By Forrest Berkshire, Editor
Sunday, August 16, 2020 at 12:23 pm
FBI Louisville’s violent crimes division is leading the Crystal Rogers investigation, a spokesman for the office said Thursday.
The FBI has a range of crime classifications it covers, including public corruption, terrorism, civil rights and other federal offenses.
Rogers has been missing since July 2015 and is presumed dead, but murder alone does not typically fall under federal jurisdiction.
“Murder is not typically a federal violation, so we do need a federal nexus (kidnapping),” FBI Louisville spokesman Timothy Beam said in an email to The Standard Thursday.
The Bureau also investigates kidnappings.
Beam said Louisville’s Violent Crime squad is handling the Rogers case.
“The FBI’s top priorities are national security threats, but the Bureau also continues to play a key role in combating violent crime in big cities and local communities across the United States,” the agency says on its website under its “What We Investigate” section. “The FBI concentrates on crime problems that pose major threats to American society. Significant violent crime incidents such as mass killings, sniper murders and serial killings can paralyze entire communities and stretch state and local law enforcement resources to their limits.”
Rogers is listed on the FBI’s website under kidnappings and missing persons. The Bureau lists Tommy Ballard, Rogers’ father, as a “related case” under the seeking information and law enforcement assistance section of its website. Ballard was killed Nov. 19, 2016, when he was shot once in the chest as he prepared to go hunting with his grandson.
Beam also gave some insight into the size and scope of the operation last Thursday that included up to 150 law enforcement personnel.
“I would call it a large operation,” Beam said.
He said the IRS, U.S. Attorney’s Office and Kentucky State Police are partners in the task force, and the FBI brought in “a number” of special agents and professional staff from other field offices, including the critical incident response group, criminal investigation division and laboratory to assist.
The FBI has 56 field offices, or divisions, in the United States and Puerto Rico. Beam did not elaborate on specific regions they tapped for the task force, but The Standard hears from sources familiar with the operation that some personnel came from as far away as Florida and Texas.
Beam declined to answer some specific questions on “tactics and strategies involved in the case,” such as how long the operation took to plan and coordinate. But he noted that the FBI had been “involved with the case for over a year prior to the searches being carried out.”
The level of FBI involvement in the case has been hard to gauge over the years, but there has been some assistance since its early days. The first public acknowledgement of the Bureau’s involvement was in 2015, when an FBI specialist administered a polygraph to Nick Houck and told him that it indicated he was lying when asked if he knew Rogers’ location.
Nelson County Sheriff Ramon Pineiroa said the Bureau had been involved for at least 19 months. It was an FBI evidence recovery team that assisted in recovering human remains found July 23 buried a few miles away from the Houck family farm, where Rogers is last believed to have been seen alive.
Beam did not respond to a question as to what role the discovery of human remains two weeks prior to the raids played. No information about the identity of the remains had been publicly released as of Thursday afternoon.
The Aug. 6 searches seemed to focus on three locations, the home of Brooks Houck, his brother Nick’s home and the family farm. All three of those locations have been searched in the past. Typically, in order to get another search warrant, law enforcement needs to demonstrate to a judge there is new information they hope to find.
“We have to establish there is probable cause the items we are searching for are in the locations to be searched,” Beam said. “Beyond that, I would not want to comment.”
While the locations had been previously searched, the past efforts were led by local agencies and the Bureau was brought in, in part, because of its more extensive resources and forensic expertise.
“New and emerging forensic techniques, unavailable when these investigations first began, contributed to the events of this past week,” the task force said on its website.
While the searches of the homes and farm seemed to wrap up at the beginning of the week, task force personnel were still on the ground in Nelson County as late as Thursday, interviewing area residents.
The task force has set up its own website, CrystalRogersTaskForce.com, where updates and other information on the case is available.
The site also contains information on other unsolved crimes in Nelson County, including the 2013 murder of Bardstown Police Officer Jason Ellis, the 2014 double-slaying of Kathy and Samantha Netherland and the November 2016 homicide of Rogers’ father, Tommy Ballard. Those cases have not been officially announced as part of the Rogers task force, but Beam said the Bureau is also receiving information possibly related to them.
“We added these cases to the website because we received tips relating to those cases and wanted to show the public that we are following all possible leads,” he said
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