On his way to a weekend getaway, a university student walked out of his flat only to spot the motionless body of a young man on the grass outside.
Initially assuming it was simply a fellow student who had overindulged the previous evening, they approached to check whether the person, dressed only in running shorts, was alright. But as they drew nearer they noticed flies swarming around the body, and quickly realised something was very wrong.
Detective John Short arrived shortly after the official medical examiner, who highlighted some disturbing details aboutthe murder victim. The corpse displayed visible signs of strangulation but, said Boone County Special Prosecutor Morley Swingle: "The cut to his neck was ... so deep the blade of the knife had also nicked the spine."
As Short and the medical examiner were theorising that the victim had beenstrangled to the point of unconsciousnessbefore the killer had then pulled back their head and slashed their throat, anotherpolice cararrived. Sergeant Kenneth Smith and Officer Steven Rios were local beat officers and Rios was immediately able to identify the deceased man.
In a new podcast about the killing, podcaster Mr Ballen explains: "He said it was a college kid that he'd actually arrested at a house party just a couple of months ago. He said his name was Jesse Valencia."
This was a positive development for Detective Short, who less than an hour into his investigation, now had a name for his victim and some fairly solid hypotheses about how his victim was murdered. The only task left was to identify the murderer.
Jesse, raised in Kentucky and the first in his family to attend university, made a bleak prediction to his mother when he was just seven years old. Linda Valencia told NBC's Dateline: "He said, 'Mom, I'm not gonna live to be - very old.' He said, 'I'm gonna die at a very young age'.
"I never dreamed that he was gonna die that way," Linda added.
Jesse, who was 23 at the time of his death, was a popular, outgoing student at the University of Missouri, and was openly gay. After a recent serious relationship ended, he had been comforting himself with several casual encounters, and on the night prior to the murder, he had reportedly been heading home alone from a party after another man he'd just started dating chose to retire early rather than accompany Jesse home.
Detective Short had interrogated numerous of Jesse's friends and acquaintances but was unable to pinpoint a credible suspect.
Source: Daily Express :: World Feed
