Kentucky AG to court: Brooks Houck killed Crystal Rogers, and the evidence proves it

The state's top prosecutor filed a 103-page brief urging the Kentucky Supreme Court to uphold Houck's murder conviction- and didn't mince words about why.

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The Kentucky Attorney General's office wants the state's highest court to know exactly where it stands on Brooks Houck's appeal: he killed Crystal Rogers, and the jury got it right.

The Commonwealth's response brief to Houck's appeal pulls no punches from its opening paragraph. Attorney General Russell Coleman's office writes that Houck, "whether he did it himself or through others", killed Crystal, the mother of his child and four others, then "disappeared her body, leaving her family in unsettled agony for almost a decade." The brief asks the Kentucky Supreme Court to reject Houck's appeal and affirm his conviction and life sentence.

What Houck is arguing

Houck's appeal raises several legal challenges to his conviction for Crystal's murder and tampering with physical evidence. His central argument is that the Commonwealth never proved corpus delicti- essentially, that a crime even occurred- because Crystal's body has never been found. He also argues there wasn't enough evidence to show he was personally responsible for her death, either as the person who killed her or as an accomplice. On top of that, he raises issues with jury selection, claims the trial judge should have recused himself, argues he shouldn't have been tried alongside co-defendant Joey Lawson, and challenges several evidentiary rulings from trial.

The AG's answer on the no-body accusation

The Attorney General's office spends considerable time dismantling Houck's argument that without a body, the Commonwealth couldn't prove murder. Kentucky law, the brief notes, has never required a body - and has said so for well over a century.

The brief points to a strikingly similar Kentucky case called Phillips v. Commonwealth where a conviction was upheld with no body, no crime scene, and no physical evidence of death or injury. What did exist were the same kinds of circumstances present here: a loving mother who "disappeared without a trace," leaving behind her children. The brief argues that a mother of five who was actively making plans to move furniture, borrow a baby swing, help plan a birthday party simply does not walk away from her life. That, the AG's office says, carries the same evidentiary weight as bloodstains.

And in this case, there was more than just Crystal's disappearance. A cadaver dog performed a blind search of a vehicle impound lot and gave what handlers described as his "trained final alert" for human remains on a white Buick belonging to Houck's grandmother- the same car that two witnesses reported seeing near the Houck farm in the early morning hours of July 4, 2015. In the trunk of that Buick, investigators found a hair "microscopically similar" to Crystal's. The car was sold to a Louisville dealership just two days after Crystal's father publicly posted on Facebook asking for information about a white Buick connected to his daughter's disappearance.

This evidence was first revealed in trial last summer and I dive into extensively on episode five of my podcast 'Circumstantial; the Crystal Rogers Trials'. You can listen to the entire 10 episode series right now.

A web of circumstances

The brief methodically walks through what it calls "a veritable web" of evidence placing Houck at the center of Crystal's disappearance. Cell phone data put Houck's phone traveling north on KY 49- past the Bluegrass Parkway where Crystal's car was later found- just after midnight on July 4. Steve Lawson called Houck at 12:07 a.m., just one minute after receiving a call from his own son, Joey. Steve's phone, according to expert testimony, was "in the general area of the Bluegrass Parkway" and "near Crystal Rogers's car" that same night.

Witness Charlie Girdley testified that before Crystal disappeared, Steve told him directly that "Brooks wanted to get rid of his old lady." Another witness, Stacy Cranmer, said Steve bragged to her- just before Crystal went missing- that he and Houck had been talking about "a girl that they had to take care of," a woman with five kids who "wasn't doing very well." When Cranmer suggested rehab, Steve said, "I wish that was the case."

Rebecca Greer, Steve Lawson's ex-wife, testified that she overheard Joey tell family members that he and Steve had been paid $50,000 to move a car and when confronted, Joey confirmed it, telling her, "if you wanna know any details, you need to ask Steve."

And then there were Houck's own recorded conversations. Police found digital recorders at the Houck family farm containing recordings Houck and family members had made of their interactions with investigators. In one, just after Nick Houck's police cruiser was seized, Rosemary Houck asked whether a blanket in the trunk had "anything on it." Brooks answered: "Huh-uh." In another, Brooks told Rosemary that "a bad tip's jacked them all up"- referring to an unverified witness account police hadn't yet debunked. The problem, the AG's brief points out, is that police hadn't told Houck the tip was bad yet. He had only one way to know.

Pictures shared with juror, showing where the recorders were found in Rosemary Houck's home

Houck's story didn't hold up

Much of the brief is devoted to cataloguing how Houck's own account of July 3, 2015 fell apart under investigation. He claimed he'd spent the day conducting business- visiting a lumberyard, working evictions, hauling trash to a landfill, mowing vacant lots, coordinating with a local electric company. Investigators checked. The circuit clerk's office was closed that day. So was Salt River Electric. The landfill had no record of his visit. The HOA had actually texted him that day saying his properties needed to be mowed "ASAP." Workers he claimed were on the job said they weren't.

His alibi for the night Crystal disappeared was equally shaky. He claimed the two of them took their son Eli to the family farm around 7:30 p.m. to feed cows, walking a mile down a gravel road in the rain. His phone data showed he never strayed beyond about 1,000 feet from the barn the entire evening. He also claimed Crystal was home playing games on her phone when he went to bed. Phone records showed Crystal's phone was manually shut off just before midnight and never turned back on until it was in police custody.

Most of his legal arguments weren't preserved

A recurring theme in the AG's response is that Houck failed to properly raise many of these issues at trial, which limits- or eliminates- his ability to raise them on appeal. His argument that the Commonwealth didn't prove he was the principal or accomplice in Crystal's death, for example, wasn't made in his directed verdict motion at trial. Same with his challenge to the evidence-tampering conviction.

For the legal challenges that were preserved, the AG's office argues the trial court acted well within its discretion. Those arguments included jury selection, evidentiary rulings, and the decision to try Houck alongside Joey Lawson. Even the jurors who'd heard about the case from news coverage, the brief argues, each confirmed under questioning that they could set that aside and decide based solely on what was presented in court.

The bottom line

The AG's brief closes simply: "This Court should affirm."

The filing frames the appeal as an attempt to re-litigate a case that was carefully and thoroughly tried, including ten days of testimony, more than forty prosecution witnesses, and a unanimous jury that heard all of it. The Commonwealth's message to the Kentucky Supreme Court is that the verdict wasn't just legally sound. It was right.

Crystal Rogers disappeared on July 3, 2015. She has never been found.

You can now listen to the entire 10 episode podcast 'Circumstantial; the Crystal Rogers Trials.' This is the story of justice delayed but not denied. Of a family that never stopped fighting. And of the trials that finally brought answers to a case that consumed a community for nearly a decade.

This podcast is available exclusively to Shay Informed subscribers.

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