"48 Hours" probes Missouri murder mystery
Produced by Peter Henderson, Mead Stone and Michael Rosenbaum
[This story previously aired on Jan. 1, 2011. It was updated on July 21, 2012.]
More than 19 years have passed since 19-year-old Mischelle Lawless was found bludgeoned and shot to death in her car.
"When I look back, I wish that maybe I'd listened a little more or been there a little more because she was always there for me," Mischelle's best friend, Melissa Gaines, told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Erin Moriarty.
It's still not easy for Gaines to read the cheery diary that Mischelle kept the last year of her life:
"January 1st. Slept real late. Family went to Mingo and I went to Leon's. We loved and ate and talked and rented movies. Made me feel loved today and I am really happy. Love him. Great first day of 1992!"
Gaines met Mischelle when they were high school freshmen in Benton, Mo.
"I had just moved to Kelly High School, didn't know anybody," she said. "Her little bubbly self came bouncing up and introduced herself and it was all over. She was part of my life from that moment on."
While Mischelle stood barely five feet tall, she was no lightweight. She was a green belt in karate - halfway to earning a black belt.
"I can't even remember anything she was ever scared of," Gaines recalled. "She was fearless."
"Would it ever occur to you that Mischelle might be in danger?" Moriarty asked.
"No. I mean, that never was a thought to me. Never."
Which is why what happened in the early morning hours of Nov. 8, 1992, was so unexpected and so shocking.
Rick Walter was a 32-year-old part-time deputy sheriff when he discovered the body of Mischelle Lawless.
"This is small town USA. A lot of stuff like this just doesn't happen," Walter said of the brutal murder.
Police documented the grisly scene using blood evidence to reconstruct Mischelle's final, terrifying moments.
"I believe she got out of the vehicle, and I think there was an argument," Walter explained. "She ended up over the guardrail and down the bottom of the slope. A very violent altercation took place. I believe she was beat at the bottom and knocked unconscious. There was a lot of blood…"
There was also blood under Mischelle's fingernails and marks on her right hand and wrist suggesting she had fought her assailants.
"I think that she was fighting for her life. I think she was fighting more than one person," Walter said. "There was a blood trail going back up the hill. They carry her across the guardrail. They put her back in the car."
It wasn't until investigators searched her car and found three spent shell casings from a .380 caliber handgun that they realized Mischelle had been shot, too.
"I think after she got back in the car, I think that's when she regained conscious and somebody reached through the window…shot her point blank in the face; shot her in the back of the head. And then one more time in the back," Walter said, pausing. "I can't imagine what she went through that night."
Investigators canvass the crime scene
At the same time the deputy sheriff was working the crime scene, a 23-year-old local man walked into the sheriff's office with a surprising story.
Mark Abbott reported that he had also seen the woman in the car.
"Scared me. I never really saw anything like that… All I remember is her face was just matted and covered with hair and blood," he told Moriarty. He said he didn't know who the woman was.
Abbott told the dispatcher he thought the woman had been shot and that he had tried to call 911, but a nearby pay phone was out of order.
"I pulled outta there as fast as I could and went straight to the county sheriff's department trying to get an ambulance," he said.
As he was leaving, Abbott saw - as he described to investigators - a white car with several dark skinned Hispanic men driving away from the crime scene.
"Well, a man for sure, and two or three other people," Abbott said.
Mischelle's family got the news when authorities came to their door.
"I answered the door. It was about 3 a.m. I guess," said Jason Lawless, who was 15 when his older sister was killed.
"I don't do this well," he told Moriarty, overcome with emotion. When asked how Mischelle's death affected his family, he said, "Whoever shot my sister, killed my family - every ounce of it, every fiber that held it together."
The first suspect was the last person to admit seeing Mischelle alive: Leon Lamb, the boyfriend she stopped to see.
"She was only there about an hour or so, so it coulda been 11:30 or 12:00 at night," Lamb said of Mischelle's arrival. He said she left "just right at 1:00 a.m."
"January 6th: Called Leon and told him I love him so much..."
Lamb said Mischelle was his first love. From the entries in her diary, Mischelle clearly loved Lamb; but they also argued frequently. Mischelle was hurt that he was seeing other girls.
"No matter how mean he is to me, I still love him..."
Lamb said things were fine that night, although he remembered Mischelle was reluctant to leave his house.
"Now that I look back, it seemed like that she knew something was wrong, maybe something was gonna happen," he said.
Investigators looked closely at Leon Lamb, but they could find nothing to tie him to the scene and he passed a polygraph.
"Did you think it could be Leon?" Moriarty asked Gaines.
"He never crossed my mind, no. I just could never imagine him wanting to harm her like that, ever."
Weeks went by with few other leads and no arrests. Finally, four months after Mischelle's murder came a big break.
Several inmates at the county jail reported that a 17-year-old Illinois boy who had been held there briefly on an assault charge had confessed to killing Mischelle Lawless. His name was Joshua Kezer. When Mark Abbott was shown a photo lineup, he picked out Kezer as the driver he saw near the crime scene.
"Did you say 'Yeah, this is the guy I saw; I know it.'" Moriarty asked Abbott.
"No, no…" he replied. "I said, 'It looks like him and that looks like the car.'"
That's all investigators needed. Joshua Kezer was charged with the first-degree murder of Mischelle Lawless.
"I sat there stunned, I immediately started to just be shaking and confused and I didn't know what was happening," Kezer said. "I just knew that something very real was happening."
Mischelle's family and friends were just as stunned. Neither Jason Lawless nor Melissa Gaines had ever heard Kezer's name mentioned.
"There was no truth to what they were presenting," Kezer said. "Everything was a lie."Valerie Eubanks is Mischelle Lawless' little sister.
"We wanna know who did it, of course. We just would really like to know why? Was there a purpose behind it? she asked. "Was it just a fluke? Was she at the wrong place at the wrong time? Did she walk up on something?"
"You just want to deny it. You don't want it to be true," said their mother, Esther Lawless.
Of her sister's last hours, Eubanks said, "She was with some of her friends from Sikeston that she hung out with all the time. Drivin' around in Sikeston. They would drive up and down Main Street and park in Malco Parking lot or whatever and hang out. It seemed to be a very typical Saturday night."
Family members said Mischelle didn't express any concerns or fears in the days before her death.
"Do you think that Mischelle would have stopped for a stranger on the street?" Moriarty asked.
"No," Eubanks said. Her mother added, "We always kinda felt that someone she knew was involved. That's what made her pull over and stop."
Which is what made the arrest of Joshua Kezer so puzzling; there's no mention of him anywhere in Mischelle's diary.
Kezer told Moriarty he had never met Mischelle or heard her name. "The first time I'd ever seen her is when my attorney brought me a picture of her obituary. That's the first time I had actually ever seen her face. When they began to ask me a few questions, right, about some murder, I was like, 'Why are they asking me about this stuff?'"
Josh Kezer fit the type - he was a 17-year-old dropout and rumored to be a gang member. He came from a broken home, bouncing between his parents and living on the street.
"You know, he had long hair, he was - he was dirty," Walter said. "He slept on the street a lot at times and slept wherever he could. He had already had a couple different run-ins with the law.
Kezer said, "I wasn't really that different from most kids that don't have an advantage. I was just going through some very difficult struggles."
Even though he insisted he was 350 miles away the night of the murder, investigators hauled Kezer into the office of Bill Ferrell, the Scott County sheriff at the time.
Kezer described his exchange with Sheriff Ferrell: "He settles into his chair…like a split second later, literally comes halfway over his desk and accuses me of killing, and I quote, 'his little girl.' And they were charging me with first-degree murder."
More than a year later, in June 1994, Josh Kezer got his day in court.
"What did you believe would happen at the trial?" Moriarty asked Kezer.
"I believed I would win," he replied. "What were they gonna present? They had blood underneath the victim's fingernails… It was not my type. It was not my DNA. They did not have fingerprints, palm prints. No weapon. No paper trail. No motive."
But the prosecution did have those jailhouse informants who took the stand and swore that Kezer had confessed to the murder. And then came a surprise witness.
At trial, although she could only see the back of Kezer's head in court, Chantelle Crider whispered to a friend that she thought she recognized him as a young man who had argued with Mischelle at a Halloween party just one week before her murder.
"This guy kept asking her out, and she refused. He was a real arrogant and - and very hateful," Crider told Moriarty. "He called her a bitch because she kept refusing and was like, 'leave me alone.' Then he asked me out, and I said, 'Are you crazy? You just asked my best friend out. There's no way.' And he slapped me in the back of my hair."
"Josh Kezer looked like him?" Moriarty asked Crider.
"It looked, yeah. It looked like him," she said.
It was the connection the prosecutor needed. Crider was questioned for hours by Sheriff Bill Ferrell and became the state's star witness.
Crider took the stand. She said she told the court, "I believed it was Josh."
Also on the stand was Mark Abbott, the man who had reported seeing Mischelle Lawless in her car the night of her murder. Once again, he identified Josh Kezer as the driver of the white car he saw near the crime scene. But the defense pointed out that Abbott had reported seeing several men that night and had given conflicting descriptions.
"They chose to rely on the credibility of a man who first claimed that it was a light-skinned black man, then a car load of Mexicans…and they finally settled on a pale white kid from Illinois," said Kezer.
No physical evidence tied Kezer to the murder, but the prosecutor told the jury that tests showed there was blood on Josh's jacket and in a car he was driving.
At the end of the trial, the jury came back with its verdict in just 3 1/2 hours, finding Kezer guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Mischelle Lawless.
"I'm sitting there ready to jump and then the verdict came back…guilty," Kezer recalled. "The only thing I remember is when the verdict came back I went numb. I was confused. I remember hearing myself yelling and screaming, 'It wasn't me. It wasn't me.'"
"What did you think when he yelled that leaving the courtroom? Moriarty asked Esther Lawless. "What else can he say, but 'I didn't do it,'" she replied.
Josh Kezer was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
He was sent to a notorious prison known as "The Walls," the Missouri State Penitentiary. Now closed, it was such a violent place that it was once called "the bloodiest 47 acres in America."
For nearly 10 years, Kezer lived in housing unit 4, cell 99.
"There was a point that I got attacked when I was in prison. There was some men who wanted to rape me and they tried and they failed. Praise God. But in the process of defending myself, I got beat up quite bad and ended up in the hospital… On two occasions, I prayed for death...I didn't want to wake up." In 2005, more than 12 years after finding Mischelle Lawless shot dead in her car, Rick Walter was no longer a part-time deputy; he was now the sheriff of Scott County, Mo.
"There's nothing about this whole case that makes me feel good at all," he told "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Erin Moriarty as they drove to the area where Mischelle was found.
"I go by here a lot," he continued. "I think about the family and I can't imagine what the family went through."
For years, Walter had nagging doubts about the conviction of Josh Kezer. "Talk to the average, everyday lay person, you know, and they would tell me the same thing: this kid didn't do it."
So as his first order of business, the new sheriff did something extraordinary: he reopened Kezer's case.
"You must know how incredibly unusual that is," Moriarty remarked.
"It's very unusual," he said with a laugh. "In the law enforcement community, that's not a real popular thing to do. This wasn't a cold case, this was a closed case."
But Sheriff Walter, with a wife and three children, quickly discovered that his decision to get to the truth made some people very uncomfortable. He even received death threats.
"There was a couple of preachers that went to lunch with me. And one knows about this case. And he said, 'I'm really surprised if somebody hadn't tried to assassinate you yet.' And, you know, I keep hearing this. It comes with the job."
Undeterred, Sheriff Walter hired Brandon Caid, an investigator from another county who knew nothing about the case, to conduct an independent review of the files.
At first, Caid thought he was wasting his time. "Reading the court transcripts, everything they had, witnesses that said he confessed…It seemed pretty rock solid when I read through it."
But as he dug through the files, that rock solid case began to crumble. "Every bit of it - once you really look and examined it piece by piece and just looked at it a little harder…it came apart," Caid said.
Remember those jailhouse informants who claimed Kezer had confessed? After getting better deals in exchange for their testimony, three later admitted they lied.
And there's more: The jury had been told that luminal tests done on Kezer's leather jacket and a car Kezer borrowed indicated drops of blood. It was evidence that supposedly tied him to the murder.
"We had it tested and, in fact, it wasn't blood," Sheriff Walter said.
"And yet the jury in Josh's trial heard it was," noted Moriarty. "Right, "he replied.
And what about Chantelle Crider - the surprise star witness who connected Josh Kezer to Mischelle at the Halloween party? Walter said Josh was not at the party hosted by Dawn Pierce.
Pierce said, "…I know every guy that was there. There was not a strange man to me."
So why did Crider testify that Kezer was there? She said she was pushed hard by then-Sheriff Bill Ferrell.
"…he kept going on and on and on about how my testimony - that it was that important… because I was what they needed to link them together," Crider told Moriarty.
Just days after the verdict, Pierce and another girl who was at the party went to Kezer's attorney and provided a sworn statement.
"They contacted his defense attorney the next Monday and said, 'He was not at our party,'" Walter said. "They had a list of the kids that was there."
That list was given to then-Sheriff Ferrell, but somehow the information went nowhere.
"They just convicted him and said 'Be done with it. We've got a killer,'" Pierce said.
"Everyone wanted to believe that this thing was done and over with. And the guy was in jail," said Jason Lawless, who believes there was a lot of pressure on Sheriff Ferrell to find his sister's killer. "He wanted a conviction. He wanted it quick. He wanted it fast. And he got it."
Sheriff Rick Walter is trying to make it right. "I'm trying and I will." And he was about to find out he wasn't all alone in his search for the truth.
"There was absolutely no reason why they convicted him," said Jane Williams, a church volunteer at the Missouri state prison where Josh Kezer was serving out his sentence.
"I'm not an attorney. I had never read a trial transcript before. I really knew nothing about any of this. But as I began to just read it and, truthfully, just pray about it, I felt very clearly that I had to do something about this," she told Moriarty.
Armed with her passion, Williams wrote a detailed summary and found lawyers willing to take the case for free.
Kezer's lawyers, Charles Weiss and Stephen Snodgrass, talk about the case
In December 2008, after spending more than 15 years in prison, Kezer finally got what he wanted: Judge Richard Callahan agreed to review his case.
Witness after witness testified for Josh, including a tearful Chantelle Crider.
"I regret it horribly," she cried on the stand. "It affects me every day. An innocent man that's been locked up and he doesn't deserve to be."
But will it be enough to convince the judge to order a new trial? Two long months passed after the court hearing. Josh Kezer sat in prison, afraid to get his hopes up. Then, late on Feb. 17, 2009, Judge Richard Callahan issued his ruling.
"I've spent my life in the justice system," Judge Callahan said. "And so I was embarrassed for our system."
"Did the system make a mistake in the case of Josh Kezer?" Moriarty asked.
"The system made a big mistake in the case of Josh Kezer."
Judge Callahan, now the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Missouri, was so disturbed by what he saw that he did something very unusual: instead of ordering a new trial, he went ahead and declared Josh Kezer an innocent man.
"As you sit here today, do you believe that Josh Kezer had anything to do with the murder of Michelle Lawless?" Moriarty asked.
"Absolutely not," Judge Callahan replied. "I believe he's innocent. And I so found."
"I let out this just roar," Kezer said. "I mean, I just let it out. I yelled. I shouted with everything I had in me."
The very next day, Josh Kezer walked out of prison - a free man for the first time in 16 years.
He hugged his mother and he hugged Jane Williams, the social worker who had championed his case.
"For years, he had had to carry that he was a monster killer who brutally killed someone, which was not true," Williams said.
Then Kezer turned to Sheriff Rick Walter. "I wanted to thank him personally for what he done," Kezer told Moriarty.
Both the prosecutor - Kenneth Hulshof - and former Sheriff Bill Ferrell have declined "48 Hours'" requests for interviews, but in court documents, Ferrell denies any wrongdoing and Holshof has said publicly that he still believes Kezer's guilty.
"I think we've done the right thing and, and we move on and try to find out who done this," said Sheriff Walter, who is determined to find the killer of Mischelle Lawless, still deeply mourned by her family and friends.
Melissa Gaines misses their friendship. "… just being able - because you could tell her anything, and she wouldn't judge you. And if she loved you, she loved you."
But someone hated Mischelle enough to kill her. Sheriff Walter still believes it is someone she knew.
"There's people of suspicion," he said. "We have right now about six or seven different people that, you know, we're definitely interested in, and we're looking at."
On that list is Mark Abbott. "Still today, I'm a No. 1 suspect in this murder, am I or am I not?"
Once a star witness for the prosecution, Abbott's account of the night of the murder raised questions, starting with what he said he did when he found Mischelle in her car.
"I just reached in the window and I grabbed her and she came up," Abbott said.
What's wrong with that story? The side window was only partly open, not wide enough, said the sheriff, to fit Abbott's story.
"You couldn't reach through the window and grab somebody and set 'em up, not the way he said," Walter explained.
When asked if he killed Mischelle Lawless, Abbott said "No."
"But there's a lot of people in this town who think you did," Moriarty remarked.
"A lot of people think I did," he said nodding his head in agreement.
"I've also spoken to a lot of people who've said you bragged about it," Moriarty said.
One of them was Ron Burton, a gun shop owner and long-time friend of Abbott's family. Burton remembered one chilling conversation with Abbott soon after Kezer was convicted.
"He said, and I quote, 'I took care of the bitch.' And that's what he said. And he kind of had a smirky little grin on his face," Burton recalled. "And I'll never forget it, because it shocked me."
When asked by Moriarty if Burton thought Abbot was kidding, he said, ""No. No, I don't."
Abbott denied ever saying that and said Burton was "lying."
There is also an affidavit from a narcotics detective who said Abbott told him that he didn't kill Mischelle, but watched another man do it.
To that Abbott said, "No. He's full of s--t."
"Why would so many people think you're capable of something like this, that they'd point the finger?" Moriarty asked.
"I don't know what I did to anger 'em like that."
"They're pointing the finger at you. Why?"
"I do not have an answer to that. I do not."
Abbott said he never met Mischelle, but her close friend, Melissa Gaines, had a different recollection. When asked if Mischelle ever mentioned a Mark Abbott, Gaines said, "Yes she did."
"She had said that she had met Mark, Mark Abbott, one of the Abbott boys, and thought he was a good looking guy. And I told her, 'Mischelle, you know, don't mess with either one of the Abbott boys, you know better than that.'"
In fact, there are two Abbott boys and they're identical twins.
Said Sheriff Walter, "Those boys, they would change places with each other from little boys on. You can't tell them apart."
Which is why to this day, the sheriff isn't absolutely sure which Abbott brother came in to report finding Mischelle. Two people in the sheriff's office say it was his twin, Matt.
"So was Matt involved? Was Mark involved? Matt says he never was, but yet we have two people that say he walked in and reported it. They have him down as Matt Abbott. So you know, that could be a conspiracy, couldn't it?" Sheriff Walter said.
Mark and Matt Abbott were convicted on federal drug charges in 1997, making some people in town wonder if maybe Mischelle Lawless had something on them.
"There's a lot of theories out there," Sheriff Walter explained. "You know, one of 'em was that she had information on their drug dealing, and there's a lot of money involved in that. …That's motive enough for somebody to kill somebody."
Along with Abbott, Sheriff Walter hasn't ruled out Leon Lamb - the last person to admit to seeing Mischelle Lawless alive.
"Did you have anything to do with Mischelle Lawless' death?" Moriarty asked Lamb.
"Not at all. I loved her."
"You know that your DNA was found under her fingernails?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And how do you explain that?"
"We had sex that night and we were both pretty passionate people, so you know, time and again she scratched me during sex."
But Lamb confirmed what Mischelle wrote in her diary: that the couple had frequent arguments, especially when he saw her with other men. And in fact, the night of her murder, Mischelle had run into Lamb while she was driving around with male friends.
"Did that bother you?"
"It did," Lamb said. "You know, because we had been together for three years."
"Did she leave the house upset with you or angry with you at all?"
"No, not at all. I mean, we - like I said, we hugged, kissed and said our goodnights and that was it."
Abbott and Lamb are only two of a half-dozen suspects. And Sheriff Walter needs more than theories and speculation. He needs hard evidence.
To find it, he went all the way to the Netherlands, to a place known as the "crime farm."Halfway around the world from Scott County, Mo., there is a rustic farmhouse in the Netherlands known as "The Crime Farm."
"I came here in hopes to find some DNA. We're lookin' to maybe get some skin cells off some of the clothing," Sheriff Rick Walter said.
Dutch forensic experts Selma and Richard Eikelenboom began the painstaking process of trying to find a killer's DNA using techniques not widely available in the United States.
Richard first examined the material with crime scopes, which emit different kinds of light, to locate normally-invisible spots of skin cells or other material.
Those spots are tested for what's called "touch" or "grip" DNA.
The Eikelenbooms will compare what they find with DNA samples from the people of interest on the sheriff's list. They didn't have Mark Abbott's DNA, so they used a sample from his identical twin, Matt. Richard explained that normally, the DNA of identical twins is identical.
The Dutch team made an intriguing discovery that raises more doubts about Mark Abbott's story of how he pulled Mischelle upright in her seat that night.
When asked by Moriarty exactly where he grabbed her, Abbott said, "On the shoulder, mighta been by the breast a little bit. I can't fully remember, but I know it wasn't too far, you know it." Abbott indicated it was Mischelle's left shoulder.
But the Dutch couple said they found what is likely Abbott DNA in other places on Lawless' clothes.
"Did you just grab the shoulder? Did you grab more of her body to pull her up?" Moriarty asked Abbott. "Do you remember?"
"I just grabbed her shoulder," he replied.
Said Sheriff Walter, "I know what he said, where he touched her. If it's somewhere else that - that he - it was impossible for him to touch, or that's where we find it, then he has a problem."
In December 2009, Mark Abbott was moved temporarily from the federal prison where he's doing time on drug charges, to Missouri for a hearing on an unrelated charge. Abbott agreed to talk to Sheriff Walter about the Lawless case, even offering his own DNA sample, which was shipped off to the crime farm for additional testing.
The Dutch confirmed that Leon Lamb's DNA was mixed with Mischelle's blood found under her fingernails. It's no surprise, since Lamb said he had sex with Mischelle earlier the night she was killed.
But they don't find anyone else's DNA - and that is something of a surprise, since Walter said it appeared Mischelle fought her attacker.
"She wouldn't take anything off anybody. She would fight if she needed to," he said. "And, you know, I believe she, she fought for her life that night."
Walter said it's a reason to continue looking at Leon Lamb, although, he pointed out Mischelle might not have made contact with her assailant.
"If she grabbed their clothing, she's not gonna get any of their skin cells," he explained. "You know, unless she got 'em in the face… there's a good chance that we're not gonna get anything."
So far, none of the team's findings point conclusively to any one suspect. But Selma Eikelenboom believes the findings can help the sheriff get someone to talk.
"It's now up to him. It's, the, the ball is in his territory now," she said of Walter. "[The] DNA results, it can become a leverage for the sheriff to get things starting up again. People might start talking after all that time."
Sheriff Walter is hoping the DNA results and further investigation will allow him to go to a grand jury soon.
"A lot of people are really scared about this case," he told Moriarty.
When asked who or what are they afraid of, the sheriff replied, "Maybe they're afraid of the people that done this."
Six months after Josh Kezer was released, he returned with "48 Hours" to the now closed Missouri State Penitentiary, where he served most of his nearly 16 years in custody. The prison is now being redeveloped as a museum and office park.
"I mean, the fact that you lived here, do you think it makes you appreciate the things that a lot of us just take for granted?" Moriarty asked Kezer while inside his former cell.
"Yeah, yeah," he laughed. "In a nutshell, yes. I think I see things through a different set of eyes."
Of being back, Kezer told Moriarty, "Oh, it's strangely way too familiar," pointing out where he slept. "I lived in this cell. I swept this cell, mopped this cell."
"When you look around here, how would you describe your life now?"
"Oh, I am blessed and highly favored. I'm livin' a dream."
Kezer got a job working construction, his own apartment and he often speaks about his experience, advocating for judicial reform.
He remains close with Jane Williams and he enjoys strong support from his church community.
Kezer insists he's not bitter. "I don't look back my 16 years in prison and get hateful and angry about all of it. It does not excuse what was done to me. There is no excuse for that. It was wrong. It was evil."
And that might explain why he was so eager to assist with the renovation of the prison.
To this day, Mischelle Lawless' family remains tormented by the mystery of her senseless murder. Her mother, Esther, said she has to believe that the case will be solved.
"Whoever took her life needs to pay for what they did," she said. "It's not gonna bring her back, I know that. But it will help all of us rest a little easier."
"I owe that to her family to find out who done it. And I owe it to this community to find out," Sheriff Walter said. "Because if there's somebody that's got away with murder, they need to pay for their crime."
Josh Kezer sued Scott County and former Sheriff Bill Ferrell for wrongful arrest. They settled the case for several million dollars.
Kezer donated $10,000 to the Scott County Sheriff's Department to fund the continuing investigation of the Lawless murder.
Have information on this case?
Contact the Scott County, Mo. Sheriff Dept. at (573) 545-3525 | (573) 471-3530