Episode 46: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. In this episode, we take a look at the tragic true crime story that rocked a community and shattered the lives of those involved. Join us as we uncover the harrowing tale of 14-year-old Kaytlynn Cargill, whose life was cut short in a horrific act of violence. Set in Texas in 2017, we explore the details surrounding her untimely death at the hands of Jordin Roache, a mere 16-year-old at the time.
As we navigate through the events leading up to that fateful day, we explore the shocking murder of young Kaytlynn and the devastating impact it had on her family, friends, and the entire community.
In an upcoming episode, we have the privilege of sitting down with Kaytlynn’s mother, who bravely shares her deeply personal perspective on the loss of her beloved daughter. Prepare yourself for an emotional journey as we listen to her recount the heart-wrenching experiences, the memories that still haunt her, and the enduring quest for justice.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I’m your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 It’s really strange how since I’ve started the podcast when I tell people about it, they’re very open and forthcoming about stories that have happened in their own life, whether it be someone who has committed suicide or someone has been murdered.
0:49 And I always find it comforting that they want to talk to me about it.
0:55 Many of them feel like there’s something I can do about it.
0:59 Most of them realize that there’s really not, but I think most of them also know that I am used to talking with family members and visiting with them about their loss.
1:13 I am not however, anywhere near a counselor, I feel like if I have to say that I lack the ability to do anything in my career, it’s to provide emotional support is difficult because I don’t have a counseling degree.
1:33 I don’t know what to say.
1:35 I don’t want to say what everyone else says.
1:38 I’m so sorry for your loss.
1:40 I mean, it seems so insincere even though it may be.
1:45 I mean, we all want to say that right, because we are, I mean, we’re truly sorry for their loss.
1:50 But you hear people say, I know how you feel.
1:55 I can’t imagine how you’re feeling.
1:58 We all know that unless we’ve been in the same exact situation, we don’t know how they feel.
2:04 I mean, we can imagine how they must feel, but we really don’t know it unless we’ve lived it.
2:10 So that’s one part of my job that I truly feel like I’m not good at.
2:17 I don’t want to be a counselor that wasn’t my calling.
2:21 I do have empathy and I do feel like I’m good at being there for the families and answering their questions and just providing that emotional support and even connecting them with someone who can give them even more emotional support, grief counseling, whatever it is that they may need because I know they’re not going to get all that from me.
2:46 It’s not my job, although I do wish I was better at it.
2:51 It’s not again that those who do what I do don’t have empathy and sympathy for every single family and every single person that we meet, but we’re not going to pretend to be counselors.
3:06 We don’t want to pretend to know what to say.
3:09 We do always offer our condolences to the family.
3:15 And it’s still super difficult and it’s hard for us.
3:18 We deal with baby deaths and teenage deaths and unexpected deaths and tragic deaths.
3:26 You don’t always know what to say and you can’t always know what to say.
3:31 And so thank God for the counselors and the grief counselors and all those who are available for all of these families after they go through what they have to go through.
3:44 Now, we were walking outside the other day and we just accidentally ran across some neighbors who were sitting outside as well and we’d never met them before.
3:57 And so we figured, you know, we need to try to be a little bit social.
4:01 We haven’t lived here long.
4:02 So we walked over and asked them if we could visit and sat down at their table outside and super nice, very welcoming.
4:11 And of course, you know how the conversation comes up, you know, what brought y’all out here, why do y’all live here?
4:17 What do you do for a living?
4:19 And so we kind of started going around the table and talking and this happens to me a lot and it seems like even more now that I’ve started the podcast when I mention it to people because of course, we want to get more followers.
4:34 And so I do mention it a lot to a lot of people.
4:37 I also own a business and I mention it there as well outside of my job at the medical examiner’s office.
4:44 And I’ve really been surprised at how many people have been through super traumatic events with their families, brothers who have murdered grandparents and brothers who’ve committed suicide and sisters who were murdered by their boyfriend.
5:02 And just it amazes me how resilient people are.
5:07 Sometimes even in our grieving, we somehow find it in ourselves to function.
5:15 It makes you wonder sometimes when you listen to the stories how the families are able to move on and it doesn’t happen easily and it doesn’t happen quickly.
5:27 But in this particular situation, I mention the podcast as I always do because I do feel like that’s an important part of my life.
5:37 It allows me to vent a little bit about my job and answer questions that people have, which I love.
5:44 I’d like to educate and teach people about what we do and the importance of what we do.
5:50 And so I mentioned the podcast to her and she asked me immediately if I would do a story on her daughter and at the time, no idea who her daughter was.
6:01 We had not ever met before.
6:03 We hadn’t talked.
6:04 Honestly, I hadn’t even seen them outside that much because I feel like I’m working all the time.
6:10 So I may get home late at night and I’m either doing homework or recording my podcast or finishing my reports from work.
6:19 Sometimes in the hustle and bustle, you have to slow down try to get out and meet people and make friends.
6:27 And so this is what I was trying to do.
6:29 So she tells me a little bit about her daughter again, very open to interview, which we are going to air next week and maybe even the week after because I am going to give her the opportunity to talk and say what she feels like needs to be said.
6:48 She has done some interviews.
6:50 I know that she’s done a couple of TV interviews and the story was actually in People Magazine.
6:57 Now, the story about her daughter Kaytlynn Cargill was all over the news when it happened.
7:04 Even my husband who wasn’t, my husband at the time said that he remembered seeing it on the news.
7:10 It was devastating because I can remember when her daughter went missing and they were showing pictures of her all over the TV.
7:19 And she was just so adorable.
7:21 Just the thought of your child missing for five minutes is frightening, much less two hours and then having to call the police and report her as a missing person and then days go by and I know that again, a lot of people experience this and you can’t possibly know what it’s like unless you’ve been there.
7:46 But I don’t want to know what it’s like.
7:48 I am devastated for her and everyone who has had similar experiences.
7:55 But one thing that really touched me when she asked me to do the interview is that she took a red bracelet off of her wrist and she handed it to me and I put it on my wrist as soon as she did and I haven’t taken it off every day.
8:12 At least one person asks me what my red bracelet is.
8:17 And I tell them the story about Kaytlynn and there’s not one single person that doesn’t remember hearing it on the news when it happened.
8:27 But I always tell them tune in to my podcast because mom wants to be interviewed and I’m gonna let her say what she wants to say.
8:36 Now before that happens, I wanted to give you guys the listeners a little bit of a background on the story.
8:45 Many of my listeners are out of state may or may not have heard the story, but everyone local, I can guarantee you has heard the story.
8:54 Trisha West is my neighbor and her daughter was Kaytlynn Cargill and now Kaytlynn, who by the way was very active in sports and she played the trumpet and band and very energetic and spirited.
9:10 You can just tell by looking at her picture.
9:12 She’s a cutie had so much to offer so much to give.
9:17 Kaytlynn actually was reported missing from her apartment complex in Bedford Texas.
9:23 This happened back on June 19th of 2017.
9:27 And I also feel fortunate that the mom is willing to talk to me about this because the anniversary of her death is coming up and I know that makes it difficult every year.
9:38 I mean, she’ll always remember it, but you can imagine the anniversary date being even more trying and difficult.
9:47 Now, Kaytlynn and Jordan Roche had planned to meet at the dog park at her apartment complex apparently before she was to meet him there, he text her and asked her not to bring her dog or her friend who was also over at her house at the time.
10:07 Now, Roche went to the dog park to meet her and saw that she had her dog with her and then went back to his apartment according to him.
10:18 And then he said that shortly after that, his uncle picked him up at around six o’clock at night.
10:24 Now we all know back in the day and I know I’ve talked about this before, but we didn’t have cell phones.
10:30 No one knew where we were.
10:32 We couldn’t text the police had no way of looking through our text messages to see if we had messaged somebody about where we were headed or who we were with or where we were at certain times.
10:43 And we couldn’t ping cell phones.
10:44 Back then, my first cell phone was a huge block that had to be plugged into the cigarette lighter in my car.
10:51 But they did find text messages on Kaytlynn’s phone indicating that she was going to Roche’s apartment.
11:00 She was buying marijuana from him to make dabs and then she was going to sell them for a profit.
11:07 But Roche owed her $300.
11:10 I don’t know at this time exactly what they were meeting for.
11:14 I don’t know if he was supposed to pay her or if there was going to be an exchange doesn’t matter though, you know, because she didn’t deserve what happened to her.
11:22 So I don’t want to put really too much weight on what she was doing.
11:29 But the fact is he was a drug dealer, wasn’t a great upstanding guy and obviously murdered her.
11:39 Now, Roche lived in the same apartment complex with his girlfriend who happened to be in Alabama at the time.
11:46 But Kaytlynn had left her dog at the dog park with a friend and gone to Roche’s apartment.
11:56 Eventually the friend had to go home and so left her dog at the dog park tied up and Kaytlynn hadn’t come back at that point.
12:03 So he just figured she’d be back when she got back and the dog would be there and everything would be normal.
12:10 Now, Kaytlynn left her apartment at about 6:20 at night.
12:14 Her mom went to look for her and saw her dog tied up at the park and then at around 8 15.
12:23 So she hadn’t even been missing for two solid hours.
12:27 Mom called the police and reported her missing.
12:31 Now the police had leads that Roche was most likely a suspect because someone at the apartment complex had seen them together the night before.
12:45 Thank goodness, that person came forward and that’s how all of this led to Roche’s apartment or the apartment that actually I think his girlfriend owned and he just had lived there with her at the time.
12:56 But when the police went to search his apartment, Kaytlynn’s blood was found on the walls on the floor and there was also a claw hammer found.
13:07 Now they found blood also in the bedroom on the kitchen blinds on the handle, on a sliding glass door in the kitchen.
13:17 And then of course, everything gets swabbed and the claw hammer had Kaytlynn’s DNA on it.
13:24 So on the 21st, two days after she went missing, her body was found or a body was found, I’ll say wearing the same shorts that she was last seen wearing.
13:36 And of course, we always do science identification on a body.
13:43 If we don’t know 100% who it is.
13:45 And if we don’t have a government ID matching their face, then we bring them in as unidentified.
13:53 So she did have to be identified.
13:56 The body found in the landfill in Arlington was in fact hers.
14:02 On the 21st, it was determined that the dumpsters at the apartment complex had actually been picked up and dumped that day.
14:11 So Roche actually not only murdered her but discarded her body in a trash can.
14:19 Now, this happened right before COVID and so some time went by before it actually went to trial.
14:27 Now, Roche was 16 at the time Kaytlynn was 14.
14:32 But as part of the plea deal, he was tried as an adult and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for first degree murder.
14:41 Now, the rip off for the family is that even though he’s going to be listed as a felon when he gets out, he’s been incarcerated since 2017.
14:52 This just went to trial in 2022 he does get credit for time served.
14:59 So he’s 21 years old now.
15:01 He’s been in prison for six years and he’s gonna get out in four.
15:06 It doesn’t hardly seem fair to me.
15:09 And I just have to say that honestly, I feel like a grave injustice has been done to the family in this case and I’m disappointed in any law enforcement agency that feels like that this is a good ending or an appropriate ending to what happened.
15:28 I hate that Kaytlynn’s life was taken and she was taken away from her parents at such a young age when she had so much to live for.
15:37 And some might argue that Roche had a lot to live for too.
15:41 And you know, that remains to be seen because he will get out in four years.
15:45 But I just have to go on some of the cases that I’ve seen and I’m sure you’re aware of.
15:50 And we’ve even talked about murderers who get out on parole and then murder again.
15:58 I don’t know.
15:58 I just think that the punishment definitely does not match the crime.
16:03 I’m interested to see what Trisha has to say about it.
16:08 I know that she’s not happy with it.
16:11 I can’t imagine any parent being ok with it knowing that their daughter’s murderer is going to get out of prison in four years.
16:19 And I, I believe she told me that he’s already been up for parole once and she went before the parole board.
16:25 I’m worried, I’m worried about what’s going to happen when he gets out.
16:29 You know, is he going to turn his life around or is he gonna be like all the others who gets out on parole and then breaks the law again?
16:38 But I do know that the interview with Trisha is gonna be emotional.
16:44 I know she’s ready to talk more about it.
16:47 I know that it has to be heartbreaking, especially with the anniversary of Kaytlynn’s death coming up.
16:53 But I do want you to listen to her interviews and hear what she has to say because I want her to know that her voice can be heard.
17:04 I want her to feel safe and comfortable saying whatever she wants to say, nothing’s going to be changed or made to sound better to protect anybody.
17:16 I am looking forward to talking to her.
17:19 We may do two episodes on her interview.
17:23 I’m not sure yet.
17:24 It depends on how much she has to say.
17:2 7And of course, how much she wants to say, I’m not going to forced her to talk about anything she doesn’t want to.
17:32 I’m just gonna kind of give her the reins outside of a couple of questions that I may have for her.
17:3 7 But again, it’s Kaytlynn Grace Cargill.
17:40 I’ve still got her little bracelet on my right wrist.
17:43 I encourage y’all to look up stories about what happened if you’re not familiar with the case And I look forward to our interviews with Trish in the next couple of weeks.
17:56 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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18:10 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.