A young woman disappears after her shift at a Missouri gas station. A killer is sentenced to death. Another man spends decades behind bars based largely on hair analysis evidence… evidence that has now mysteriously vanished from the crime lab itself.
This chilling true story explores grief, justice, forensic uncertainty, and the haunting questions that remain long after the headlines fade.
SPLITTING HAIRS
Fifth Street in St. Charles, Missouri, just off Interstate 70. Two gas stations, Mobil and Shell, sit across the street from each other. As the clock struck 11 p.m. on a cold Thursday night in February 1989, the hands of horror and fate awaited.
Jeffrey Ferguson called a friend, Kenneth Ousley, to pick him up down the street at the Shell station. Ousley arrived driving a brown and white Chevy Blazer. It was 10:55 p.m.
Across the street at the Mobil station, 17-year-old Kelli Hall was minutes away from getting off work. Her last task was to check and record the fuel levels in the four tanks at the front of the station. A witness reported seeing a brown and white Chevy Blazer cross the street, pull into the Mobil station, and park. He reported seeing a male standing next to Hall, with one hand in his pocket. Seconds later, Hall entered the back seat of the Blazer. At the same time, Hall’s boyfriend was waiting for her in his car, parked behind the station. At 11:30 p.m., wondering where she was, he went inside looking for her. He found her purse, then called her house. When he found out she wasn’t there, he called the police.
The long night of horror began for the Hall family. A couple of weeks later, Hall’s body was found on a farm in Maryland Heights, naked except for her socks. Later that night, Ferguson was arrested and charged with the murder of Kelli Hall. Ferguson would go to death row, and, as Kelli’s father Jim Hall watched, be executed in 2014.
And that brings us to the strange case of Kenneth Ousley, the man who picked Ferguson up in the Chevy Blazer. The only physical evidence linking him to the scene was hair analysis. There was one blond strand on his shoe. And there was pubic hair linked to Ousley on Hall’s sock.
The years rolled on, Ousley sat in prison, and beginning in 2008, he was up for parole hearings. And each time that he was, Jim Hall would make the four hour round trip to argue against his release. No one could blame her father for the anger and pain that would never leave. Ousley was never successful before the parole board. He settled into prison life, and even got married behind bars.
And then came the hairs. Where are the hairs? They are missing from the county crime lab. Such forensic evidence in a criminal case would be well marked in a large box, unlikely to be lost or misplaced. But it has been.
📖 25 Frozen and 1 Thawed dives into real cases where truth isn’t always as clear as it first appears.
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