The Motive

There was a party, there was a UK football player that had been shot.

He's killed on his birthday. I was like, it's who, that can't happen, why him?

No one saw a thing. It's at night, it's dark, nobody knows where the bullet comes from. Nothing is making it any easier.

If you don't have a motive, it's hard to know which direction to go.

We were just never going to know.

But someone knew.

She called me and said, I think I know something about a murder.

We never could find out why Trent was killed because it was something this weird. She became the key.

Would she also become the next victim?

She was scared to death to confront him.

And thus, she was terrified.

And thus, she was terrified.

Someone solves a mystery and then vanishes. I'm Lester Holt and this is dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with the motive.

It wasn't a huge party.

It was just a low-key party with some good friends.

They were about to be seniors, the young men who'd rented the place and hosted the party.

There were four guys that got along extremely well.

They were big men on campus.

In Lexington, Kentucky, if you play for the Cats, you're pretty much a well-known entity.

The birthday boy, 21 years old, was a true rarity, a wildcats walk-on. He had no scholarship, no invitation. He just showed up, tried out for the team, and over three years of hard work, he had earned a starting position.

Here we go bud, go on bud.

Trent Digiro, Gentle Giant.

Everybody called him a big teddy bear. He was the great protector of all of our friends.

The party was sweet, informal, friends snapped pictures and evening doddled into night. It was after midnight when the party wound down.

I think we turned in somewhere between 12 31 o'clock.

Antonio and his girlfriend went to bed outside, Trent and some of the others settled under the light on the front porch. Out there, beyond the streetlights, was impenetrable, dark inside...

We were already in a faint sleep and we heard a loud bang.

One of them must have slammed the screen door, but no.

Well, within ten seconds, you started to hear the chaos outside.

And there was Trent, slumped to one side in his chair under the light.

Trent was bleeding out of his ears and his eyes, and his nose and his mouth, and it was a horrific scene.

Horrific and confusing. That loud bang had been a gunshot, but from where? Somewhere out there, in the dark, had someone intentionally fired a gun at their gentle giant, their teddy bear.

It was just so senseless once you found out why, it was even worse.

Just who was Trent Digiro the target?

We all started hanging out from first grade, six years old. That's pretty neat, yeah.

Trent Turner and Sharon Lee Bollinger were his lifelong friends.

If you were his friend, you were his friend, and that's all that mattered. It wasn't a group for him. Yeah, there was no group, everybody got treated just the same.

Trent was in fourth grade when he started playing football in his hometown of Goshen, Kentucky, just outside Louisville. By high school, he was captain of the team, had lots of friends. So popular. Trent was homecoming king with Sharon Lee, his Queen. It was pretty special.

To be a part of that and to be voted as that, especially with Trent.

When it came time for college, Trent set his sights high He turned down football scholarships to smaller schools.

At one point, he says, You know what? I've just got to know if I can play in the big time in a Division I school.

Mike Digiro is Trent's dad.

So he walked on to the University of Kentucky, which is in the Southeast Conference, which is sure about as big as it got. And he worked real hard to get to where he was.

And Trent's teammates saw that hard work.

Trent had the ability to perform, so while he might have been a walk-on, his performance allowed him to endear himself to others very quickly.

That July, as Trent practiced football and prepared for his senior year, his parents went to Lexington to see him and to talk about his future.

He was trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life, he was talking about maybe going to law school or business school.

Did he talk about his birthday celebration?

We knew he was going to have some kind of a thing and that he was supposed to come home that next day to celebrate birthday with us. And, uh, never made it.

No, and a creeping fear washed over the University of Kentucky football team. Was a killer targeting them, and, if so, who would be next?

When we return, the investigation begins. Everyone talked, but they didn't say anything.

And was there more terror to come?

We were so nervous driving down the street at practice, thinking that there might be someone in the woods who wants to take you out.

Chaos is what there was. On Trent Degiro's front porch, his friends stood over the body and stared out into the dark with a kind of anticipating horror.

A concern that there's more to come. You know, that was one shot. Is there someone who's going to shoot again?

Trent was officially pronounced dead at 3 a.

There were 3 young men in this very yard and they just looked distraught and they were consoling each other.

On the porch, Trent's chair was turned over and Evans could see blood and debris left by the ambulance crew. What was your first idea of what appeared to have happened here?

You know, when I first walked up, I went with what appeared to be the obvious that someone had simply walked from the side of the house, fired the shot and then exited back toward the rear of the house. So this is almost like an alley here, so it's like, well, it would provide concealment.

Take advantage of the surprise.

Yeah, if someone was going to take a shot, that made the most sense.

Believing the shot came from a handgun, police looked for shell casings, and yet, for all they looked, there were none nor any other evidence. Still, Detective Evans figured there was a party that night.

My thought was, as soon as I get them to headquarters and get them separated, someone's going to tell me what happened.

Did they talk?

Everyone talked, but with each and every person that I talked to, they didn't say anything.

Eighty miles away at 5 a.

It's hard to imagine the feeling.

And suddenly, your life doesn't make sense anymore.

It absolutely stops and pivots in an instant. And then it was kind of, you know now what?

And soon everybody knew I couldn't even believe it.

I didn't understand it. Who would murder somebody so wonderful?

It was about then that the first really useful evidence came back from the medical examiner. Bullet fragments were recovered in the autopsy.

Well, the theory about walking up the side of the house and firing the shot.

That goes out the window.

That's probably out the window. The rifle's not designed for a close-range shot.

Officers canvassed the neighborhood. A woman who lived across the street said She awoke to a loud noise and it sounded like it was right outside her house.

We actually took one of our marksmen from the police department and asked him, could the shot be made from here, from this angle? And we literally reenacted that possibility.

Did it make sense the location you found?

It did make sense, we didn't eliminate the possibility that something else could occur, but this looked pretty strong to us.

So, a working theory that Trent was shot from across the street. Ballistics suggested it was a rifle with a particular and uncommon type of barrel. But who owned it? why did he or she shoot Trent?

We were so nervous, we were so uncertain of what happened that night.

But days and weeks and months went by, nothing happened, and over time, the fear eroded, but the investigation went nowhere. Did you ever get to the place where you thought we'll just have to live with this uncertainty for the rest of our lives?

I would say, four years into it, it's like it doesn't make any difference.

Yeah, it's not going to bring it back.

It's not going to bring Trent back, but still, it's. Why did this happen?

You're four years in, five years in, and really no closer to solving it than from the first case day one that will make you doubt yourself.

And then one day, a particular woman happened to see an anniversary story about the unsolved murder of the football player back in Kentucky. A woman who'd once sat in a bar in a fog of love and who now was quite terrified.

This could be the reason that we never could find out why Trent was killed is because it was something this weird.

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I think we'd all kind of resigned ourselves as every year passed, we were just never going to know.

Then, it was about five years after the shooting, a local attorney named Tom Bullock heard from an old friend, a woman. She was nervous, tentative, asked him on the phone Could she reveal what she knew about a crime without saying who she was?

She was extremely evasive, she didn't really want to tell me really anything.

But she kept calling. Finally, she revealed it she was calling about a murder.

She eventually came around to say it was a very high-profile murder.

Where'd your mind go when you heard that?

I knew which one it was.

And then she told him a very strange story happened in a bar, she said. Almost a year after Trent Degiro was killed, she was falling hard for a guy.

They talked about how much they loved each other. Towards the end of the evening, they decided to say, OK, what is the worst thing that you've done? Let's just get to it, you know, that sort of point in the relationship where you say, let me hear the worst.

And her boyfriend said.

And at first, she sort of sloughed it off, you know? Uh, sure, you did.

Didn't believe him.

No, of course not.

But then he started describing it, and you know exactly how he did it.

But she still didn't want to believe it, after all she'd fallen in love with the guy, so she said she kind of buried it. Stayed with him for another year, but now, years later, and single again. She had seen a story in the newspaper about the fifth anniversary of Trent's murder, in which Trent's dad was quoted. Somebody knows what happened.

She started really thinking about it.

And it touched her, but she was so frightened of him. She said she was determined to remain anonymous.

They know each other intimately. She knows how he would react to certain situations.

Yep.

And she was terrified.

He certainly would have remembered his conversations with her.

If you told someone that you committed a murder, you would certainly remember having told them that.

So Tom Bullock went to Detective Evans.

We agreed that whatever information I would give him would be anonymous because, for all we know, the whole thing could have been hogwash.

Well, that's sort of tricky, isn't it? I mean, when you've got somebody making an accusation, you have to be able to talk to that person.

Well, yeah, but at that point, beggars can't be choosers.

So he gave you a name.

So he gave me a name, he gave me the name of Shane Ragland.

Shane Ragland, the woman's ex-boyfriend But who was? He? didn't take long to find out Shane was the son of a wealthy businessman. Just so happened. Shane attended the University of Kentucky at the very same time as Trent Digiro.

Is there any more? Can you get me any more? And ultimately, he started talking about a motive.

And that's when the whole story took a turn into the twilight zone.

He told me that it was concerning Shane Ragland being blackballed from a fraternity.

What did you think when you heard that?

That's a stupid reason to kill somebody.

The fraternity in question was Sigma Alpha Epsilon. SAE Detective Evans looked through SAE's records, and there it was a pledge list with Shane's name crossed off.

And then it hit. This could be the reason that we never could find out why Trent was killed is because it was something this weird.

Evans went to one of Trent's closest friends and asked Had he heard of this guy? Shane Ragland?

And he said, Shane Ragland. And then I could just sort of see it at that point on his face, you know, and I let him tell the story.

A story about an unpleasant little incident. Shane was among the freshmen pledging the SAE fraternity and one day, as they were getting to know the campus,....

They went into Trent's dorm, and Trent was there, and on the wall was a calendar of some sorority girls.

When Shane saw that calendar right away, he pointed to one of the girls pictures and he bragged that he'd had sex with her.

What Shane didn't know is that girl was the girlfriend of the president of the fraternity.

Trent did not like that one bit, got word of the SAE president, and that's when Shane was blackballed.

So at that point, Shane's opportunity to be in that fraternity is pretty much over.

The motives for murder are many and varied, but this seemed absurd. It was 3 years after that slight when Trent was murdered in cold blood. Could it really have festered so long? And if it had, if that was true, they had another problem.

The more that we dug specifically into Shane Ragland, the more the likelihood that he would get word that he was becoming a suspect in this case. And if that happened, this anonymous witness was in real danger.

Evans had no doubt that Shane would remember he told an ex-girlfriend about the murder.

And what's going to keep him from then going up and eliminating her like he did? Trent Desero?

So now Evans understood his mystery witness was trying to be brave, but was quite reasonably frightened. How would he ever convince her to take the ultimate risk?

She was hesitant to do it, and she was scared to death to confront him.

Coming up, setting a trap. Something's been bothering me.

Something that you told me a long time ago.

But who's going to get caught?

It was like, Listen, don't get me involved in this, this guy's dangerous, so until you get handcuffs on him, you can't involve me.

But Evans knew, even if he did arrest the guy, a mystery woman testifying about something an ex-boyfriend told her wouldn't be enough. I can imagine a prosecutor saying, Well, I can't just put her on the stand. His attorney will come along and say she's full of it.

In this particular case, it's, yeah, you know what? That in itself, is not going to do it, nor should it. We're still in a situation where this has to come from him.

Him meaning Shane Ragland Evans told her they had to find a way to get Shane to admit on tape what he did. Otherwise, which jury would buy such a ludicrous motive for murder?

She wasn't very happy with that, obviously.

I should think not.

She asked me if I could spell anonymous.

But he said she came around.

She wanted to do what's right all along, she just would like to do that without getting herself killed doing it.

But she would only proceed on one condition.

I'd have to prove why she was going to be safe, I'd have to prove how we were going to do this. It wasn't enough for me to say, Oh, don't worry, he won't have a gun. We'll look for bulges.

So they came up with a plan. Gave her a cover story to protect her, a fictitious job, a phony address, and then, casually, she resumed contact with Shane. A few emails, a little flirty at times on both ends.

People sometimes hear from their exes, right? I mean, that happens.

And, finally, the sting. She told Shane she'd be passing through the Lexington Airport on business, and he agreed to meet her. It was in this airport lounge, surrounded by undercover cops and FBI, and behind security, to be sure Shane wasn't armed.

Something's been bothering me, something that you told me a long time ago that I wish you never had.

At that point, he paused, and it's like he knew exactly what she was talking about.

Saying Trent's name was deliberate.

We talked to her about that. Let's make sure we know what you're talking about, and we play this for a jury later.

And she brought up what appeared to be the motive that fraternity blackballing. How could you not let somebody do that?

Do you ever think about it?

Because I have to live with it, too, you know.

I mean, do you plan on ever telling anybody about what you did?

Was he sensing something? The cops, knowing they didn't quite have what they needed, not yet held their breath and listened.

He said, Are you setting me up? And that's when things got really scary.

But she kept her cool.

She made him so confident and comfortable that he came back to the subject and left us with what we really needed. At that point, it came out of his own mouth.

They picked him up the next day, took him downtown, asked him, was it true what an old girlfriend was telling them?

We were talking about stuff, but I didn't hear her say Trent, I didn't talk about Trent.

I swear to you guys, I did not do this. But his denials were to no avail. Shane Ragland was charged with murder, bail was set and Shane's wealthy father paid it a million dollars cash. So Shane was free pending trial. Which was a very big problem for the ex-girlfriend who'd turned him in.

We got information from our state police intelligence section that there was a hit-out on this girl. There were phone calls to her friends that would ask, Have you seen her? Do you know where she is these days? Obviously trying to locate her.

And with all that going on, she had to do precisely what she didn't want to do go public, show herself and testify. And the world would know that her name was Amy Lloyd and that she was truly terrifying.

If, in fact, someone had actually told you they had engaged in killing of another person to continue a romantic relationship with them, that seems a bit odd.

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I don't know how a jury could sort of not convict him.

But when it came time for trial, then-prosecutor, now-d.

I think I was like everybody else.

A little incredulous that somebody would let the fact from a fraternity fester for years.

And culminate in killing the person they blamed on blackballing them.

Mind you, they had a bit more than just Amy. They'd found what they believed was the murder weapon, a .243 Weatherby rifle. At Shane's mother's house and at his father's place. They found .243-caliber bullets like these. An FBI expert said testing had linked those bullets to the fragments from the fatal bullet.

Amy Lloyd.

And now, nearly eight years after Trent was killed, here was the one person who could tell the story. Amy Lloyd finally revealed herself publicly, though, because she remains frightened even now we've obscured her image. In this video recorded by the court, the prosecution's star witness talked about that night and Shane, according to her, straight out confessing to murder.

You did not break off the relationship after he said this to you.

No.

You didn't go to the police or anything.

No, I just ignored it, just ignored what he had said to you, right? I forgot about it.

I didn't want to listen to it, I didn't want to hear it, I didn't want to believe it.

Why? Because she was in love with him, she said. During Amy's testimony, the prosecutor played the tape the sting meeting at the airport.

I was angry at you.

That, said the prosecutor, clear as day, was an admission that he did indeed commit the murder. How to defend against that? Shane's father hired a formidable defense team. Guthrie True was one of Shane's lawyers.

If, in fact, someone had actually told you they had engaged in a killing of another person and you continue a romantic relationship with them, that seems a bit odd.

When the defense cross-examined Amy, she knew it was coming had to an attack on her credibility. But could she have suspected how personal it would be? This from True's co-counsel when Amy said she went home with Shane that night after he talked about killing someone.

Weren't you concerned about spending the night with somebody who had admitted to you that he had killed someone else?

I blocked it from my mind.

I didn't want to.

We are trying to challenge the credibility of the prosecution's case, and sometimes that gets uncomfortable.

This is what Amy wrote the day after she said Shane confessed to her to murder.

April the 30th, the very next day you make a notation made love in afternoon great day.

We have, for the sake of decency, left out the most explicit entries made public by the defense that day.

And then May the 3rd was the date that you recorded, you took a bath together and made love.

Yes.

Then it was on May, the 7th, you noted, Great Love decided I would move in with him in July.

Perfect, yes.

So this man had told you that he had killed someone. You made the decision that you were going to move in with him come July.

Yes, so. Was her credibility harmed? There was still, after all, that incriminating airport recording.

You never did ask him, though, if he had shot and killed Trent, Did you?

Why would I, when he had already told me, and if I said to him, Did you kill Trent when he already knew? He told me five years ago?

He would have known that I was there, in fact, to.

To set him up.

To get him to admit it.

Hadn't you rehearsed that?

Rehearsed what?

With Detective Evans and others, don't give him an opportunity to deny that he had shot Trent, No.

Had the defense planted a seed of reasonable doubt, maybe the jury adjourned to think about it, and Trent's friends waited.

I've never been so terrified and so scared in my life.

Your heart's going 100 miles an hour.

100 miles an hour.

And five hours later.

To know that he was guilty, know that this guy who's sitting there, smug and non-remorseful, is guilty and found guilty. And boom, you feel good about that.

Mike Digiro thought it was done.

Okay, this is it, he's going to jail, it's over.

And Amy, she had vanished.

Amy was afraid of Shane Raglin.

And we told her that if she testified, we would do what we could to let her have a new identity. And law enforcement helped her get a new identity. And that new identity would be a problem.

You talk about something that just blows you away. I mean, I can't, even couldn't even grasp that.

Because this case wasn't over, not even close.

It's, oh, wow, here we go all over again.

It was early spring in Kentucky when justice was done for the murder of Trent Digiro. Thanks, his friends knew to a woman who faced up to fear and told her story.

We've never met Amy and I am eternally grateful to Amy for everything that she's done for not only Trent and his family, but for us.

Except there was an appeal. Of course, there was standard procedure, but what happened was not standard at all. A court reversed the jury's decision.

Any comments, Shane?

And Shane Ragland went home on a million dollars bail paid by his dad to wait for a whole new trial.

It's been a long time. Shane, you're going home with your father, right? I don't really look at it like that. I look at the long-term goal of fighting a case against me. That's fake, that's false, and they know I'm innocent.

Was the verdict thrown out? It had nothing to do with Amy Lloyd or her explosive testimony, or the sting tape recorded at the airport. All that was fine. So what was the issue? The bullet that killed Trent?

These are things that we've been arguing for years, frankly, shouldn't have been admitted.

And the court agreed with the defense when this reversal happened. What was that like?

Well, it was a blow, I mean, it was a real blow.

Kind of an irony, isn't it? It was one of the smaller pieces of evidence in my mind. Yes, when what you thought was done gets undone, what does it do to you?

It's, oh, wow, here we go all over again. We've got to go through this yet another time. And the yet another time, we realized pretty quickly, was going to be without some key evidence. Yeah, Amy Lloyd wasn't coming back.

No, Amy Lloyd was not going to testify a second time. That was the deal she made. Testify once, then disappear.

There was no way to bring her back.

And then do it again.

And then do it again, remain seated and come to order.

No option but to make a deal. Shane got to plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter.

And did you in fact, commit the crime?

That you are pleading guilty to? Yes, I did, which meant that at least he now admitted to firing that fatal shot.

And I thought, Well, Plea Bargains, you know, spends another ten years in jail. I'm not too bad with that.

Ten more years wasn't any more years. He got the time he'd already served, five years, plus just three days of house arrest, three more days.

Three more days he walked out of the courtroom, went home, and that really chapped my ass.

It did help a little, said Mike Digiro. When he successfully sued Shane in civil court for wrongful death, the jury awarded him $63 million, later reduced to $33 million.

He's never really accepted responsibility for what he did.

Shane went on with his life and then, a few years later, he was involved in a serious car accident. He's in a wheelchair now and was back in court on an unrelated case. And what about Amy, if that's even her name now?

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be able to tell you anything about her current life at all.

At all. As for Mike, he had a choice he knew he could sink into bitterness. Or so, where do you put your frustrations over this?

Well, what has come from all this is a we consider very positive thing.

The Trent Digiro Foundation has awarded nearly a hundred scholarships to walk-on football players and others at the University of Kentucky and at local high schools. Young people with determination and personal courage, just like Trent. You'll never make any sense of his death, but you can make sense of his life.

We can make sense of what we've done to commemorate Trent, to remember Trent and giving these young folks an opportunity that Trent won't have. That's a whole other story.

And, remarkably, Trent's friends remain exceedingly close even all these years. After that shot in the dark, you feel like family now.

Well, they are family. I think it says so much about what Trent meant to these kids.

Young adults now.

And what they mean to us?

They all get together and laugh and tell stories and imagine.

Who would he have become as an adult? Gosh, I'm sure it would have been magnificent just as he was as a teenager. I'm kind of pissed that I don't get to meet his wife or meet his kids. Or share all the adult things that we've had the opportunity to share with each other. But I think when I get rid of those base feelings, the underlying feeling is just a gratitude. That he was in my life, even for a brief moment in time.

That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.

Thanks for joining us.

Bye-bye.