Isaac Apodaca Sword Trial: Kiara McCulley Testifies She Believed He Was an Archangel, Ryan Cooper Convicted in Lacambria Toomer's Murder

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, you're listening to Daily Crime Injustice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it is Thursday July sixteenth, twenty twenty six. Before we get going, a word of warning. Today's show deals with the killing of a young woman, a mother who vanished, and the alleged abuse of a child. I'm not going to be gratuitous about any of it, but if that's not where you are today, look after yourself, and if any of it lands close to home, I'll have some resources for you at the end. Three stories. In Santa Fe, the star witness in the sword murder trial is the woman who admitted swinging the sword, and what she told that jury about the man sitting across the room from her is one of the strangest accounts of control I've ever had to read. Then to Georgia, where a jury took less than an hour to decide a man murdered the mother of his child in a case with no body, no crime scene, and no confession.

1:04 And we'll finish in Florida, where a firefighter and his wife are accused of doing something to their adopted daughter that the arresting officer noted was especially hard to square with his day job. This is daily crime and justice. We start in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I'm gonna say her name first, because in a case this strange, it's easy to lose the person at the center of it. Grace Jennings was twenty one years old. She grew up in Santa Fe. In October of twenty twenty two, she was going through a breakup and needed somewhere to stay for the night. She went to the home of people she knew. She never left. She was killed in a detached garage with a three foot sword. We brought you the opening of this trial on Monday, so you know the shape of it. Isaac Appadaca, thirty years old, is charged with murder and conspiracy. And here's the thing that makes this case unusual. Nobody on either side says Isaac Appadaca swung that sword. Everyone agrees his girlfriend did. Kiar McCully has admitted it. She pleaded guilty. The state's whole theory is that Appadaka is what the prosecutor called, the architect, not the killer, the person who built the conditions that made the killing happen and then talked someone else into doing it. Appadaka has pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent, and that presumption is not a formality. It's the whole ballgame in a case built on words. On Tuesday, the

2:34 state put its star witness on the stand, Kiara McCully, twenty three years old, the woman who did it. She's there because of a deal. She pleaded guilty to second degree murder and conspiracy, and the terms require her to testify against Appadaka. She has not been sentenced yet. That happens after this trial ends, and prosecutors have agreed to recommend thirty years. I want you to hold on to that because it's the first thing any competent defense attorney is going to say about her, and they'd be right to say it. This is a witness with a powerful reason to give the state what it wants. That doesn't make her a liar. It means you weigh it. So what did she say. She said that by the time Grace Jennings died, she believed she was dating the archangel Gabriel.

3:22 That is not a figure of speech. She testified that Appadaca told her he was Gabriel, and at first she didn't believe it, and then he started telling her things about herself that she thought nobody knew. And here's the line that stuck with me, because it isn't the line of someone spinning a story. She said, maybe part of her wanted it to be real. She testified that he told her he'd founded a secret organization called Ghost of Vigilante Outfits. She said that killed bad people, predators, rapists, drug users, people somebody had decided the world was better off without. She said he gave her a tattoo marking her as part of it. She said he told her he'd already killed forty people in its name, and she said that she wanted, more than anything to belong somewhere her words, she wanted to be a hero to somebody.

4:13 None of that is real. There is no ghost, There were no forty bodies. It was, according to the State, a fiction built for an audience of one. And around that fiction, the State says, was a lot of very ordinary control. McCully testified that in twenty twenty, Appadaca told her to start selling sex, and that when she said she needed time to think, he told her he already had clients lined up for her. She testified about an argument in April of twenty twenty two that left her covered in bruises with a broken thumb, and she said she went back to him anyway. That is the part of this case that isn't exotic at all. Strip out the archangels and the secret societies, and what you have is a nineteen year old with a ninth grade education and no job and nowhere else to go, and an older man who figured out exactly which levers to pull.

5:04 Then came the night. She testified that Appadacca brought Grace to the house and pressured her to kill her, telling her she could rank up in ghost. Days earlier, McCully had bought a sword on Amazon. She admitted that on the stand, she said that when she bought it she believed the world was ending. Asked to describe the weapon, she said it was extremely sharp and that it was beautiful if you looked at it as art. I'm going to let that one sit exactly where it is. She testified that Appadacca never touched Grace, that he handed her the sword, and prosecutors asked her what she understood that to mean. She said it meant it was time and that she had no choice, and that he told her he would hurt her mother if she didn't do it.

5:49 She said, she closed her eyes and swung. She said he stood there telling her to finish it, over and over, and then he walked out of the room. And then she said, the thing that will be in that jury's head when they deliberate, I finished the job as he would reference it. The medical examiner has already testified about what was done to Grace Jennings more than a dozen stab wounds, injuries to her hands, which tells you she tried some of the wounds inflicted after she was already gone. I'm not going to catalog it beyond that because you don't need the inventory to understand the gravity. What was done to that young woman went so far past killing her that the first officers on scenes struggled to describe it. Now, the defense and they had a real cross examination here, because their entire case is that the state has this backwards.

6:40 Jay Nyer has told this jury that Kiara McCully butchered Grace Jennings and that now they want to blame the man who never touched the sword. He's argued that McCully was the one filled with rage that Appadaca was the gullible one that the ugly text messages are ugly, but they are not the same thing as killing somebody on cross They went after her memory. They asked how much she'd had to drink that night, and they got her to admit that after her arrest she frequently saw apodaca and mirrors. She tried to explain that, said she thought it might be part of her spiritual beliefs and insisted she knew he wasn't actually there. So here's the question this jury actually has to answer, and it's harder than the headlines make it sound. If you build a fake world around a vulnerable person over a period of years, and you hand them a weapon inside that fake world and they use it, who killed the person on the floor.

7:33 The law has an answer, and the answer is that you can be a murderer without ever touching the weapon. But the state still has to prove it out of text messages and the testimony of a woman who has every reason to say what they want. One more thing, and this is the part I want you to hear. Clearly, there has been testimony in this trial from prosecutors and from a witness about a prior relationship between Grace Jennings and the defendant offered up as the root of mccully's jealousy. Grace's mother has disputed that any such relationship existed. We're not going to treat a contested claim about a dead young woman as fact on this show, and honestly, it doesn't change the legal question at all. What matters isn't what was true about Grace. What matters is what Kiara McCully was told and who told her. This trial is nearly over. Testimony and closing arguments were expected to run through the middle of this week, which means as you're hearing this, that jury may already have the case or may already have come back. We'll bring you the verdict when we come back. A jury in Georgia took less than an hour to convict a man of murder, no body, no crime scene, four years of a mother asking where her daughter is, Welcome back. Lecambria Tumor was twenty three

9:06 years old. She lived in Albany, Georgia. She had a little boy. In August of twenty twenty two, she disappeared and she has never been found. And on Tuesday, a jury decided it knew exactly what happened to her. This is new to the show, so let me lay it out. The last person known to be with La Cambria was Ryan Cooper, twenty eight years old, the father of her child. He told investigators he dropped her off at a truck stop, and investigators determined that was not true. Her family reported her missing eleven days after she was last seen, and then for a long time, nothing happened that looked like justice. Cooper was arrested in May of twenty twenty three. He was not indicted until March of this year. That is nearly three years in a jail cell with no indictment and three years of a family with no answers. And I want to be fair here, in secutors were building a case out of almost nothing physical. And they said so at the time because here's the problem the state had.

10:07 There is no body, There is no burial site, there is no crime scene because nobody can tell you where the crime happened. There is no confession. What there was was data, text messages between the two of them that simply stop. On August fifteenth, cell phone records showing her phone's last ping, GPS records from the trucking company Cooper drove, for which let prosecutors put his truck on a map hour by hour from just before midnight on the fifteenth until he rolled into Savannah the next night. Prosecutors also had blood evidence from an earlier incident and a witness who told investigators Cooper admitted shooting her and they had history.

10:47 This is the part that matters, and it's the part that always matters. The year before la Cambria disappeared, prosecutors say there was an incident in Cooper's Oudi where he beat her and pointed a gun at her. A salon owner testified that Lecambria came banging on her locked door, panicking, begging to be let in, wearing a bra, tights, and one shoe, one shoe. She'd run out of that car so fast she left a shoe behind. The salon owner said she thought about her own daughters and she let her in. Investigators later found a bullet hole and blood inside that car, and DNA testing on blood from the headliner came back consistent with Lacambria's family line. There was a whole separate aggravated assault case for that. The judge refused to let prosecutors try it together with the murder, so this jury never heard it as its own case.

11:38 The defense attorney Benjamin Davis made the argument you'd expect and it isn't a stupid argument. He told the jury this case was about jumping to a conclusion. He attacked the state's blood experts, called them paid, and pointed out that expert testimony has put innocent people in prison before. That's true, it has, And he kept coming back to the simplest fact in the room. They say she's dead, and they can't show you where she is, and it took them years to get here. The district attorney Gregory Edwards told the jury Cooper was one hundred percent guilty of everything in front of them. He said, Cooper shot La Cambria to send a message, and he made the point that I think actually decided this case. Cooper could have left her anywhere in the state of Georgia, and by putting her somewhere nobody would find her. He tried to erase the very existence of La Cambria tumor. The jury was out for less than an hour. They convicted him of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and concealing the death of another less than an hour for a case with nobody. Now, look, I'm gonna be honest with you.

12:46 Fast verdicts make me a little uneasy as a general matter, because I want twelve people to actually labor over a man's life. But I've also read what that jury sat through for a week, and I understand it. When the last text stopped cold, and the phone stops and the truck starts moving, and the man's own story about the truck stop falls apart, there isn't a lot left to argue about. Here's what a conviction doesn't do. It doesn't bring le Cambria home. Her mother, Melassia Thornton Caldwell, said it about as plainly as a person can. She said, she's still hurting on the inside. Even though they got the justice part. She said, she doesn't have the closure part because she still doesn't know where her daughter's remains are.

13:28 That's the whole thing, isn't it. We talk about closure like a verdict delivers it. It doesn't A jury can tell that woman who killed her daughter. Twelve strangers cannot tell her where to go and sit down and talk to her. Ryan Cooper has not been sentenced yet. And the one person who knows where lecambria tumor is is the one person with no reason left to say he has been convicted. He has nothing to trade. If there was ever a moment where telling the truth might have bought him something, that moment is behind him. Now. Lecambria has a son. He was a baby when she vanished. He is going to grow up in a world where his mother's killer is a matter of public record and his mother's grave is not. And when we come back, a fire rescue lieutenant in Florida, an adopted twelve year old and a bedroom that investigators say had no means of escape. That's a phrase with a particular weight when you know what the man does for a living. Welcome back.

14:37 This last one is about a child who is alive. And I want to say that at the top because it's the only piece of good news in the story. Coral Springs, Florida, February of this year. A twelve year old girl walks up to the school resource officer at her school and tells him what happens at her house at night. She says she gets locked in her bedroom every night. She says, there's no bad bathroom, so she has accidents on the floor and in the morning she has to clean it up with her own clothes. That report went to the Department of Children and Families and then to the police. And here is what investigators say they found when they went into that house. A bedroom with a lock on the outside of the door, a window that had been restricted so it wouldn't open. Investigators used a phrase in their paperwork that I haven't been able to shake, no means of escape inside, an air mattress on the floor, almost no furniture, three outfits, no toys, no personal items, nothing that says a kid lives here.

15:37 Officers say the room smelled of urine, and her clothing was stained in a way consistent with exactly what she described. And then they looked at the other bedrooms. Because there were seven children in that house, six of them were the couple's biological kids. Their rooms were clean, properly furnished, full of toys and personal things. One child in that house was adopted. One child in that house slew on an air mattress behind a door that locked from the hallway. I'll let you do that math. Her parents are Joel Konert forty four and Jennifer Konert forty five. And Joel Kohnert was a lieutenant with Broward's Sheriff of Fire Rescue, on the job since twenty ten, fifteen years a firefighter and paramedic. Now, I want to be careful and fair here.

16:23 These are allegations. Both of them have pleaded not guilty to everything. They have not been convicted of anything, and they get the same presumption of innocence i'd want for you or for me. But I have to tell you about the note in the arrest paperwork because the officer who wrote it saw exactly what I saw. Joel Knerd acknowledged to investigators that there were safety concerns with the girl's door and window being secured so she couldn't get out, and the officer wrote that this was particularly concerning given his professional background, where he would reasonably be expected to recognize the risk of restricting a child's ability to ex in a room during an emergency. That is the politest possible way of saying it, So let me say it the other way. This is a man whose entire career is built on one principle. People have to be able to get out. That's the job. That's what the smoke alarms are for, and the egress windows and every fire code in the state of Florida. He has spent fifteen years pulling people out of rooms they couldn't escape, and prosecutors say he built one at home. The other details are worse. Investigators say she was made to bathe outside in a swimsuit every morning, whatever the weather. That she wasn't allowed at family meals or to play with her siblings, That she was called names and told distressing things about her biological parents, including details about substance abuse and death, which she believed was done on purpose to hurt her.

17:52 Prosecutors say she was made to write Bible verses as punishment, and on one occasion, made to tread water for forty five minutes. The defense has said this is a misunderstanding of the family's religious beliefs. I'm going to be honest with you about how I handle that. I'm not in the business of telling anybody how to raise their kids or what to believe, and religious families get the same benefit of the doubt as anybody else. But a judge in bondcourt back in the spring said the thing that needed saying. He said, their beliefs may not line up with other peoples in that courtroom, and that's fine. But a twelve year old locked in a room for years, forced to urinate in it and clean it up with her clothes is not a religious issue. That's something else.

18:36 There's a playbook for this, and the playbook is to reach for the most sympathetic word available and hope it covers everything. It doesn't cover this. So what happened Monday? The Kohnerts were back in front of Judge Frank Ladee, and the charges have grown. They'd already been facing aggravated child abuse. Now prosecutors have added neglect of a child plus four counts of contributing to the del delinquency of a minor, and those four counts involved the biological children. The Assistant state Attorney Taren Stein told the court. The new charges came after investigators did forensic interviews with the other kids in that house, and those interviews backed up the girl's account of what life was like inside. Think about that for a second. The corroboration came from the children who had the toys, and then Stein told the court the detail that made me put the page down.

19:29 Investigators determined that girl had not been taken for any medical care in six years six years, and that she'd been limping for at least three months. She has since had surgery on both of her hips. She was in pain visibly for months in a house with a paramedic in it. Here's where it lands. The judge kept them both out on the same one hundred thousand dollars bond they'd already posted, with GPS monitors and no contact with the girl. Their attorneys argued the bond was already large and that nothing had changed enough to move it, and in fairness, that's how bond is supposed to work. It is not a punishment. It's there to make sure you come back to court. The state didn't win that one, and the state didn't fight it that hard. Jennifer Kohnert spoke briefly. She told the judge her husband lost his firefighting job, that she'd been a stay at home mother, and that she's now working about fifteen hours a week at a Walgreens for fifty cents above minimum wage. And I'm not going to pretend that isn't a real consequence for a real family, or that their six other children aren't now living through something they didn't ask for. But I keep coming back to the kid who is not in the family photo, adopted at two months old, two months she was a baby handed to these people. And the state's case is that for the last three years of her childhood, the house she lived in had a hallway lock on her door and a bathroom she wasn't allowed to use. And she got out not because a neighbor called, not because a doctor caught the limp, because

21:02 she wasn't taken to one. She got out because a twelve year old girl decided to walk up to one adult at her school and tell the truth. That is the entire margin here. One kid, one cop in a school hallway, one conversation. That's not a system working. That's a child saving herself and the system arriving afterward to take notes. There's a motion pending to terminate the Kohnertz parental rights trial is currently set for the end of August. Will follow it. That's the show. If today's episode did something for you, share it, send it to one person who follows these cases. The way you do word of mouth is how this show grows and it is very nearly the only marketing we've got. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment, because I want an answer to this one. In Santa Fe, a jury has to decide whether a man who never touched the sword is a murderer. Where's your line? A fake world around someone and hand them a weapon inside it? Are you the killer?

22:04 Or are you just a person who said terrible things to somebody who made her own choice. Tell me on Spotify. You can leave a comment on YouTube too, And before we go, the names. Grace Jennings was twenty one years old, she needed a place to stay for one night. Lecambria tumor was twenty three, and she has a son, and four years later, her family still cannot bring her home. And a twelve year old girl in Coral Springs who I won't name, walked up to an adult at her school and told the truth and got herself out. She's the only one of the three still here to tell it. That counts for something. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media until tomorrow.

22:46 Do better. For the record, Isaac Appadaka has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. His trial is ongoing as of our recording on Wednesday, July fifteenth, and testimony and closing arguments were expect to run through midweek, so a verdict may have been returned by the time you hear this. Everything attributed to prosecutors, to the defense, or to Kiara McCully reflects testimony and argument made in court not proven fact. McCully testifies under a plea agreement that requires her cooperation and under which prosecutors have agreed to recommend a thirty year sentence, and she has not yet been sentenced. Testimony in the trial has described a prior relationship between Grace Jennings and the defendant. Grace Jennings's mother disputes that any such relationship existed, and we have not treated it as established.

23:40 Ryan Cooper has been convicted of malice, murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, and concealing the death of another. He has not yet been sentenced, and he retains the right to appeal. La Cambria Tumor's remains have never been recovered. Accounts of when she was last seen very court TV reports August thirteenth, twenty twenty, while local reporting places her last known text and phone activity on August fifteenth. The exact list of counts has been reported slightly differently across outlets, and her mother's name appears in reporting as both Melassa Thornton Caldwell and Melissa Thornton. Joel and Jennifer Coonert have pleaded not guilty to all charges and are presumed innocent. Nothing alleged against them has been proven. Accounts of Joel Koonert's employment differ.

24:28 Court TV reports he lost his job, while the Broward Sheriff's Office has described him as on administrative leave without pay. The trial date has been reported as August thirty first, with a further hearing set for August twentieth. We do not name the child in this case. Our reporting today drew primarily on Court TV, corroborated across additional local and wire outlets. This episode discusses violent death, domestic violence, and the alleged abuse of a child. If you are worried about a child, the Child Help National child Abuse Hotline is one eight hundred four two two four four five three. If you are in an abusive relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is one eight hundred seven nine nine seven two three three