suspects?
Then they actually brought her out and then they were like, medic, and that's when everybody knew it wasn't a joke.
Katie's body was burnt up all the way from her inner thighs all the way up to just above her breasts. And you don't have to be a great detective to figure out, okay, somebody's trying to cover something up here in areas of concentration would lead you to believe it's some type of sexual assault.
In the very beginning, there was participation from many different agencies. There was Kentucky State Police, there was the Bowling Green Police, and there was the Western Kentucky University Police.
Those agencies all met and decided that Western's police department would take the lead in the case. Definitely, fire, arson investigations, and murder were not the kinds of cases that Western police handled with any kind of regularity or at all. The investigators' first steps were trying to figure out where Katie had been and who she might have been with.
They interviewed Danica Jackson, who was Katie Autry's roommate. Details is huge in an investigation of this size. So Danica Jackson was filling in these details for us.
According to both police records and an interview that I'd done with Danica, that night, the two of them had gone to the Pike party together, a fraternity house not too far from campus. And Danica told police that at one point, Katie got into a fight with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Maurice, and she slapped him.
She was drunk, and after both of those things, just kind of had decided it was best for her to go home. Often at the fraternity parties, they would have either pledges or freshmen that were designated to be sober. And so they were kind of there to give people a ride home. Danica helped connect Katie with somebody to get a ride home from the party. It was about 1.30, two o'clock in the morning.
The important thing of Danica's interrogation was that they split up. Katie goes home with the sober driver. Danica goes on to her other party.
Danica was pretty protective of Katie. In addition to making sure she got home with a sober driver, she called Katie later that night to make sure she was OK after the fight with Maurice.
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