The Men, the Town, the Bond

Belair, Ohio—coal dust, modest homes, and a rhythm that rarely surprises.

– David Kenny: ordinary, earnest, 21 and in love. He marries Sherry, a single mother with three kids, and carries the weight gladly. He trains for coal mining to provide. He is liked, trusted, the man who shows up.
– Brad McGarry: Cambridge-born, openly gay in a conservative track, toughened by insults, stubborn in truth. Hairstylist turned miner. Magnetic, warm, “Uncle Brad” to David’s children.

They meet during mining training. They become inseparable. Jokes, family gatherings, plans for a Bahamas trip. The bond looks pure—until the secret inside it cracks.

🧭 May 7, 2017: The Day Splits
The timeline is simple—until you look again.

– Early afternoon: After a family lunch, Brad tells a cousin he has a meeting. He jokes about a “nap” with his guest. His guest is married. His guest hasn’t told his wife. His guest’s name? “DJ.”
– 6:15 p.m.: David, Sherry, and their youngest daughter arrive to return a weed trimmer. Brad’s car is there. Brad doesn’t answer. The back service door is ajar.
– Inside: the kitchen ransacked, drawers open, living room disrupted. It looks like chaos. It doesn’t look like theft.
– Basement: David finds Brad face down, in blood. Sherry’s 911 call brings officers who see grief, shock, and a body that speaks quietly, but clearly.

The first theory—maybe suicide. Then the body is turned: no weapon. The second theory—robbery gone wrong. Then the valuables are untouched, a TV remains, and cash lies on the floor. Staging doesn’t shout. It rearranges.

🔎 The First Wave of Leads
Investigators do what small-town detectives must: expand the circle, test the obvious.

– Hate-crime angle: Brad’s colleagues in the mine surprise everyone. They respect him. They call him a good man. No heat there.
– The ex-boyfriend: “Scotty,” a tumultuous relationship, arguments, drama. But Scotty’s in jail—three months for probation violation. He’s shaken by Brad’s death. The theory dissolves.
– Neighborhood canvass: A camera points toward the street near Brad’s house. Hours of footage. Faces, cars, arrivals, departures—time becomes a net.

Two days later, a cousin shifts the ground: Brad had a secret relationship with “DJ,” a married man. He hints it was years long, kept clean of public view. Under pressure, the cousin gives the name. “DJ” is David.

The man who found the body. The man who came with his wife and child. The entire board flips—quietly.

🧭 The Device That Doesn’t Forget
Detectives move with method: they ask David for his phone, saying they need scene photos. What they need is the map inside it.

– Location data: David’s phone pings at Brad’s house during the estimated time of death.
– Messages: Deleted, but not gone. Forensics restore texts that confirm a sexual relationship.
– Camera footage: David arrives before the attack—not in his own car, but his wife’s. He stays roughly forty minutes. Hours later, he returns—this time in his truck—with his family, under the pretense of delivering a weed trimmer.

Two timelines form:
1) The private visit—fast, hot, fatal.
2) The public return—cool, domestic, performative.

The case pivots from “What happened?” to “How long has he been lying?”

🔎 The Interrogation: Seven Stories, One Pattern
Confronted with data that stitches him to the scene, David admits he was there. Then he edits the afternoon—again and again.

– Version 1: A third man was there. An argument. A gun. The third man forces silence, lets David leave.
– Version 2–5: Details shift, motives wobble, timing frays.
– Final arc: David admits to the affair, says it was months, not years. Claims Brad waved a gun, he wrestled it away, shot in fear—self-defense. Says he fired again when Brad was on the ground.

The autopsy is a wall he can’t climb:
– Two shots to the back of Brad’s head.
– The positioning suggests the shooter stood behind him.
– Self-defense does not align with bullets in the back of the skull.

The weapon is never found. Law enforcement combs the area, drains time into ditches, and comes up empty. But they have enough: the data, the texts, the camera, the pattern.

🧭 Courtroom: The Long Hour
May 2017 brings a marathon preliminary hearing.

– The prosecution: location pings, surveillance footage, body-cam clips, contradictions stacked like bricks. They argue staging at the house, a second arrival with family, and lies that multiply under light.
– The defense: fear, confusion, self-defense, a good man in unique circumstances. They push for manslaughter. They say he is not a threat. They say he lied out of panic, not malice.
– The judge: finds probable cause, sets bail at $1 million. The request to reduce is denied—David brought his wife and daughter into a house with a corpse and pretended it was a routine stop. That is a breach of trust and truth.

Friends and family testify to David’s character—hardworking, responsible, loving. Sherry, trembling through memory, confirms her husband’s story that day: returning a tool, a door ajar, a house disturbed, a scream from the basement. Her heartbreak becomes an exhibit.

The court moves forward.

🔎 The Trial: What Evidence Feels Like
A week-long trial turns tape and text into a narrative jurors can live inside.

– The surveillance map: David’s pre-crime arrival in his wife’s car; his later return with family in his truck. The timing tightens the noose.
– Police body-cam: the ground truth of first contact—shock, breathless panic, but also contradictions that bloom as facts enter the room.
– Forensics: two shots to the back of the head; the plausibility of “self-defense” collapses.
– DNA twist: a used condom shows Brad’s DNA outside and an unknown male’s DNA inside—no trace of David’s. The defense seizes on this absence. The prosecution holds the center: location data, camera, and autopsy don’t care about a condom’s profile. Two bullets into the skull from behind are not ambiguity.

The prosecution’s theory is simple and cold: David lured Brad with the promise of sex, executed him, staged a robbery, disposed of the weapon, and returned with his family to discover the body “by accident.” The defense counters: fear, a struggle, chaos, and a man who couldn’t tell the truth because the truth would detonate his life.

The jury deliberates for four hours. The verdict is unanimous: guilty of aggravated murder.

Gasps. Tears. Silence that feels like concrete.

🧭 Sentencing: The Weight of Words
Before the sentence, David speaks—apology to Brad’s family, regret, the wish to rewind time. The judge listens, unmoved.

– The judge’s frame: lies laid out in sequence; a crime described as “cold and calculated,” an execution followed by staging. The court hears premeditation: a promise used as bait, a scene constructed, a weapon vanished.
– Options: all life terms, with varied parole windows—20, 25, or 30 years. The defense asks for parole eligibility. The prosecutor asks for life without parole.

The judge’s line lands hard: if he could kill the man who loved him and was his best friend, what might he do to someone who opposed him? The sentence: life without the possibility of parole, plus three years for the firearm specification.

February 2018 seals the end of David’s free life. By mid-2023, appeals fail. The coal mines won’t see either man again.

🔎 The Secret and the Cost
Investigators say the tragedy could have been avoided if the secret had not been his true north—if the fear of exposure had not outrun the law. The theory they settle on is blunt:

– Brad, tired of hiding, threatens to tell Sherry.
– David, terrified of losing his family, resolves the threat with fatal finality.
– The house is staged—drawers, cash, the television untouched.
– The return with wife and child is a cover so domestic it tries to anesthetize suspicion.

In the end, what breaks the case isn’t motive dressed in eloquence. It’s the geometry of behavior:
– He is there when the bullets matter.
– He is gone when the truth would help.
– He is back when the performance needs an audience.

The camera gives the spine. The phone gives the organs. The autopsy gives the heart. Together, they build a body the defense can’t dismantle.

🧭 Character, Community, Fallout
It’s easy to flatten people into roles—killer, victim, wife. The case resists the flattening.

– Brad: resilient, openly himself, beloved, brave. The small-town myth that acceptance can’t coexist with tradition is complicated by the mine’s respect. But private truths don’t always survive public fear.
– David: husband, provider, stepfather, the man who was there for a decade. He is also the man who hid, lied, shifted, and, according to a jury, executed a friend to preserve a life that was already breaking.
– Sherry: stunned, betrayed, present in the most harrowing minutes—finding, calling, testifying. She is proof that innocence can live inside a case’s edges.

The community absorbs the shock: not a stranger in the night, not an outsider with a grudge. This is an interior crime. It lives in rooms where we keep photos and family recipes. It walks from the basement to the living room and leaves everything colder.

🔎 Investigative Spine: Why the Case Holds
The story runs on a logic you can test:

– Staging tells on itself: valuables untouched, cash abandoned, drawers disturbed—not stolen.
– The device timeline beats alibi: the phone pins him to the scene when words try to drift.
– The camera refuses comfort: cars don’t lie, arrivals aren’t rumors.
– Forensics beat narrative: two shots to the back of the head are not self-defense.
– Behavior triangulates truth: a second visit with family, a scream that performs, the pretense of a tool return—these are choices, not accidents.

When the weapon is missing, the structure must work harder. Here, it does. The case doesn’t rely on a smoking gun; it relies on a room full of clocks that point to the same hour.

🧭 Emotional Register: The Basement as Symbol
Every true-crime story has a room where everything changes. In this case, it’s the basement.

– The descent: the sound of feet on steps, the certainty that something is wrong, the air that feels heavier in every breath.
– The shock: the body in blood, the world narrowing to a single point.
– The scream: a barbed-wire sound that wraps around a marriage and a childhood.
– The call: the voice that tries to make order out of chaos.

We want the basement to be the end of the story—tragic, accidental, beyond blame. The investigation refuses that wish. It turns the basement into the middle—a place where what happened becomes a map of why.

🔎 The Defense’s Last Stand
Defense attorneys aren’t villains; they are a necessary spine of justice. Here, they argue:

– He panicked, he lied, he feared.
– He struggled with a weapon and fired because he was scared.
– The condom’s DNA profile doesn’t put him inside that moment.
– The man is more than the worst thing he’s accused of doing.

It’s a fair fight—until the autopsy and timeline pull rank. Fear doesn’t put bullets into the back of a head. Panic doesn’t stage drawers or cash. A condom’s profile can complicate an evening, but it doesn’t erase location pings or camera stamps.

The jury looks at pieces, then at pattern. Their decision is unanimous.

🧭 Aftermath: Lives in Ruin, Lessons in Plain Sight
True crime often ends with tidy lines. This one ends with scar tissue.

– Brad’s family: grief with no parole. The memory is punctured by facts they cannot unlearn.
– Sherry and the children: a decade of stability replaced by a decade of why. The betrayal is layered—romance hidden, friendship weaponized, home invaded by a truth that arrived too late.
– David: life without parole. Appeals denied. A man defined by the choice that undid him.

The lesson isn’t moralizing. It’s structural:
– Secrets accelerate risk.
– Staging rarely survives scrutiny.
– Devices are diaries with timestamps.
– Cameras turn streets into witnesses.
– Two bullets into the back of a head write a sentence few courts will soften.

🔎 Why Readers Stay: Pace, Mystery, Closure
This case grips because the arc is brutal and familiar: a loving image conceals a volatile truth. The pace is fast—arrival, discovery, data, confession, verdict. The mystery isn’t an unsolved whodunit; it’s a “why” we climb but never fully reach. The closure is legal, not emotional.

The final image is simple and terrible: a man returns to a house with his wife and child and walks them into the story he wrote. He points at the basement and lets the scream do the rest. When justice moves, it moves because time, tape, and bone line up. When it stops, it stops where secrets live.

💡 Takeaways
– Hidden relationships are not crimes; the violence used to protect them is.
– Staged scenes can slow investigators; they cannot stop physics, time stamps, or autopsies.
– Small towns carry big truths. Respect at work can coexist with danger at home.
– The strongest evidence often isn’t what’s held—it’s what’s recorded: where you were, when you arrived, how you left.

The story began with a weed trimmer, a calm afternoon, and a closed door. It ends with a life sentence. Between those moments lives the most American kind of true crime: the secret that swallowed the room.