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PAGE 4 - THE HOMETOWN PRESS
COMMunITY
May 3, 2012
Cold case cracked Chambers County sheriff’s deputies Brad Moon and Sherry Willcox never stopped looking for Krystal Jean Baker’s killer By SCOTT REESE WILLEY Hometown Press Chambers County sheriff's deputy Sherry Willcox remembers the phone call 10 years ago that eventually led Kevin Edison Smith to confess to killing 13year-old Krystal Jean Baker in 1996. Willcox was working for the sheriff's department as a secretary in the criminal investigation division in 2002 when a private investigator called. He wanted some information on the unsolved murder. Willcox retrieved the case folder from the captain's office and gave the private investigator the information he was seeking. Then she began to thumb through the inch-thick folder, studying the photos and reading the notes collected by the investigating officer, Brad Moon. “The more I read the more interested I got in the case,” recalled Willcox, who had graduated from Anahuac High School in 1998. “It was so sad what happened to that little girl. The murder had never been solved.” Her eyes welled with tears as she looked at the photographs of the smiling teen with sandy blond hair. Anger welled up in her as she scrutinized other photos — the ones taken beneath the Trinity River Bridge where Krystal’s body had been found six years earlier. “I was just a secretary at the time but I kept thinking I wish there was something I could do to help solve this case,” recalled Willcox, now 33. “It was just one of those cases that grabbed your heart, you know, the murder of a 13-year-old girl. I was hoping that by reading the case something might jump out at me, something the investigator had overlooked maybe.” The following year, in 2003, Willcox earned her criminal justice degree at the University of Houston and took the oath as a sheriff's deputy. She was assigned to the juvenile investigation division and served as the department's evidence collection and storage officer. In the months since talking to the private investigator, Willcox had not forgotten the photographs of Krystal Jean Baker, and now educated in criminal justice she reviewed the case file again.
Scott Reese Willey photo
Chambers County Sheriff’s deputies Brad Moon, an investigator, and Sherry Willcox, an evidence officer, never gave up searching for Krystal Jean Baker’s murderer. Their determination paid off in 2010 — 14 years after the 13-year-old girl’s body was found beneath the Trinity River Bridge – when Willcox resubmitted DNA evidence Moon had collected at the murder scene to a state crime lab. The DNA led to the arrest and conviction of Kevin Edison Smith last week. “I started talking to other officers about the case,” she remembers. “I was hoping they might think of something that had been overlooked during the initial investigation.” But nothing had been overlooked. “Deputy Moon had collected every shred of evidence and had followed every possible lead,” she recalled. “Nothing had changed. There were no new leads, no one to talk to.” ‘We never forget’ Moon, who started working for the Chambers County Sheriff's Department in 1998 as a jailer, was the initial investigator assigned to the Krystal Jean Baker murder case. After earning his peace officer’s badge from the Liberty County Sheriff’s Department's Law Enforcement Academy in the early ‘90s, Moon went to work for the Chambers County Sheriff’s Department’s investigation division. He left the department in 2000 to work elsewhere when a new sheriff took office, but returned in January 2005 when that sheriff was not re-elected to office. Willcox made a beeline for Moon’s office shortly after he returned. “She said she wanted to talk to me about one of my cases, the
Chambers County Sheriff Joe LaRive talks with Monetta Jeanie Escamilla, Krystal Jean Baker’s mom, during a press conference in October 2010 immediately after Kevin Edison Smith had been arrested and charged with the rape and murder of the 13-year-old Texas City girl.
Krystal Jean Baker, at left, was 13 years old when Kevin Edison Smith saw her walking down a highway in Texas City on March 5, 1996. He picked her up and later raped and killed her before dumping her body beneath the Trinity River Bridge in Chambers County.
Krystal Jean Baker murder, and I said, ‘Sure, sit down, two heads are better than one,” Moon recalled. Sgt. Moon remembered the case well. Krystal’s murder had been the first homicide Moon had ever investigated. “We never forget a case, especially the unsolved cases,” says Moon, “It’s always there, in the back of your mind somewhere. I probably thought of the case at least once a week for the past 14 years.” Sitting in his office 14 years later, Moon remembered how frustrated he felt when he couldn’t discover the little girl’s identity right away. “The faster we find out who she was the better chance we had of catching the murderer,” he explained. He had sent out a description of the girl to every police department and sheriff’s department in the state shortly after the young teen’s body had been discovered on the afternoon of March 5, 1996. But weeks went by and no agency had claimed her. Then Moon got a call from the Texas City Police Department. They had a missing girl who they had listed as a runaway that matched the description Moon had sent them. Krystal had last been seen alive by her grandmother on the afternoon of March 5, 1996. They'd gotten into an argument and Krystal had left her home in Texas City to go to a friend’s. But she never made it there. Her mom contacted the Texas City Police Department. Officers there listed the little girl as a runaway, because she had left her grandmother's house in a huff. “We knew she wasn’t a runaway,” said Krystal’s mother, Monetta Jeanie Escamilla. “She didn’t need to runaway. She knew she could have come back to her grandmother’s at any time. We knew something had happened to her.” But the police refused to listen to Monetta’s pleas, and listed her daughter as a runaway. Then officers received Moon’s description of a murdered girl whose body had been found beneath the Trinity River Bridge in Chambers County the same day Krystal had supposedly run away. The body was Krystal’s. The investigation, led by Moon, never identified a suspect in the murder. After several years, the case folder was placed in the “pending” file in the captain’s office where it had come to Willcox’s attention in 2002. Willcox and Moon discussed the now 8-year-old murder mystery. Was there anything he had missed? Any evidence that could be looked at again? Was there anyone who could be re-interviewed? Any new leads, no matter how insignificant, they could follow up on?” “It had been my first murder case and I spent a great deal of (Continued on Page 5)