When three men were convicted for the 2015 murder of a Kentucky mother of five this summer, her loved ones wept with relief. But Crystal Rogers’ body has never been found, and other mysteries continue to loom large over the case that has tormented a small town and intrigued true crime sleuths for more than a decade.
A number of critical questions are still unanswered: How was she murdered? What role did Rogers’ boyfriend, who was just convicted of her murder “as a principal or accomplice,” play in her death? Where are her remains?
Who killed her father, Tommy Ballard, just 16 months after Rogers went missing? And was Ballard’s fatal shooting related to evidence he found during his relentless pursuit of justice for his daughter?
According to recently unsealed court documents and explosive allegations by prosecutors at trial, some answers might finally be coming.
Rogers’ disappearance
FBI
Crystal Rogers in an undated photo (FBI)
Rogers, 35, had been dating Brooks Houck, a successful property developer, for about three years when she disappeared on the night of July 3, 2015. They lived together in Bardstown, Kentucky — once dubbed the ”Most Beautiful Small Town in America” — and shared a then-2½-year-old son, the youngest of Rogers’ five children.
On that Friday evening, Houck, now 43, said the couple hung out at his family’s 245-acre farm with their son and returned home together later that night. Houck was the last person to see her alive, authorities said at the time.
But when asked to provide a timeline for that night and the rest of the weekend, Houck responded with vague answers or said he didn’t remember specific events, according to police interviews played during his trial. Houck told police he last saw Rogers after they returned home at about 11:30 p.m. on July 3. He claimed she was playing games on her phone before he went to bed.
However, a digital forensics expert’s testimony at trial contradicted his account.
Rogers’ phone lost power and shut off at 9:23 p.m. that night, the expert said. It briefly powered on again at 11:57 p.m., before being manually shut down 30 seconds later. It was not turned on again for three days, when investigators rebooted it themselves.
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Houck said he woke up on the morning of July 4 with their toddler, Eli, beside him in bed, with no sign of Rogers. He told authorities he called and texted her a few times, but he wasn’t worried when she didn’t respond because he assumed she had gone to her cousin’s house to “cool down,” which she had done before when the couple argued. However, he previously hadn’t mentioned having a disagreement with Rogers the night she disappeared. According to his phone records, he didn’t text the cousin until Sunday asking if Rogers was with her. She responded that she hadn’t heard from Rogers that weekend at all.
Rogers’ family became increasingly alarmed when she didn’t respond to their calls or texts, including those from her children. On Sunday, July 5, during a chance encounter at a gas station, Rogers’ mother Sherry Ballard asked Houck where her daughter was. When he said he hadn’t seen her since Friday night, she drove to the sheriff’s department and filed a missing persons report.
That same day, Rogers’ Chevy Impala was found abandoned on the side of a nearby highway. Her keys were in the ignition and her phone and purse were in the car, but Rogers was nowhere to be found. Authorities and Rogers’ family members conducted massive searches in the area without finding any other clues about what might have happened to Crystal. As the months passed, her father went out every day looking for her, handing out missing flyers and hanging signs wherever he could. Residents couldn’t miss Tommy Ballard, who wore T-shirts adorned with his daughter’s picture and drove a truck plastered with her missing signs.
Houck, who continues to deny any involvement in Rogers’ disappearance, never participated in a search in all the years his girlfriend was missing. Instead, in a televised interview with Nancy Grace on July 9, 2015, he claimed to be working behind the scenes with the sheriff’s office. But just the day before, he had walked out of a police interview after receiving a shocking phone call and never cooperated with investigators again. That call — from his brother, then a Bardstown police officer — seemed to indicate, prosecutors alleged, that Brooks Houck did not act alone.
The prime suspect
Warren County Jail
Brooks Houck in a mugshot taken ahead of his trial in June 2025
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Prosecutors said Houck’s accounts to police, Rogers’ family and others, and on the Nancy Grace show, were inconsistent and contradictory — starting with his account of a low-key evening on July 3.
In fact, it was a stark contrast to the plans Rogers shared with friends and family that day.
Her longtime friend Kristina Holley testified that Rogers turned down her invitation to get pizza with the kids because Houck had wanted to spend a romantic evening alone with her.
Amanda Greenwell, Rogers’ cousin, told the court about a similar conversation she had with her that day at the local Walmart — the last time, prosecutors said, she was seen alive.
“She said she and Brooks were going on a surprise date. She didn’t know what they were doing or where they were going,” Greenwell testified. “She was very excited.”
Instead, prosecutors claimed, he took her to the Houck family farm, where she was ultimately murdered.
“The surprise date was Crystal’s surprise ending,” the lead prosecutor reportedly told jurors in his closing argument.
Motive for murder
Court documents unsealed on July 15 shed new light on what prosecutors believe was Houck’s motive for killing his girlfriend. Although he told police he was faithful to Rogers and the couple were happy together, witnesses claim he shared that their relationship was rocky and that he’d slept with another woman just a month before Rogers disappeared.
According to witness statements, he also said he didn’t want to share custody or pay child support if they broke up. (After his trial, Brooks Houck’s sister, Rhonda McIlvoy, 38, filed a petition seeking full custody of Houck and Rogers’ son Eli, who has lived with her since 2023.)
Investigators didn’t spend much time speaking with Houck directly. Days after Rogers vanished, his interview with a detective at the sheriff’s office — which authorities later learned Houck had been secretly recording — was abruptly cut short. He answered a phone call from his brother, Bardstown police officer Nick Houck, who advised him to leave. (The police chief later fired Nick Houck for allegedly interfering with the investigation, lying to authorities and failing a polygraph test.)
Houck, who told Nancy Grace he was “100% innocent,” has continued to deny any wrongdoing. But authorities, Rogers’ family and the Bardstown community were suspicious from the start that he was involved in Rogers’ disappearance. Even after he was named as a suspect in October 2015 by the Nelson County sheriff — who said at the time that he believed Rogers was dead — no charges were filed against him. For more than eight years, Houck remained free and had full custody of the son he had shared with Rogers (an arrangement the Ballards unsuccessfully fought in court).
But in September 2023, the FBI, which had been coordinating with state and local law enforcement agencies on the case, announced that Houck had finally been arrested. He was charged with murder and tampering with evidence and pleaded not guilty. His bail was set at a whopping $10 million, which a judge later refused to lower.
The court proceedings in this case have been complex and confusing, with long tentacles to other potential crimes and suspects. Houck was tried alongside Joseph Lawson, the son of his former employee, so prosecutors could demonstrate that the men worked together to commit the crime. However, Joseph’s father, Steven Lawson, was tried separately (and convicted) weeks before them, because a judge ruled that his “wildly inconsistent” and “ever-evolving” grand jury testimony in 2023 would prejudice his son and Houck’s case.Steven Lawson was largely convicted based on his testimony before a grand jury and on the stand in his trial this May that he had coordinated with his son and Brooks Houck to move Rogers’ car. According to prosecutors, Lawson told a grand jury in 2023 that Houck, who had previously hired him for construction projects, promised him more work if he helped move the car on the night of July 3, 2015 — which prosecutors said was evidence of premeditation.
Prosecutors in the Houck-Lawson trial alleged that Joseph Lawson not only knew Rogers had been killed but was involved in disposing of her body — in a gruesome way.
Charlie Girdley, a former employee of Houck’s, testified that Joseph Lawson told him that “no one would ever find” Rogers’ body because he planned to “pull her teeth” and “let the hogs do the rest.” Lawson also mentioned moving her body with a skid steer (a type of loader often used in construction for digging or moving heavy equipment), Girdley said.
Prosecutors said Lawson used Rogers’ own car keys to move her sedan the night she disappeared and Girdley’s testimony directly connected the keys to Houck.
Girdley testified he was picking up his week’s pay from his boss on July 3 when he saw Houck hand over Rogers’ keys to Joseph Lawson. He claimed Lawson told him that he was going to make some repairs on the car. Instead, prosecutors said, Joseph Lawson abandoned the car on the highway, where his father picked him up.
Lawson’s defense attorneys pointed out that Girdley’s hearsay accounts had repeatedly changed in numerous interviews with police and he was an unreliable witness. No physical evidence — DNA or fingerprints — was found linking either of the Lawsons to Rogers’ car, the defense noted.
A widening conspiracy
While prosecutors called Brooks Houck the “leader” of a conspiracy to kill his girlfriend and cover up the crime in a recently unsealed document, and focused on Joseph and Steven Lawson as co-conspirators, they believed there was more to the story.
They also named brother Nick Houck and their mother, Rosemary Houck, as “unindicted co-conspirators.” Neither has been charged with a crime, and prosecutors have not indicated whether they plan to pursue charges against them. They did, however, play a role in the prosecution’s narrative of what really happened to Crystal.
Shay McAlister, a dogged local journalist who has covered the case for years, including in the podcast “Bardstown,” highlighted passages of newly released court documents in which prosecutors allege that Rosemary Houck was involved in a plan to kill Rogers well before her disappearance.
Contractor worker Danny Singleton, a longtime employee of Brooks Houck’s, testified that Rosemary asked him whether he knew someone who could “get rid of Crystal.” She openly expressed her contempt for her son’s girlfriend, he said, according to prosecutors. Another witness told a grand jury that with Rogers gone, Rosemary Houck said her son with Brooks would now be “raised right.”
Prosecutors also suggested that Rosemary had been using a burner phone in the weeks before and after Rogers’ disappearance.
Investigators who obtained Rosemary’s phone through a search warrant said it showed no activity between June 16 and Aug. 4, 2015. During this period, they concluded, she must have been using a different phone — one they never obtained or found records of.
In addition, investigators found several recording devices hidden in Rosemary Houck’s closet. They allegedly contained secret recordings prosecutors said Houck family members made during grand jury proceedings — which Brooks’ sister admitted she had done when she testified at his trial — as well as private conversations between them that prosecutors said in court documents are further “evidence of the conspiracy.”
Now, awaiting sentencing from his jail cell, Houck has been accused by Rogers’ mother and adult children of working with his family to prevent them from recovering financial damages in a wrongful death lawsuit they filed against him after his arrest in 2023.
An attorney for the Ballard family said in a court filing that recorded jail conversations between Houck and his brother, mother, sister and current girlfriend show that he had been working with them to liquidate his assets before the civil lawsuit proceeds.
A judge issued a temporary injunction on July 25 barring him from selling property owned by him and his businesses, pending a hearing in October. According to court filings, he owns more than 80 properties with a tax-assessed value of $8.5 million.
But Crystal Rogers’ disappearance isn’t the only shocking tragedy the Ballard family has had to endure.
Another suspicious killing in the family
FBI
Tommy Ballard in an undated photo
On the morning of Nov. 19, 2016, Sherry Ballard, already overwhelmed by grief and anxiety over what happened to her daughter, received a phone call from her terrified grandson. Rogers’ son, Trenton, told his “Memaw” that he had just seen his grandfather, Tommy Ballard, get shot as they were preparing for a hunting trip.
She called 911 and rushed to the scene on their family property, but her husband was already dead. He had been killed instantly by a single shot to the chest.
According to her grandson, he and Ballard, 54, had just arrived and were still getting organized for the hunt by Ballard’s truck — near the Bluegrass Highway, the same road where Rogers’ car had been found abandoned — when the shot was fired. Police initially described Ballard’s death as a hunting accident, but the FBI would later rule it a homicide.
While Tommy Ballard’s killing remains unsolved, authorities began drawing connections between his death and the murder of his daughter.
During the Houck-Lawson trial last month, an IRS detective — who was brought in to investigate a possible financial motive in Rogers’ murder — testified that Tommy Ballard had posted a tip on Facebook in April 2016 about a white Buick sedan that might be connected to Rogers’ disappearance. Two coon hunters testified they had contacted police after spotting a white Buick LeSabre parked on an access road in a property adjacent to the Houcks’ family farm late on the night Rogers disappeared. The men found it strange, they testified, to see a clean car out there so late on a rainy night.
After Ballard’s social media posting, authorities learned that Anna Whitesides — Houck’s grandmother — owned a white Buick LeSabre. But when investigators arrived at her home with a search warrant, they learned that the car had been sold to a dealership by Whiteside and Brooks’ police officer brother Nick — four days after Ballard posted about the car on Facebook.
In a deposition played during the Houck-Lawson trial, a search-and-rescue dog handler testified that his cadaver dog detected human remains in the trunk area of the Buick when it was finally searched. But investigators found no other evidence that Rogers had been in the car. Prosecutors noted that investigators found only Whitesides’ fingerprints when they searched the Buick, despite Nick Houck having driven the car to the dealership.
During a 2023 court hearing, the special prosecutor publicly drew a link between Rogers’ and Ballard’s murders. He also made a shocking allegation: that the gun used to kill Tommy Ballard may have been owned by Nick Houck.
A brother’s loyalty
Bardstown Police Department
Nick Houck before he was fired by the Bardstown Police Department
Authorities said they tested a rifle that they had purchased from Nick Houck, who sold it using a fake name. It was the same caliber as the firearm used to kill Ballard and “matched four out of the five criteria” that would prove it had fired the fatal bullet, the special prosecutor told a judge in 2023.
(The special prosecutor has also been assigned to a third unsolved case in Bardstown: the fatal shooting of Bardstown Police Officer Jason Ellis in an apparent ambush in May 2013. Ellis’ family has said they believe that all three killings are connected.)
During police interviews and before a grand jury in 2023, Nick Houck could not provide a detailed timeline of his activity the night Rogers disappeared and in the days afterward.
Amber Bowman, Nick Houck’s ex-live-in girlfriend, testified that she called him 15 times between July 3 and 4. When he returned the morning of July 4, he didn’t explain where he’d been. A digital forensics expert testified that he was unable to analyze Nick Houck’s phone data because it was off from July 2 at 11 p.m. until July 4 at 1:47 p.m.
According to Brooks Houck’s defense attorneys, Nick had a reasonable explanation for turning off his phone: he had been arguing with Bowman.
“If you look from a sinister view, you will get a sinister answer,” defense attorney Steve Schroering told jurors in his opening statement on June 25.
By labeling Nick Houck and his mother as “unindicted co-conspirators” in Rogers’ murder — and drawing a connection between him and Ballard’s killing — prosecutors seem to be viewing Nick Houck’s actions through a sinister lens. Whether they plan to charge him or other family members with any crimes remains to be seen.
It took less than four hours of deliberation on the afternoon of July 8 for the Houck-Lawson jury to deliver its verdicts. Houck was convicted of murder as a principal or accomplice to the crime and complicity to tampering with physical evidence; the jury recommended a life sentence with an additional five years for the evidence tampering charge.
The jury found Joseph Lawson guilty of conspiracy to murder and evidence tampering and recommended a sentence of 25 years. The men’s official sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 21. Previously, a jury found Steven Lawson guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with physical evidence; on Aug. 6, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Days after his conviction, Joseph Lawson filed a motion requesting that the judge toss the jury’s guilty verdict or grant him a new trial. Like his father, he argued, he should have been tried separately from Houck. Steven Lawson had previously appealed his conviction as well, claiming that the jurors were confused about the murder conspiracy charge because they did not receive adequate instructions.
But Crystal Rogers’ supporters and loved ones believe justice has been served.
Team Crystal
Bardstown Main Street
Bardstown residents line the street to show their support of Crystal Rogers and her family; the Nelson County Courthouse in Bardstown was lit in pink in honor of Rogers on July 8, 2025
Ten years ago, Tommy Ballard created Team Crystal, a group of Bardstown community members dedicated to finding his daughter. On July 8, they lined the streets in a sea of pink — Rogers’ favorite color — to celebrate the verdicts and welcome Sherry Ballard home from the trial in Bowling Green.
In a Facebook post after the verdicts, Sherry Ballard said attending the last trial “were some of the hardest days of my life,” but Team Crystal and the town have been “the pillars that kept me supported.”
“[W]hen I came back to Bardstown I was so overwhelmed by the support that I received,” Ballard wrote. “I can’t say thank you enough to everyone in this community that stood by me and supported me through all these years.” Team Crystal said their support will continue until Rogers is found and her father’s killer is caught.
Investigators and the Ballard family are now focusing on their search for Tommy’s killer. Authorities have conducted extensive searches for Rogers in the years since her disappearance, including at least four at the Houcks’ family farm, property belonging to Whitesides and two by Nick Houck, and a Bardstown subdivision that included property being built by Brooks Houck. So far, none of the searches have found anything of evidentiary value.
The FBI is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information regarding his death, and the Ballard family has increased its own reward to $50,000.
“We hope in the near future there will be other co-conspirators charged,” Team Crystal wrote in a Facebook post the day the verdicts were read. “Crystal & Tommy we felt your presence. We never gave up and we will NEVER give up. Tommy was the driving force and lost his life for Crystal. … May God lead us to Crystal and see Justice for Tommy.”Don’t forget to sign up for the Suspicious Circumstances newsletter, our inside guide to the biggest unsolved mysteries, white-collar scandals, and grim cases of today. Click here to subscribe.
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