Town note
The area was known as the Highlands since the 1800s.
about 0:06:01The story
Ryan Carter Poston was born on 30 December 1982 in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, the only son of Jay and Lisa Poston. He took Carter as his middle name out of respect for him. The family moved to the Philippines, and Ryan went to high school in Manila and Geneva before studying at Indiana University, where he completed a triple major in political science, history and geography. He followed his grandfather and his uncle to the Salmon P. Chase College of Law at Northern Kentucky University and then opened his own practice on the fifth floor of the 810 Sycamore building in downtown Cincinnati, concentrating on personal injury and car accident cases. Friends described him as gentle, nerdy and relentlessly hard-working, a man who never raised his voice and who dressed immaculately even when working late. At 29 he was six foot three and about 200 pounds. He lived in a condo in Highland Heights that belonged to his mother and stepfather, and he kept a number of guns there.
She took honours classes, earned straight A's, collected academic trophies and attended the Governor's School for the Arts for vocal music in the summer of 2008. She graduated from Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School in 2009, made the Dean's list at the University of Kentucky in 2010 and finished her psychology degree in three years. She was pretty, confident and competitive, and friends described her as dramatic about relationships. She did some modelling, sang well, and was jealous and persistent when she was rejected. She did not take break-ups well.
He sent a friend request and she accepted it and messaged him first, asking how she knew him and telling him he was gorgeous. They met in person at a Lexington bar on her twentieth birthday, 8 April 2011, and began a relationship that ran hot and cold for the next eighteen months. She spent Thanksgiving 2011 with his family and was given a Michael Kors purse by his mother and stepfather that Christmas. She kept a key to his condo, left toothpaste and moisturisers on his counter, bought a shower curtain and matching bedroom curtains, and they took in a kitten together.
They also broke up repeatedly. When they were apart she turned up at his condo and at his law office unannounced and refused to leave. One night in 2012 he went to stay with his father because she would not go, and she sent him hundreds of texts. He told his step-cousin the situation was getting to restraining-order level. A co-worker said she sometimes called him 50 to 100 times a day, and that when he would not answer his mobile she rang the office reception repeatedly. When he blocked her number in April 2012 she got another phone with a Nashville area code and called him pretending to be a client; he recognised her voice, hung up, and then took her back when she called again. She hacked into his Facebook account to monitor his messages and block women she did not like, and she searched online for a woman he had friended in January 2012. His father and stepfather both told him repeatedly that the girl needed to go, but to be kind about it, and he was too well mannered to throw her out.
On 2 October 2012 Ryan took her to a gun range to teach her how to shoot. She texted a friend that part of her wanted to turn round and shoot him, and told another friend that at the range she wanted to shoot him, kill him and pretend it was an accident.
He had just settled the lawsuit with his former law partner and was in a good mood. She called her mother, who drove 80 miles to the condo at four in the morning and slept on the couch.
Her mother filled the car with petrol, bought her aspirin and told her to go to the emergency room if she felt ill again, then left to visit family in Ohio. Ryan, meanwhile, was at work telling colleagues he had plans with friends that night. In fact he was meeting Audrey Boltz for drinks and pool at 9.30 p.m. At about 8.30 that evening the couple in the condo below, Vernon and Doris West, came home and heard a woman weeping on Ryan's deck. Doris put the time at about 8.45 or 8.50. Moments later they heard two noises like fireworks, then four more loud bangs and something falling to the floor. They heard no argument, no screaming and no fighting. At 8.54 she did, opening with the words, I killed my boyfriend in self-defence. She told the operator the gun was on the bookshelf, gave her name and his, and said she was standing about three feet from his dead body. Asked whether he was definitely dead, she said he was completely dead.
Police found Ryan on the dining room floor with six gunshot wounds, two to the head, one under the arm and three to the torso, all fired from his own .380 handgun. Nothing in the condo was knocked over and a prescription pill bottle stood upright on the table beside him. Four scientists from the Kentucky State Police forensics lab matched the bullets to the gun and found gunshot residue on her hands, and a bloodstain expert concluded that Ryan was sitting at the dining room table when the first shot was fired. The shots had been fired from between six and 30 inches away, most of them from under two feet. She had no marks, no torn clothes and no injuries.
In interview she gave a rambling account. She said Ryan had been screaming at her, had thrown her around the room, had mocked her family and called her a hillbilly, and that her love had turned to hate. She said she shot him, then shot him again because she could not stand to watch him twitch. Between interviews, alone in the room, she danced, hummed and sang Amazing Grace, then sang, I did it, I did it, I can't believe I did it.
Ryan's family said the ruling was a wound that would not heal, but Jay Poston said he did not blame the judge.
At the retrial the prosecution again relied on her own words, her 911 call, her interrogation and her text messages. Her defence argued that she had been sexually and physically abused, that she had never had an orgasm with him, and that the two were deeply flawed people in an unhealthy relationship. A psychologist said she had borderline personality disorder and complex PTSD but knew what she was doing when she fired.