1804
The town was built on a 3,000-acre tract of land called Falling Springs, purchased in 1804 by Solomon Brandenburg.
about 0:05:29The story
Brandenburg, Kentucky lies in Meade County, about fifty minutes from Louisville, in the part of the state the town motto calls the heartland of Kentucky. Rhonda Sue Warford was nineteen in the spring of 1992. Born in September 1972, she had graduated from Iroquois High School and still lived with her parents, Mary and her father, at East Whitney Avenue in Louisville.
On the evening of April 1, 1992, at about 7.30, Rhonda walked down the street to the Kroger grocery store. On the way back she told her mother that an old, dirty-looking man had followed her, shouting that he wanted to marry her and have children with her. A few hours later, at about midnight, she took her mother's house keys and said she was going down the street for a little while. She was wearing red sweatpants, a dark blue shirt, white canvas tennis shoes and a red and black UNLV jacket.
She did not come back. Her mother sat up all night; at daybreak on April 2 she called the Louisville police. Mary and other relatives made a flyer with her photograph and description and distributed it to shops and offices in the area the next day.
On April 5 a couple looking at property on Dead Horse Hollow Road, near Kentucky 823 outside Brandenburg in rural Meade County, saw what they took for a mannequin in a field. It was Rhonda, face down. She had been stabbed eleven times in the upper body and her throat had been slashed from ear to ear. There was no sexual assault. She had defence wounds on her right hand and index finger. Stab wounds at the base of her skull severed her brain stem, and another pierced her lung. A detective said satanic symbols had been crudely tattooed on her body: an inverted cross on her left breast and an anarchy symbol on her back. Three hairs were found in her right hand, two of them grey, and fingernail scrapings were taken.
He said he had last seen Rhonda on March 27 or 28, when he spent the night at her house. He admitted practising modern Satanism but said it forbids blood sacrifice and killing, and admitted tattooing the cross on her chest months earlier at her request.
Officers also took a washcloth soaked in blood and a broken cup, which the police called a chalice. None of the knives could be linked to the murder, and a tyre cast from beside the body did not match any vehicle the two men had access to.
Detective Mark Handy, a Louisville detective with a reputation for closing murder cases, took over. The two men were given polygraphs, told they had failed, and interrogated at length without any recording. Sheriff Joseph Greer placed a pistol on the interrogation table and told them that bad things could happen to people who did not cooperate. Each was told the other was implicating him.
Her mother said the sweatpants were hers and had been freshly laundered that night.
Satanic ritual was the motive, and the Commonwealth's attorney, Kenton R. Smith, sought the death penalty on the aggravating ground of murder for other profit, which he said meant psychological gratification.
The prosecutor used a plastic model of a skull to show the brain stem injury and said the men had waited a month to give their alibi. Remsburg testified, but the defence produced a tape in which she conceded she had not used the term brain stem until the police said it.
The Innocence Project took the cases in 2009 and sought DNA testing of the hairs and fingernail scrapings, offering to pay for testing at a private accredited laboratory. The fingernail scrapings could not be found.
The Commonwealth refused to release the evidence. The state Supreme Court affirmed.
His ruling questioned Detective Handy's truthfulness, noted that Handy had lied in other cases, and found that Sheriff Greer had conspired with Remsburg to manufacture her statement. Greer fed her non-public details, including the brain stem wound. Caps had been given shock probation a week after his statement. The time of death had been changed from April 4 to April 2 once the alibis were known, and a witness who saw Rhonda alive in Brandenburg on April 3 had been ignored, with the sighting never recorded in a police report. Detectives never obtained the Chevron surveillance video, which was taped over a week later.
Rhonda Sue Warford is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Louisville.