Special Prosecutor Shane Young looks on during an October 2023 status hearing in the Crystal Rogers murder case. Young and his legal team won three convictions in the case, one of the more high-profile cases in Kentucky history.
Special Prosecutor Shane Young, right, hands off documents to Nelson Circuit Judge Charles Simms III during an October 2023 status hearing in the Crystal Rogers murder case. Young, Hardin County's Commonwealth's Attorney, and his legal team successfully prosecuted Brooks Houck and his two accomplices, Joseph Lawson and Steve Lawson, for murder charges in Rogers' death earlier this summer.
In a case that captured the attention of the state, Brooks Houck was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for the murder of Crystal Rogers of Bardstown, his then-girlfriend and mother of five.
Convicted accomplices Steven and Joseph Lawson - a father and son who worked for Houck’s homebuilding business - also were sentenced to 17 and 25 years respectively.
The team who brought them to justice in one of most high-profile cases in Kentucky history was headed by Special Prosecutor Shane Young, Hardin County Commonwealth Attorney.
“Honestly, I’m just glad it’s over,” Young said in an exclusive interview with The News-Enterprise. “I say that, but I’m glad the family got justice, and we were able to help the family, but it’s been three years basically.”
The case would change his daily life, Young said.
“I’m not complaining,” Young said. “That’s what I do for a living, but it went from a five-day-a-week job to a seven-day-a-week job.”
Rogers, 35, was last seen July 3. 2015, and reported missing two days later. Early in the decade-long investigation, Houck, 43, who shared a child with Rogers, was named the main suspect in the case. The case passed through the hands of local Nelson County authorities, the Kentucky State Police, the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation before Young was asked to prosecute it. It was a case Young considered carefully with co-counsel and wife, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Teresa Young.
On a Saturday in the summer of 2023, Young said he his team made a decision before the indictment of Houck whether to take the case or not.
“We said, if we have no witnesses, could we prove this case without any witnesses?” Young said. “We wrote it all down on a white board, and what we had against Brooks and using Brooks’s own statement, we came to the conclusion that we could convict him without any other witnesses with his statement alone.”
Even with that decision, Young said they had a mountain to climb to try a case without much physical evidence, including not finding Rogers’ body, a murder weapon or any DNA evidence.
“You don’t have any physical evidence, but you can still prove cases by circumstantial evidence,” Young said. “There had been a lot of work done on the front end back in 2015. They interviewed a bunch of people, so we started to go back and looking at the interviews and figuring out who was telling what we believed to be the truth.”
What struck Young and his team was the inconsistencies in the statements from the defendants, Steven Lawson and Houck.
“Really Brooks Houck’s statement he gave to (Nelson County Sheriff’s Office lead detective) Jon Snow on July 8, 2015, and the one he gave on July 5, 2015, we were able to go through it and show basically the whole statement was a lie,” Young said.
Brooks Houck was the last person to see Rogers alive, Young said, and other details just didn’t add up.
“He gave statements about what she was doing, like when he went to bed, she was on her phone, playing with her phone,” Young said. “We hired some experts, a place called Celebrite – they’re the ones that worked on Bin Laden, they worked on that Idaho murder case – they looked at it and said there’s no way because her phone was powered down hours before.
“The pitch to the jury was, if he was lying about her coming home, if she didn’t come home with him, he killed her,” Young added. “Because he was adamant she was home.”
The other detail was Rogers’ vehicle, which investigators found on the side of the Bluegrass Parkway.
“We found some witnesses that said the car was out on the Bluegrass much earlier at like 10:30 or 10:20 p.m. One, if her car was gone when she got home, I am sure she would ask where her car was, but two, there would be no way for her to leave the house.”
The defense’s case was based on the possibility of Rogers leaving Houck in the middle of the night, which would have been impossible with her car on the Bluegrass Parkway, Young said.
“If she was going to leave him … one, she wouldn’t have the car to go, and two, how in the hell would she know where to go find her car so she could put her purse and cell phone in it?” Young said.
Young credits the team he assembled in helping get the conviction, including Kentucky State Police detectives Brian Luckett and Tony Hardin.
“Those two are the reason we were able to do this,” Young said. “If it wasn’t for them, this case would have never been indicted. … The reason this got done is because of those two guys.”
In a case that captured the attention of the state, Brooks Houck was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for the murder of Crystal Rogers of Bardstown, his then-girlfriend and
www.thenewsenterprise.com
abcnews.go.com
www.crimewatchers.net
