1,381 days and counting: the excruciating wait for justice after a daughter's murder
Police say Shannon Gilday broke into Wesley Morgan's home and killed his daughter Jordan in 2022. The trial keeps getting delayed, and Wesley says "it opens the wounds over and over and over."
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Wesley Morgan can tell you exactly what time he wakes up every morning. Somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m., his eyes open in the darkness. It's been that way since February 22, 2022- the night a man with a rifle broke into his Richmond home and murdered his daughter Jordan as she slept in her upstairs bedroom.
"I just wake up," he says. "I just wake up."
It's the same time the doorbell rang that night. The same doorbell that had been shorting out, giving false alarms when it rained. Wesley assumed it was nothing when he got up to check at 3:30 a.m., never opening the front door where Shannon Gilday was hiding behind a column, waiting to kill him, he said.
The former Kentucky State Representative has spent the last four years fighting for justice for his daughter, fighting a court system that seems designed to protect the defendant, not the victim.

Fighting, while his daughter's body "lays up in the ground rotting," as he puts it with the bluntness of a man who has run out of patience for euphemisms.
The trial, currently scheduled for May 2026, just got delayed again. This time, it's a change of venue motion- filed after nearly four years, when such motions are typically handled early in a case. To Wesley, it's just another in a long line of delays that have kept him trapped in a cycle of reopened wounds and renewed trauma.
"What it does is it opens the wounds over and over and over," Wesley says. "And there's no, absolutely no reason for this to be in the situation it is."
The facts of the case aren't in dispute. According to Wesley, Gilday confessed to killing Jordan and shooting at Wesley. Gilday was arrested about a week after the shooting, when KSP troopers found him walking alone on the side of the road in the middle of the night. He was charged with Murder, Burglary 1st Degree, Criminal Mischief 1st Degree, Assault 1st Degree, and two counts of Attempted Murder.
According to Wesley, Kentucky State Police told him that Gilday had been to the property before, that he'd watched Jordan walk past her bedroom window during a week when Wesley, his wife Lindsay, and their youngest daughter had been out of town. That's why he went to that particular bedroom- he thought it was the master bedroom, thought he was assassinating Wesley Morgan.
Instead, he shot Wesley's 32-year-old daughter at least 11 times as she lay in her bed.