Kenneth "Kenny" Floyd (Wild Card, Colorado)

Our card this week is Kenneth Floyd, a wild card from Colorado.

When Kenneth Floyd was found dead inside his apartment in Aurora, Colorado, detectives

didn't have to guess which way the suspect went.

The trail of blood led straight from Kenneth's door to the front of the building, as if

the killer had drawn them a map.

And that trail of blood held one very important clue, their suspect's DNA.

The kind of evidence that's supposed to make this case solvable.

And for a minute, it seemed like it might.

That DNA led investigators right to one particular island in the Caribbean.

They were this close to a breakthrough.

There was just one problem.

And I'm talking a big problem.

A volcanic eruption on the island had destroyed the very records they needed to track down

their suspect.

The whole lava was the only thing standing between investigators and justice for Kenneth.

But that's where you come in.

There's a chance that some of you listening right now have roots on this same island without

even knowing it.

And if you do, you may be able to help detectives finally find Kenneth's killer.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.

It was mid-March 1995.

6 p.m. when an apartment complex manager was about to do what I'd imagine is the worst

part of being an apartment manager, nothing on the door of a tenant who is being evicted.

This manager's name was John, and his tenant, 32-year-old Kenneth Floyd, was supposed

to be out by noon that day.

He hadn't come by to turn in his key, though, and John hadn't seen him leave.

So now he had to climb the stairs to the third floor and be the bad guy.

Unlocked on the front door of apartment 303, but there was no sign of Kenneth not even

rustling or the sound of TV behind the door.

John tried the handle, but it was locked, so he pulled out his master key and let himself

in.

And it was instantly clear why Kenneth Floyd hadn't moved out.

Kenneth, who everyone called Kenny, was lying on the living room floor surrounded by

packed-up boxes in a pool of his own blood.

He was lying on his side in a fetal position with one gash to his neck visible above the

collar of his bathrobe.

His hands were bloodied by what appeared to be defensive wounds, and there were cuts

to the fabric of his robe as well.

When John called police some 30 years ago, it wasn't Detective Jason McDonald who showed

up on scene, but he has had to make this his job now to interpret old reports and evidence

in order to solve this mystery.

So an officer that had arrived on scene noticed that there were spots of blood going down

the hallway from Kenny's apartment.

And it's carpeted, flooring, and it's like a cream colored floor, so red blood drops

would stand out pretty well on it, fortunately.

And he noticed that the droplets went down three fights of stairs to the exit.

But that's where the trail just stopped.

Was it Kenny's blood?

The killers?

They didn't know.

I mean, at that point, they didn't even know the full extent of his injuries, because

police weren't allowed to touch the body or check what wounds the robe might be hiding.

That was the job of the coroner investigator.

A coroner investigator's role at the crime scene is pretty important because their initial

examination of the body gives the detectives an idea of what we're looking at, what type

of murder we're dealing with, what weapon was used.

This initial assessment helps detectives because it allows them to start their investigation

right away without waiting for an autopsy which could take days to happen, and even longer

to get results.

But at Kenny's crime scene, for reasons we don't know, Detective McDonald said his record

show that the coroner investigator didn't inspect the body at all.

According to those records, he or she apparently ruled that there was no sign of foul play.

And wasn't given the scene, I don't know how you could say this, without looking at

his body even, and neither does Detective McDonald.

He told us that he's never been to a crime scene where someone died and a coroner investigator

failed to examine the body.

That baffles me.

I think he clearly had blood on his hands, blood on his neck, visible injuries, and he's

dead.

While that preliminary examination, the original detectives were lacking the most basic information

about Kenny's injuries.

But they still had to work and process what was clearly a crime scene to everyone else.

So they collected Kenny's glasses and a broken-beated necklace, made note of a bloody footprint

on the living room floor, and they zeroed in on some very important evidence in the bathroom.

There was a blue washcloth on the ground near the toilet that had some blood on it.

And in the bathroom sink, there was droplets of blood and a washcloth that had blood on

it.

There's a phrase that's popular in crime culture that, at every crime scene, the killer

leaves something behind.

For this crime scene, this blood in the bathroom might be it.

Their crime scene was mostly contained to the living room, so taking this into consideration

with the blood droplets that they'd found outside the apartment leading to the exit,

it seemed highly possible that the killer injured themselves during the attack.

In our experience, we've seen this in many murder cases that evolved in knife, especially

brutal attacks where there's multiple stab wounds, is there's a lot of blood and blood

is very slippery.

And once it gets on the handle of the knife that's being used by the killer, it often

times ends up causing the killer's hand to slide down the handle and cut themselves.

And now they've left their own blood at the scene.

I know they didn't know exactly what their murder weapon was, but one can take an educated

guess.

And they only had to guess for a couple of days before all their assumptions were confirmed.

The autopsy found that Kenny had been stabbed multiple times to the neck and chest with

a half inch wide blade.

The blood in the sink matched up with other blood we found at the scene, and those blood

samples were not Kenny's blood, so that's who we believe is our killer.

And they believed that person was someone Kenny knew.

It seemed very personal.

It seemed like the attacker most likely knew him, versus a random attack.

The knife attacks in particular are pretty personal murders, and the number of stab wounds

tells a story as well.

They definitely wanted this person dead, that one stab wound to the chest was not going

to be enough for the killer, that they wanted this person dead in a bad way, and that there

was anger towards the victim.

So who might that be?

At the scene, they learned some surface level information about Kenny from John who owned

and managed the building.

He said that Kenny was being evicted for numerous complaints.

He was throwing loud parties that were bothering his neighbors.

An investigators discovered that police had actually been called to Kenny's apartment just

a few days before his murder.

Officers had responded that night and took an individual named Leslie Taylor to detox,

because he was drunk and being very loud, because he'd been partying and was drunk at

Kenny's apartment just three nights before his murder.

It turns out Leslie was more than just a friend or acquaintance.

When investigators tracked him down, he told them that he and Kenny had been in a romantic

relationship, but Leslie said that he'd recently ended things.

But before you go thinking that might be a good motive for murder, he also told them

where he'd been when Kenny was killed.

He was still at detox, and that's a rock solid alibi.

He didn't check out until the 19th, and so they did get those records from the detox

facility and were able to rule Leslie out because of that.

While detectives were polling police reports related to Kenny or his address, it wasn't

just Leslie's name that popped up.

They also found a report from a few months earlier, a report filed by Kenny alleging a man named

Kevin Ransom had forged his signature on a money order.

According to police records, Kenny claimed that Kevin Ransom forged his signature on a

money order.

Kevin had been interviewed just two months before Kenny's murder, and he was cooperative

at the time.

Kevin's story, when he was interviewed, was that he and Kenny were doing crack together

one night, and they ran out of crack.

And Kenny wanted Kevin to go out and buy more crack for them.

And he gave Kevin Ransom his rent check and told him, just scratch out my landlord's

name and write your name and go cash this money and buy us more drugs.

Kevin Ransom said he did that, and they came back, did drugs, and that later, now that

Kenny is out of rent money, decided to make a police report.

At the time, police hit Kevin with some minor charges, and that was the end of it.

But now that Kenny was dead, they brought Kevin back in again, and again, Kevin cooperated.

He allowed detectives to photograph him and look for injuries on his body, like a cut,

you know, that might have left behind all that blood.

Because it's one thing inspecting somebody's body a year after a murder, and we're looking

for a cut loan, those can obviously heal and be totally gone.

But a week after, if you cut yourself to the point where you're bleeding out of a building,

you would still have that injury, and Mr. Ransom did not.

He was in a DNA match where the blood found at the scene either.

So Kevin Ransom became the second name crossed off an ever-growing list.

Between friends from Kenny's parties, romantic partners, and just generally trying to run

down all possible connections, police did not have an easy time.

And some of these folks are hard to track down.

Some are transient.

There were other people that don't have permanent residences that kind of couch serve from

a place to place.

Luckily, investigators didn't have trouble finding Kenny's big, tight-knit family, but

many of Kenny's relatives, who we spoke to, felt that they weren't appropriately interviewed

or kept up to date as the investigation unfolded, like Kenny's niece, Lafondre Johnson.

In the mid-90s, around the time that her uncle was killed, she worked with him at the

Denver Rescue Mission, a shelter for folks experiencing homelessness.

She sat right next to Kenny in their call center and gave him a ride home most nights.

She saw him every day, but Lafondre said police never contacted her for an interview

after Kenny was killed, even though she knew him so well and spent nearly every day with

him.

That's why it was especially heartbreaking that she had to learn about her uncle's murder

on the nightly news.

Lafondre told us that she had been worried about her uncle for days before she found out

about what happened to him.

Jen seen him at work and she'd been trying to call him, but was having no luck.

And at the time, it was landlines, you know, that kept calling and calling.

That gnawing feeling in her gut was growing stronger, and her mom, Deb, Kenny's sister,

had started to worry too.

And Deb became more than worried one night when she was watching the news.

I want to say it was like Channel 4 news or something.

Was that, and then she was like, well, do you know where Kenny lives?

And I'm like, of course, I drop him off.

She was like, well, it just came on a news about a man being found in the apartment building

in Aurora.

So she said, come with me and take me over there.

They drove over.

They couldn't get inside the locked building, but Lafondre could see Kenny's third floor

window.

And the curtain was blown, and I was like, oh, he's right there.

Like, at my head, I thought I'd seen him.

And I was just like, Uncle Kenny, Uncle Kenny, come open the door.

And then I'm standing there.

And so I looked again, and I'm like, oh, maybe that's just the window blown with the curtain.

They eventually got into the building with the help of a couple who lived there.

And then when we went out there, it was police tape on his door.

So that's how we do for sure it was him.

Dev said she was the one who had to call her mother and inform her that Kenny, her youngest

son, was dead.

We asked Detective McDonald to confirm whether police called Kenny's mom Joyce, who would

have been his next of Ken to notify her of the murder.

And he said that Kenny's mom actually called them.

Even if the reports McDonald had whoever Joyce spoke to at the Aurora PD advised her to

call the coroner's office to ask about a body that hadn't yet been identified.

After Kenny was identified, Detective McDonald says that records show the original detectives

talk to Kenny's mom and to Dev and a few other members of their family, including his

other sister Cheryl.

But how in-depth those conversations were is up for debate.

Like for example, Cheryl had been arrested at the scene the night that they found Kenny

for disorderly conduct when she had rushed to Kenny's apartment and tried to get inside

to check on her brother.

They took her to jail, but they didn't ask any questions about Kenny until later on.

And though Dev is listed in police records as someone who was interviewed, she told us

that likely only happened because she just happened to be at her mom's place while

they were talking to her.

She only remembers being asked a couple of questions and getting very little information

in the less than one hour that police were there.

Any time after that for that matter.

When we met with them, in early 2026, they still weren't even clear on how Kenny was killed.

They thought he'd been dead for a week or more instead of less than 24 hours by the time

he was found.

And they also had no idea that the killer had left evidence behind.

But that didn't mean they didn't want to know what happened to him.

We found there is an entire extended family who is still showing up for Kenny, even decades

later.

When we went to meet with Kenny's nephew, Cletus, or Rookie, as they call him, he showed

up with five members of his family, a whole crew of people who wanted to talk about Kenny.

They said Kenny had the same booming voice as his father, who was a preacher, and he was

always the life of the party, a sharp dresser, a social guy who could befriend anyone.

But he kept his close circle small, and he was pretty regimented.

He had a good career, and always showed up to work with a home-cooked meal for lunch.

Rookie actually lived with Kenny for a bit, and he said that his uncle ran a tightship.

My uncle had to get up and go to work early in the morning, so I couldn't just walk in

the door any time a night.

Like, I had to be there by a certain time where I wasn't getting into the house.

Like, there was rules of regulations.

That was my uncle's rules of the house, like, period.

In the time Rookie lived with Kenny, he said that he doesn't think his uncle even gave

him a key, so he definitely wasn't handing out keys to people that he hardly knew.

Like, his house wasn't an open door for just, like, homeless people, but he worked at

a homeless shelter.

So, him seeing you every day, if you all started to have conversations, I could see him

maybe inviting you to his home, knowing that you're homeless.

He was that kind of person, but like, it wasn't for any and everybody.

He was more or less private, and nobody was ever really there while I stayed with him.

This was a very different picture of Kenny than the one painted by the police investigation.

Now, the family is not saying that Kenny didn't party.

I mean, when the family thought of Kenny, they thought of a solid dude who liked to drink

and have a good time, but had his life in order.

So they were surprised to hear for the first time from our reporter that Kenny had allegedly

been partying to the point of being evicted.

And we shared with them that according to Detective McDonald, an old report in the file

says that Kenny had been let go from the rescue mission.

The family didn't know that either.

With this new information, they all agreed that something must have taken a sharp turn

in Kenny's life.

And now that he learned who Kenny was hanging around with, rookie wonders whether his uncle

may have started using drugs.

I just know that there was something going on.

You don't hang out with too many people that I do crack, and you don't do it.

Rookie said he never saw his uncle use drugs, never smelled drugs in his apartment, but

he knew his uncle was dating Leslie, and he had seen Leslie with a crack pipe.

He thinks if Kenny was losing control of his home and his job, he probably was using

too.

A reporter asked LaFondre Kenny's niece who saw him almost every day if Kenny had been

acting different, if he looked different.

And she said he hadn't seen totally like himself.

If you knew my uncle Kenny, you would know that he kept his hair trim.

He was always patting on his outflow, like, wouldn't no hair be out of place.

He always kept a comb in his pocket, but sometimes it seemed like maybe close to the end, he

just kind of started showing up with like sweaters and jeans, and I don't know, it just seems

like he was just a little off.

It's not something she told detectives at the time though, because again, no one went

and talked to her.

LaFondre said that her family followed up with police to try and learn anything they

could, but after years of being stonewalled, ignored, dismissed, they stopped trying.

And eventually, police stopped trying to, at least for a while.

Kenny's case went cold, whether that's because police lost hope, felt like they were at

a dead end, or if his case was just lost to time, we may never know.

But nothing happened in Kenny's case for years.

But during a recent review of Aurora's cold cases, Kenny's was flagged as having viable

DNA evidence prime for retesting.

When Detective McDonald took over the case in 2022, he knew that original detectives had

sent the suspect's blood from that trail in the hallway, and in Kenny's bathroom to

the lab, and that they'd been able to get a DNA profile on their suspect.

Now, it had already been run through Kodas, no hits there, but this was recent enough

now in 2022 that he knew that wasn't the end of the line anymore.

And luckily, their killer had left enough blood behind that they had plenty of it to

retest with different methods, like the kind needed for genetic genealogy, which by 2022

had already been closing cold cases left and right across the country and beyond.

So they turned to a local forensic genealogist whose name might sound familiar to you if

you have listened to our recent episode about another Colorado case.

Joan Hanlon.

Joan started to build out a family tree, and she was able to trace the suspect's ancestry

to this tiny island in the Caribbean.

I'm talking a total population less than 4,500 people.

She found family connections that made her think they just might be able to solve this

case.

I mean, they were this close, but Mother Nature had other plans.

According to the family tree, Joan started to build.

The suspects ancestors had roots in two places, South Carolina, and a tiny Caribbean island

called Monserot.

In a typical case, investigators might hop on a plane and start digging through local records.

The problem was, those records in Monserot were destroyed by hot, fiery lava, because

in 1995, the same year that Kenny was killed, a dormant volcano re-awakened.

Arrupted over and over for years, making the island partly uninhabitable, and forcing

most people to flee, dispersing them all across the globe.

The destruction also reduced most of the birth and marriage records to ash.

Those two things meant it was almost impossible to track down the family members that Joan

had identified.

Still, this was the biggest lead they'd had in more than 20 years.

But when our reporter Taylor Hartz asked Kenny's nephew, Rookie, if anyone had ever told

them about the suspects linked to this island, or that there was DNA evidence at all?

Not at all.

Not at all.

I think that we were just told that he was stabbed, and that was in the story.

And I think that that's where I'm not going to say we gave up hope, but we didn't have

no hope.

My uncle was found dead, there's no DNA, we were just left.

I think everybody just had people in their own mind or in their head.

I think it was this person or whatever, and I think that that's where it was just stuck

at.

But as soon as Taylor explained the ancestry, we all started turning for the family.

And for one of Kenny's sisters, Yvonne, a light bulb went off.

Yvonne remembers that Kenny had an ex-boyfriend who, around the time of Kenny's murder, allegedly

was in a new relationship, with a guy who seemed to not like Kenny very much.

And she thinks she remembers him being from another country, maybe Monserat, she wondered.

Now police knew about Kenny's ex back in 1995, but he was one of the many people who were

hard to track down.

And since Leslie was Kenny's most recent ex-boyfriend, I venture to assume that they didn't think

an ex prior to him held the answers that they were looking for.

But what if the answer was somehow connected to this guy all along?

We took this lead right to Detective McDonald, and he ran with it.

He was able to track down the ex-boyfriend and interview him for the first time.

And as of the time that we're recording this episode, detectives were still working

with him and following up on his relationships to see if any of them could be connected

to Kenny's murder at all.

Kenny's family is hopeful that now that they're in the loop, Detective McDonald can make

up for lost time.

Knowing the DNA that's been discovered now, I'm hoping that we get a little bit closer.

They've held out hope for answers for over 30 years, and they're angry because it felt

at the time and now that Kenny's case fell through the cracks because of who he was.

Here is Kim Briggs, Kenny's niece.

And then when my uncle, a black man, a black gay man, it's killed, you know, it was in

the news and that was it for like a day.

Kim, who later came out herself, said at a time when being openly gay wasn't always easy,

her uncle made her more comfortable in her own skin.

And she loved him for that.

To this day, the whole family still celebrates Kenny, gathering on his birthday to light fireworks

in his honor.

He loved him for fireworks, yes, especially artillery shows and pop on the rockets.

As long as they're around, he was going to be lighting them.

Kenny's niece Kim wishes she could tell Kenny's killer what they took from their family.

You took someone that someone loved, like my uncle has so many great nieces and nephews

that he'll never get the chance to meet.

We have spouses, he'll never get the chance to meet, you know, it just took so much.

If you have any family from Montserrat or think you might or even have ancestry on the East

coast of the US, please, please consider uploading your DNA profile to Jedmatch and selecting

the option to opt in for law enforcement.

If anyone you know might have ancestry connected to that island, please tell them about Kenny's

case and encourage them to do the same.

Solving this case depends on people like you.

Here's Joan Hanlon.

We've done everything in our our knowledge to analyze the DNA shared matches that we have.

It can be solved.

We just need more matches.

And so I beg you, please consider uploading to Jedmatch and opt in for law enforcement.

I just, I can't do this without the community.

And she wants everyone listening to know that they might be the one who can help, even

if they don't think that's the case.

The excuse I hear over and over is, I know my relatives.

And if there was a criminal in my family, I'd know it and that drives me absolutely crazy

because even in my own family, I don't know my first cousin's grandchildren.

I, they could run into me in the street.

I wouldn't recognize them.

And those distant connections are exactly what we need to solve cases like Kenis.

And someone out there, right now, listening to this podcast, could be holding the key

to identifying Kenis killer.

So if you have information on the murder of Kenny Floyd, contact Aurora Police Colt case

detective Jason McDonald at 303-739-6013.

We're also going to put his email in the show notes.

Or if you'd like to remain anonymous, you can call the Metro Denver Crime Stoppers tip line

at 720-913-7867.

The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

I think Chuck would approve.